In my own cosmology:
All existence is, at its core, the deep dreams of an entity who is for all practical purposes the same concept as Lovecraft’s Azathoth. The writer, in short, imagined as a blind idiot god working through the twin faces of the Crawling Chaos as sub-creators (let nobody say that I take the ‘writer as god’ metaphor for an unironic power fantasy). The Arkhalai, Lady Destiny, and the Arkhanazun, Lord Dreamer, are those twin faces and they were the first true ‘dream’ perspectives.
They made all but one of the others of the Seven Protogenoi, and that one that they did not make is Death, who is the one who at the end of time will end the endless dreams of the Dreamer and thus end the stories, or metafictionally, that is what happens when I am done writing. The Dreamer awakens, the one world ends and new stories begin unbound by authorial fiat.
That list of Seven Protogenoi is Arkhalai, Arkhanazun, Death, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, Neshadan, and Zoth-Ommog, who is the substance of which Yog-Sothoth’s second creation in this Thousand and One Nights style cosmology is woven. All entities in the structure of Zoth-Ommog are, deep down, cosmic entities and made up of the substance of same. The means by which future generations became Xoth and Urhalzan were, essentially, grasping this truth and wielding it to reshape the inhabitants of Xoth into the Starspawn and the Urhalzantrani into the Universal Empire.
Each of the Seven has a specific ‘energy’ and power woven into the fabric of existence, though only six can act directly. And Arkhalai, Arkhanazun, and Death operate at different levels to the others.
Where the Outer Gods move, reality itself *reshapes* in their image and their likeness, for all is Dream and Dreaming and Story, and thus they are absolutely powerful and absolutely impotent as they are but text on a page with no true reality at all and fully aware of this.
