While in the bowels of Gaia the battle between the Chaos of Poimandres, the lunar fury of the elves, and the earthly tenacity of the Aluxes clashed with the crawling manifestations of Cthulhu, a strange and deceptive stillness began to descend upon the planet's surface. The primary focus of the Ancient One's monstrous consciousness, once a crushing pressure upon the global psyche, now seemed to have retreated, concentrating on the subterranean conflict.
In Cancún, and in cities around the world that had suffered under the tide of Nyx-induced madness and terror, people began to awaken as if from a feverish and oppressive nightmare. One by one, their eyes opened in confusion. An indescribable headache, as if their skulls had been compressed by an invisible vise, was the first and most universal sensation. A deep, almost absolute lassitude followed; Their bodies felt heavy, their muscles ached, as if they'd run a marathon without moving.
Cthulhu, it seemed, had stopped intervening directly in their minds. The cacophony of alien whispers, the visions of impossible geometries that had plagued their dreams and waking life, had faded, leaving a void almost as disturbing as the assault itself.
The change was also noticeable in the animal kingdom. Birds, which had fallen silent or flown in erratic patterns, now trilled with a cautious normalcy. Dogs stopped howling at invisible shadows. Off the coast of Cancún, schools of fish that had washed ashore in a mass suicide now floated lifelessly in the surf, or the survivors swam dazedly away to deeper waters.
The sea creatures, the first to fall under the direct yoke of Cthulhu's will, began to regain a semblance of their own consciousness. Dolphins no longer rammed ships; sharks no longer patrolled in unnatural formations. As if a cosmic hand, in an act of indifference or a strange, perverse mercy to prevent a biospheric collapse from trauma, had erased the tapes of their terror, Cthulhu, in withdrawing his direct control, seemed to take the memory of the violation from their minds with him, leaving only an empty instinct and a shallow, precarious peace.
For humanity, however, the price of that brief brush with the abyss would not be so easily forgotten, even if conscious memory of its cause had grown dim. While most people struggled to shake off the fatigue and headaches, attributing them to some strange atmospheric malady or unexplained mass hysteria, some began to experience something more disturbing.
They were "strange memories," as they called them in frightened whispers. Flashes. Fleeting images that didn't fit into their lives: the sensation of drowning in an oceanic darkness despite being on dry land; the sight of impossible angles that made the eyes and mind ache; the echo of a language made of clicks and pulses that evoked a primordial terror. Some dreamed of cyclopean cities of slick green stone beneath alien stars, and woke up screaming, with the taste of salt and madness in their mouths.
A residual fear, cold and sticky, clung to these people. They looked at the sea with a new and profound apprehension, distrusting shadows in the night, feeling that the world they knew was a thin shell over an abyss of incomprehensible horrors. The peace that had returned to the surface was superficial, a thin veneer of normalcy over a planetary trauma. The world breathed a collective sigh of relief, unaware of the titanic battles raging beneath their feet and above their heads, and unaware that the real storm was yet to break.