The Earth and its sister planets Venus and Mars no longer lie in their usual place within space and time, instead like so many others the birthplace of humanity has been torn into a realm alien in all aspects, a playground outside of our known universe. For one thousand years these worlds served as more battlefields among the billions which had fallen under the control of the true masters of our universe and all others. Plucked from the fevered dreams of the cursed Demon Sultan ximself the Earth has been thrown and trampled by the raw forces of creation in a skirmish between the combatants of the War Behind the Stars.
But that was so long ago, humanity slumbered then, the longest peace any of them would know, even the surviving warlocks of the Great War- Crowley and List, Rasputin and Lovecraft, do not remember how they escaped their imprisonment and laboured under the bondage of the Coven (of Ancient and All Knowing Creators of This World and All Worlds) and their minions, or how they were forced to war against the Hunters and the Great Ravening One Umbolk, the fabulous Yog-Sothoth and his twisted spawn, Ind the Un-Maker in all his mad splendor and the countless other monsters.
Humanity has returned to their blighted world, returned to the wars which sleep has not driven from their minds, returned to scrape and survive and fight against the remnants of the Earths part in the war. In this charnel realm, littered with dead worlds and dead gods, all under the burning eye of Yi-Shamyr who stares through space as they stare through our souls, guarding this rotting patch of a battlefield which stretches until the end of time.
The Charnel Realm isn't as messy as it once was. Littered with the corpses and remains of vast, leviathanic creatures which must have one point soared between the stars to do the dark bidding of their masters, most have been cleared. Devoured by smaller, parasitic space-faring beasts, drawn into the gravity wells of planets and colliding with their surface, or snagged by Yi-Shamyr for a snack. Xon-Shan-Tekili was the largest and one of the last to be defeated, the size of a planet with a hide as thick as the mantel of the Earth and as tangible as Dark Matter, their remains will likely take millennia to be consumed to dispersed to the cosmos. Oolor-Xon'g was equally massive, though its habit of phasing in and out of visual space makes the corpse a lot harder to track, and in any event it probably won't survive its latest journey around Yi.
Still the name has stuck, and it suits too. Every observable planet in the system bears the scars of its part in the War behind the Stars. Venus is now under the the control of a highly heat resistant, gaseous entity whose intense light-show can be seen from Earth with a good set of binoculars. It took some effort to drive off Cthugha's avatars, but those brainless aspects wouldn't have known what to do with the place! Unbeknownst to Earthlings of course its efforts in uplifting and enslaving the huge crawling, beetle-like creatures which dominated the cavernous interior of Venus have paid off, they've finally discovered a sprawling city complex in the upper mantle of the planet, seemingly built in the long-long-ago when the planets atmosphere wasn't quite so industrially toxic. Of course the Cthonians (close cousins of Earths burrowers, though immensely large and intelligent in comparison) are absolutely livid about some smug, aethereal thing messing with their spawning pit. They turned the surface into a wasteland to drive off those star headed freaks, and they can easily take care of this newcomer and its pets.
Mars was another possession of those "star headed freaks", the drying of its once vast oceans driving them to the suitably wet- if uncomfortably hot and humid, ancient Earth. The remnants at the Poles of the planet did hang on for a few more million years, burrowing into ice caves, cultivating the black slime which seeped up through the fissures deep underground for food. Nyarlethotep eventually found them on the brink of collapse, degenerated tribes crawling through the fast drying canons, cannibalizing their spores/offspring. They saw a brief Renaissance under this dark saviour, in which they built for it mountains and monuments and offered dark rights to the distant stars they didn't even remember their forebears descending from. Of course Nyarlethotep has a short attention span, especially back before they met humanity and adjusted to our mayfly like existences, so eventually these Elder Things were abandoned, their bodies and cities buried beneath the sand of their barren home.
Being the only inhabited world during the Convergence the Earth was more thoroughly devastated, whilst Venus and Mars saw equally intense battles for domination only the most OCD astronomers would be able to identify the scars left on their surfaces. Earth however was twisted almost beyond recognition, a freezing and shattered world barely kept alive by the faint heat of the demon star it has been tethered too. Humanity is a young race, and often interfered with in its youthful naivety, but these death-driven mayflies have proved to be infinitely entertaining to the Earth-bound deities who have enslaved and exploited them over the millennia. After all it was their desire to kill millions for their mortal rulers which drove the warlocks and sorcerers of the Earth to delve into dark texts, some dating back to before the first stones of Ur or Iram, they bound the souls of their fellow species to torture and thousands of years of servitude so they had the power to serve masters who they could smite with a snap of their fingers! Pacts were made with minor things which offered knowledge and instruction, the natural physics of the local space-time were disrupted, more powerful things began to notice this anomaly, and more powerful pacts were made as a result. Humanity surely had no concept of what they were dealing with, they would never have risked their home and all the lives on it to win such a petty conflict.
The destruction of the Moon will give the Earth a ring of its own, which will prove useful in keeping out some of the larger and less spatially aware extraterrestrial threats. The closest one is probably Mneme. Oceans and atmospheres can be clearly observed, even by someone with good eye-sight, and concentrations of points of light suggest some form of civilization on the planetoid. Whatever is up their they seem to be incapable of contacting us, though some meteorites studied by local authorities on ancient dialects almost look like they've writing on them, a message of greeting, or an insult directed at the nature of our progenitor?
The Mi-Go know of course, at least the control nodes have directed contact with the inhabitants of their new neighbour to see if they could help them get their rocks to Yuggoth. The local primitives were a bit more accommodating then the flesh things back on Earth, but they proved to be ignorant and just as prone to violence when confused. The control nodes have been looking further afield, the hot planet sets extremities on fire when one gets too close, the old ruins on Mars are full of old junk and drones tend to disappear when they get sent down the frozen passages. The new arrivals, Nemsis as observant humans call it, has been far more useful and a delegation is en route to collect the necessary rocks and other materials to finish a new transportation portal.
The Rhamnousians of Nemesis are recent arrivals to this system, settling on the third planet soon after the Unconscionable Things had grown bored of their new toys and pulled their forces to some other forsaken corner of the cosmos. Parasitic in nature their world was similarly captured and devastated by the powers that be some millennia ago, and since then they have served the masters of all creation like so many billions of others. A splinter of the greater race, a regiment one billion strong descended on the devastated and enslaved its original inhabitants as the crawled from the caverns and shelters they had hidden within for generations. Of course they've not made this too obvious to their fungoid visitors, claiming that the pale, fleshy lumps which squeal at them are merely an engineered servile race to their ruling caste. The Mi-Go drones aren't too observant of course, and the control nodes couldn't care less about how their new business partners got to where they are. What they're less observant of is the peril their friends find themselves in, on a collision course with Mars. Human astronomers had realised this decades ago, but the Rhamnousians have only copped onto it recently. Solutions are not forthcoming, and unless someone comes up with something soon then they may be forced to more desperate ends, they may be forced to ask for help from their former benefactors.