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The Red King's Dream
Anacalypses are the beings who dream our reality, but not by their own choice: they also labor to break free of the Demiurge's prison. Once, these strange and enormously powerful creatures were content, living somewhere beyond Metropolis, and dreaming of nothing. They dreamed Nothing: an unending, changeless void, and this existence--and its dream--made them happy.
But the Demiurge had need of their strong dreams; once Nataraja's dance had shaped our world from the substance of Malkuth's living body, it was the dreams of the Anacalypses that would hold it in place, that would allow the Illusion to bend and stretch as we pushed against it. So these bizarre gods sleep on, and their sleep is everything.
It is said that Anacalypses are the offspring of She Who Waits Below, scions of a spontaneous generation, and that there are 343 of them, whose archaic slumbering surrounds us with narrative. In the Dreamworlds, the Anacalypses appear as titanic eyes that have been sewn shut, whose hundreds of tentacles have been nailed or pinned of bolted or chained to monolithic crags that float like icebergs through the Interstices. Those who wander into an Anacalypse's dreams wander into the "real" world, as if they'd passed through a gate; they are fully capable of applying their skills from Art of Dreaming, although it might be a bad idea--if an Anacalypse's dream were to become lucid, it might wake up.
We call it "Awakening," when a human being escapes from the mundane dreams that the Demiurge has inflicted on humans and Anacalypses both; but there is no way to predict what will happen when an Anacalypse wakes and realizes how the blissful nihilism of its sleep has been derailed, simply in order to imprison humanity forever. Some Anacalypses, still unable to dream of Emptiness as they would choose, go mad and enter the Illusion, wreaking destruction; the lictors are quick to see these renegades exterminated. The cleverer ones, however, enter the Illusion subtly, slowly amassing power, money, and followers, because they know they will never be free to dream until the Illusion has been destroyed.
When the Illusion has begun to fray in an area, that's usually a sure sign that an Anacalypse is growing wakeful--if it hasn't simply awoken already. The only other thing that has been known to bring an Anacalypse to consciousness is a rare and powerful spell in the Lore of Dreams; it's said that only the Demiurge and the dream prince Hammad al' Sufi know this spell. This might be why many creatures of power seek alliance with al' Sufi, including the Devourers, Messiah, Ialdabaoth, Muawijhe, Malkuth, Tiphareth, and Thuwathu and Minyindagarr.
An Anacalypse whose power has grown in the Illusion is known as a Devourer.
Devourers always appear huge and monstrous; they have no pleasant facade to present to the world. Some sprawl out for miles in corridors beneath the cities, a contiguous lake of black ichor rising in places to shape hideously-imitated human faces; some appear as moving masses of insect parts, whose clicking susurrus buzzes out words; while still others resemble tremendous human beings, whose disproportionate bodies cannot stand, and can barely move of their own volition--entire ecosystems of four-foot-long maggots can live in these insensate forms, while the Devourers care nothing for their burdensome flesh.
The Devourers live under cities, where the Illusion is weakest; after all, this is where they woke, the place they dreamed for thousands of years, however unwillingly. Some occultists believe there is a Devourer beneath every major city. This may or may not be true, but there are definitely Devourers beneath Harlem and the Bronx, southeast Washington D.C., L.A.'s Watts, Bangkok, Amsterdam, and Kreuzberg in Berlin.
The Devourers' purpose is to destroy the Illusion utterly, so they can return to dreaming their zero dream. In order to accomplish this, they influence the emotional state of the city they occupy, driving its inhabitants to ever more desperate and violent acts, which thereby lower their Mental Balance. While Anacalypses do not control minds, their very existence causes an intensification of emotion--so a discussion might turn into an argument, an argument into a fistfight, a fistfight into murder.
Devourers tend to have many followers: human cults, creatures from the Underground, borderliners, seraphim, nosferatu, and even the occasional lictor have been known to serve the Devourers. It is not known whether these monolithic creatures act in collusion with each other.