The Nether

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The Vessel of Sin

“The dark is the cradle of all; without light did life rise, and without light shall it die.”

In the beginning, the mortal world was forged by the nameless, fragmented soul that gave our cosmos the first death; shaping it in the Creator’s memory, so that when the shadow touched souls of Men would awaken upon it as materialized beings aeons ahead, they would cherish the last gift of their fatherly One God until the end of time. But Men were brought into their world with the capacity to commit all wicked sins history would come to endure, and thus in an effort to prevent this in the very beginning, the Vessel of Sin was given shape within the very center of the earth.

“And behold the skyless ceiling yawning,

The infernal fires, ceaselessly dawning,

Agonized horrors, nearly drawing,

To souls undeserving of peace and rest;

And indeed the sinful daemonites hunger,

For they come swift, flame asunder,

Seeking bone and flesh for plunder,

To revel in the sin we so detest.”

Believing the terrible inner-demons of mortalkind could be displaced to this “Vessel of Sin”, the First of the Dead nestled the lost second half of the Creator’s Soul deep within the confines of a once very dark, very peaceful cavern of vast expanse. It was by trapping this lost, ancient soul essence here that the flames of the Nether first did come to smolder, embodying the terrible fury and twisted nature that all descendant Men bore within themselves. The Vessel of Sin, with its white-hot flames that were fated never to die, once tied itself to all the souls of the world far above, so that the ill will of Men would be siphoned to that place of hellfire and perpetuate the containment of material evils. In this ancient time, no God ruled the Nether, and no mortal suffered the ire of its masters; only profaned flame burned here, kept forever lit and anchored by the suppressed sins of primeval man.

The designs of the First to Die were not realized by those who were known as “Gods”. When the God of Ruin, Iblees, came down to wage his war and lost, the Aenguls cast their brother to the depth of the earth so that he may be chained there to burn for all eternity. But the Vessel of Sin was not intended to act as a prison -- and thus its flames were tainted by the un-mortal fury that stirred and boiled within the Felgod, making rise to terrible, daemonic manifestations of hatred and deep, very mortal transgression. It was upon this point onward that the Vessel of Sin, now known by men as the Nether, had been broken of its original purpose; and thus all the vile things that originally occupied the mortal soul returned to them, and ushered in eras of betrayal, strife and the murder of sons and brothers.

For over a millennia after the Fallen One shattered his bindings, he took control of the Vessel’s usherer, the last half of the Great Soul, and ensued total control over the designs of the Nether. It was his rage that bid the perpetuation of the Nether’s infernal flame; and in the shadow cast by fire, daemonic entities anchored by wroth toiled about and tore at eachother, reveling in cannibalistic feast and the harvest of twisted bones and burnt flesh. From the Nether did the Undead rise a first and second time, carrying with them a power so ill and destructive that it tore their bodies apart, made them rotten, and made them undying.

“I have witnessed the Vessel made twisted,

Its smolder made a vaporous flame;

Where men’s sins transpire unlisted,

Where undead groan and feast without shame.”

It was Iblees who first conceived the most wretched and terrible design of what is known by all men as “undeath”. His Undead Sorcerers were not the first of their kind to rise, for far in the past, when the first great war was waged, the Daemonic Betrayer cursed the graves of ancient mortals ushered to the eternal slumber of death that their material coils were fated to one day meet, and made them awaken; risen as ghoulish shells, who bore nothing within them but the animalistic, terrible evils that the Vessel existed to extinguish. With nothing to guide them but Soul Shadows, the countless undead that would walk the earth to scourge their mortal brothers did so without a trace of remorse. When the time came that their master was defeated, they too were banished, but left behind was the Curse of Undeath that clung to the mortal world like a subtle, unfading poison.

So long have Iblees’ mindless undead roamed the screaming halls of the Nether, oppressed and shackled by the tormentous manifestations borne of the Felgod’s fire. Some of their countless ilk had been so utterly crushed by the torturous existence of the corrupted Vessel that they could only go on as feral spiritual manifestations, still trapped within the God of Ruin’s domain, yet others suffered for so long that their flesh had sloughed off, the fire-borne pain they were forced to endure chiseling their shambled minds until something akin to a sentience was reborn within them again. The oppressions of their hateful master incited the deep seated and burdensome desire for freedom within these few mindful undead, and thus the seeds of betrayal were planted within those shackled by the Betrayer.

“I have witnessed the fire burn its brightest,

When the Felgod ruled us unchained;

And cringed to the cacodaemon’s screams nearest,

When the fouled flame forged them untamed;

And set upon us a servitude of rotten flesh ever pained.”

When the Abyss was born of Aegis’ utter destruction, it had bore such a depth into the earth that the very unseeable ceiling of the Nether suffered cracks and breaks in the crust; a miniscule penetration, a doorway into the land made ruined by the King of Demons. While the one known as the Abysslord settled his throne before this entrance, which had collapsed within the deepest part of the Abyss, in order to keep what was able to crawl out of it at bay, there was nothing on the other side to prevent the seeping dark of the Abyss from crawling so subtly into the Nether.

It was much like the inhalation of fresh, clean air; the undead that suffered within the fiery pits of the twisted Vessel were granted clarity and understanding, for when that doorway opened their wretched, tormented Soul Shadows were immediately bid a kind of resonation, or connection to the Abyss they were incapable of reaching. Like their far older, more worn brothers that regained their minds based on the length of their suffering alone, newer droves of undead that Iblees took claim to upon his second invasion in Athera culminated a vengeful sentience that echoed a very dark, very mortal collection of emotions -- a farcry from the humanity that true, living men know, but enough to give the oppressed undead of Iblees the willpower to revolt.

