3. From the White Wastes

When its not moving, the Strider at first looks like a cluster of mountains, their peaks lost in the frozen, overcast sky.  Its skin looks like stone and earth, complete with its own flora and fauna, clinging desperately to the beast for fear of falling off and down onto the tundra.  Until one of those mountains lifts itself up off the ground and vanishes into the clouds, only to descend miles away with a thunderous crash said to be felt across the whole of the White Wastes.  The Strider takes these steps only rarely, one, two, three impossibly massive feet rising and falling until it seems that that cluster of mountains has shifted its location.

One must crest an actual mountain, or perhaps climb the Strider itself, to discover the truths.  Those moving "mountains" have no peaks; they continue upwards beyond the blanket of gray clouds like improbably thick tree trunks, pock-marked with caves and crags, as a normal beast might be marked with scars.  Here and there actual trees sprout from that rocky skin, perched precariously over nothing, hungry for the sun that the Wastes below so sorely lacks.  It hurts ones eyes to look on it in its mass.  The Strider is simply too big to properly comprehend, so huge that one's brain convinces itself that it's but a figment of the viewer's imagination.

The three colossal legs come to a joining just over three miles above the wastes, forming the tripod supports for the Strider itself.  Its body is diamond shaped, with two sides long and two sides short, the corners rounded by the powerful winds.  From front to back the Strider measures over a mile in length.  Above the legs its skin appears less like earth and stone and more like that of a sea mammal--a huge brown whale, perhaps, fleshy and streamlined at the same time.  Its two eyes, positioned on the underside of its front point, are relatively small--yet a man would need a hundred paces to cross one on foot.  The Strider has no visible mouth, no nostrils, no means of intake or output.  It needs no sustenance; it simply is, content to wander aimlessly from one end of the Wastes to the other.

Yet, the most curious part of the Strider isn't the beast itself, but the structure mounted precariously at the center of the rolling plain that crowns the creature's body.  Nestled between two grass-covered hills, towering over the humps and bluffs, is a castle of gray stone, towers and minarets scrabbling to reach a sky that seems so close.  The castle itself is uninhabited.  No lights flicker in its windows, no servants tend to its now-wild garden, which every day spreads further and further out across the Strider's wide back.

2. From Under the Lake

(Excerpted from the short story "Come", which can be found here. )

We stood there, side-by-side. Sharon dropped to her knees, a hand over her mouth. The awful smell washed over us, making the hot, muggy air thick. The light, which had a certain shimmer to it, was shining from above us, but neither of us was looking at it. The tunnel now opened up into a nearly unimaginably massive cavern. The floor of this cavern tilted down into a sort of crater, and it was at the center of this crater that our eyes were locked. I'm not sure... exactly how I can describe what we saw, but I'll do my best. It was round, a sort of spherical object half-buried in the dirt and rock. It's surface, it's skin--which moved in and out slightly, breathing--was a blueish-gray hue, and hung loosely on what looked like giant ribs, arranged in a circle, their points coming together at the top of the sphere, where they formed... I don't know, teeth, and a mouth. Around the circumference, slanted slightly so that some of them were half-buried as well, sprouted hundreds, maybe thousands, of tentacles, all different thicknesses and lengths, swaying side-to-side, hypnotically. The sphere itself must have been a a hundred-fifty, two-hundred yards across. Massive. And some of the longer tentacles were two-thirds-again as long as it was wide. I can't do it justice with words--it hurt my eyes to look at it, it just didn't make any goddamn sense. It lay something like a hundred yards away and somewhat below us.

I dropped to my knees beside my wife and was noisily sick.

1. From the Box with no Bottom

At full height it stands at a formidable seven foot seven.  Its skin is black--so dark that it looks more like an absence than a presence, like looking out your window on an overcast night, an utter lack of illumination.  So dark, it's impossible to make out a texture without touching it, and should you manage to do so the skin is dry and rough, like uneven sandpaper.  Yet somehow, it moves silently.

It has no face.  What it does have can only generously be called a head; its sinewy neck terminates in a clump of muscle, extending from which is a two foot razor sharp beak.  The beak is as black as its skin but harder, giving the insane impression of being carved from wood. It's sharp enough to slice through flesh with minimal effort.  The thing drools, a bright-red substance that coats the beak and dribbles down onto its chest, faintly glowing in the dark.

Its torso seems roughly human, well-muscled and visibly powerful.  Its shoulders are broad and slope slightly downwards towards the two arms--which are more obviously not the arms of a human being.  Each is jointed three times--two elbows and a wrist.  The muscles between the joints are hard as iron.  Beyond the wrists are the thing's hands--hands that immediately grab your attention as being wrong.  There are four long fingers, each, like the arms, with one too many joints; each of these fingers appear double-jointed, so the thing has palms on both sides of its hands, and each finger ends in a calloused stub, lacking nails or claws.  There are two thumbs, one on either side, each one joint too long and double-jointed like the fingers.

Its abdomen is long and lithe, with strangely feminine hips across which its skin is pulled almost taut.  At first glance its the legs resemble those of a goat, or perhaps a devil, but upon closer inspection the legs, like the arms, have one extra joint--two knees, and an ankle.  The upper knees bend like your own, while the ones below the lower thighs are reversed.  Below these are long, narrow shins and powerful calf muscles terminating in ankles that seem to be far more flexible than those of the average human.  From the ankles sprout three thick, stubby toes, one in the back and two in the front; these are completely without joint and function like fleshy tripods.  These toes, as well as the fingers, can easily cling to vertical surfaces, allowing the thing to stalk along the walls as easily as walking on the ground.