And so they did. So many had risen with this newfound inner-darkness that entire sections of the cavernous Hell suddenly began to grow dim and black with shadow, for through the shattering of their shackles the Vessel was forced to take on a new manifestation of mortal evil; darkness. Something of a civil war sparked far below the earth, below the deepest precipices of the Abyss, where undead men swarmed their infernal, daemonic slave masters with a screaming fury, tearing them apart while droves of their own were shattered and broken amidst the revolt. To this very day, the God of Ruin struggles against his rebellious, once-mortal slaves as they swallow the flames of the Nether and return the Vessel to the cold darkness it once bore.

“I have witnessed the rusting of shackles,

And the fall of the vaporous flame;

I have drawn blood those known as demons,

And scourged those who must shoulder our blame,

For we deign to suffer their chains again.”

Index

On “The Vessel of Sin”

The Vessel of Sin was the original name and status of the Nether, when the “First to Die” saw to the last half of the Creator’s Soul being contained in the massive, dark network of tunnels that existed within the earth’s center. The Vessel acted as a siphon to all forms of mortal evil and had functioned correctly in keeping the souls of mortals “pure” until Iblees had cursed them and was locked in the Vessel for eternal imprisonment. This caused the Vessel’s flames, which were ever-burning based on being “fed” by siphoned mortal sin, to become corrupted by the Fallen One on behalf of being fed by his own hatred. This led to the creation of Daemonic Manifestations, or Demons that would inhabit the Nether before the undead and greater Undead Sorcerers would come to inhabit it with them, as well as the failure of the Vessel’s original purpose, as mortalkind was given the capacity to commit terrible evil after the Vessel of Sin’s use of a God’s prison.

On “The First to Die”

The First to Die is a mysterious, undefined entity that oversaw the event that led to the Creator’s disappearance and the subsequent creation of the mortal world. It saw to the design of the Vessel of Sin before the mortal world was even conceived, and assured the last half of the Great Soul that He left behind would be contained there.

On “The Great Soul”

The Great Soul is also known as the Creator’s Soul, or the soul which the souls of all other Aengudaemonic Gods was born from through fragmentation. Not all of the Great Soul was fragmented, as the remaining half resides trapped within the Nether to forever act as its power source.

On “Daemonic Manifestations”

Daemonic Manifestations are also known as Demons, and are entities created by Iblees with the use of the Nether’s Vaporous Flame. They are Devil-like and almost always embody aspects of mortal sin and wretchedness, and adopt often adopt the destructive nature of the Ruin God that made them. Demons had long since existed as the “slave masters” of undead that had been banished to the Nether alongside Iblees. Examples of types of Demons are those such as the Unseen, particularly powerful entities that had ushered the creation of the Strigae in the mortal realms, and Pigdaemons, who appear as rotting suidaeic halfbeasts that actively seek out once-mortal undead so they may be cannibalized.

On “Undead Sorcerers”

Known originally as simply “The Undead”, these maleficar were direct servants of Iblees that acted as the primary footmen and commanders of the wars waged in both Aegis and Athera. With their connections to the Felgod, they exchanged the livelihood of their mortal bodies for some of the most destructive forms of magic ever to be conceived. Unlike the undying droves that they and their master were capable of summoning and raising, Undead Sorcerers had acute sentience, even if tainted by malicious intent, and were created directly from descendants that proved themselves worthy to serve the God of Ruin.

On “Dissentious Undead”

Dissentious Undead were once slaves to Iblees and his Daemonic Manifestations, the Demons, and number in the hundreds of thousands based on how many mortal corpses that Iblees had raised from death to fuel his vile warmachines. Because of the creation of the Abyss from Aegis, something of a “doorway” had opened between the Nether and the Abyss because the destruction that created the latter was so intense that it formed a crater that reached the very depths of the earth, where the Vessel of Sin resides. This caused a dark influence to take hold of the majority of undead in Iblees’ service, granting them a vengeful and hateful sentience driven and kept alive solely by the prospect of overthrowing their fellic masters. There are Dissentious Undead that had existed far before the formation of the Abyss, their minds fabricated and anchored entirely from the raw suffering they had endured for hundreds of years. These “Ancient Dissenters” acted as the commanders and lords of their brutal rebellion.

On “Vaporous Flame”

Originally, the Vaporous Flame was the product of the untainted Vessel of Sin siphoning the world’s mortal evils into itself, spawning a type of fire that burned for unusual amounts of time, only able to be fed by a perpetual flow of spiritual sin. It is said by the wisest and oldest of the Dissentious Undead that this was the cause of the world’s consistent peace in the ancient times, for when Iblees had cursed mortalkind and became trapped within the Nether, descendants became the vile and strife-rattled creatures they were destined to become without the Vessel’s presence in the earth. When Iblees was imprisoned in the Vessel of Sin, it began to feed off of the Ruin God’s hatred instead, and thus became corrupted; able to be used in order to fuel the most terrible of magics and to create the most foul of creatures, known as Daemonic Manifestations. If Daemonic Manifestations are pure embodiments of the worst of mortal sins, and the Vaporous Flame is fed by the Felgod’s hatred, what does that say about his darkened nature?

On “Cold Darkness”

Known as the “Cold Dark” by the Demons that fear it, as well as the Dissentious Lords that bring it, it is a force of change that threatens to extinguish the Vaporous Flame of the Nether so it may be replaced by what the Dissentious Undead call “the aspect of mortality”, being darkness. With the Cold Dark, the unshackled undead threaten Iblees’ seat and the hellfires he heralds, for they seek to bring about an era of darkness where the Vessel’s intent is restored without the use of fire. With this, they believe, the terrible strife that transpires on the surface of the world between mortals may subside as it had in primeval times.