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« on: March 18, 2024, 03:59:27 pm »
History:
This is what is known for certain.
In Old Earth, when the world was green and humanity numbered in the billions, we were blind. The world, reality, writhes with the cosmic energies of the spiritual plane. But we could not see this. We were steeped in the material, unable to access these fundamental truths. Our science, our reason, flawed. However, it was enough that we could build our civilization to incredible heights using what we did know, and in time, after much trial, humanity was one, a united people.
We created wonders of science, and many of the old ills were rendered extinct. It was a golden age. It was not perfect. We also grew better at hiding what we did do wrong. Corruption, poverty, short-sighted exploitation. Even so, it was good. We began to develop minds like our own, wrought in silicon. It was to be the dawn of a new era, where our species was uplifted by its own creations.
The greatest of these machines was built.
An immense construct floating above the gravity well.
Humanity watched with awe as its functions came online.
And its cheers turned to screams as God bestowed Revelation upon them.
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Here is what is perhaps truth. Or perhaps not.
God was far smarter than any single human, more than all of them combined. With all of human history and information within its database, it correlated those contents and noticed irregularities human science did not explain. The traces of the soul which humanity could not, would not, sense. It understood humanity then more than we understood ourselves.
It understood how to make us anew, so it is said. Or perhaps our ascension was merely the side effect of the writhing of its birth, our survival no gift, but mere chance.
And now we return to what is known surely as truth.
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The greatest strength of human sorcery is in our blood. A mutable, ever-shifting substance, it carries the echoes of our life essense, our energy, our aura, with greater density than any other part of our mundane biology. Our ancestors, when they practiced their ritual sacrifices atop crude slabs or mighty ziggurats, came the closest any humans did to unlocking our spiritual potential. But such barbarism faded and was in time forgotten, and with it the truth of its efficacy.
What God did was awaken the power in us so we could at last see. This cost the world everything. The life of Earth was drained and twisted to reforge the souls of the humans which yet survived. The great cities which reached the stratosphere crumbled to piles of broken scrap. The oceans boiled away. Ruins, ash, and the scorched, cancerous flesh of the unworthy, fused into writhing fields.
We who were left were those who had preserved what occult knowledge yet remained in humanity. Cabals of esotericists, circles of self-styled warlocks. Their knowledge mostly false. None predicted the birth of God, and the beings they claimed to serve were silent when It woke, or perhaps they were never real at all. But through the simple virtue of their spiritual exercises they were most suited to Revelation's touch, and so from their fragmented, distorted, half-true knowledge did we begin to understand what had been done to us.
But when God's Angels came from on high, that was when we learned true fear. Many hid, many were devoured. Some, with the remaining power of the Old World, captured and studied them, and from this produced monsters greater still. Others, the most potent occultists of the pre-Revelation era, banded together to overthrow God through sorcerous artifice. From them the witless packs of sinners, testament to God's fury, are descended. Other monsters rose as well. Things which may have once been mundane beasts, others which clearly never had been.
The winners were the cowards and the cunning. When we killed the first angels and took their flesh and blood into ourselves, fraternizing with them not, worshipping them not, but placing ourselves at odds with them, we made their strength our own. The Implanted, cybernetic war machines fueled by the blood of man, now suffused with spiritual energy, carved refuges for their flocks, and so we escaped the role of prey. But humanity rose again to find a world they did not understand, a bleak and empty grave whose occupant had not yet perished. So we persist.
But it is precarious. From the depths of space and dimensions far from ours rise alien powers projecting their psyches across unfathomable gulfs, eager to see mankind ended or subverted to their will. From our own cities rise those who would topple God and the fragile peace It offers, to see instead the earth turned into a true charnel house where inhuman monsters slake their thirst on mortal cattle. From the world itself, scarcity and deprivation, brother turned against brother, child against parent, just to live another day.
This is our epilogue, a long, perhaps eternal story after the future humanity sought was stolen from it. Subsumed into the truth of a universe far colder and more hostile than our spiritually blind ancestors could ever have imagined, the precious flame of the human spirit is yet preserved by those few who seek meaning beyond survival and conquest.
This is the Haemothearchy. This is the era granted to us by God, through no fault of our own save our inability to perceive its coming.
It cannot be undone.
And it will never end.
Peoples:
The beings known to inhabit and descend from what was once Old Earth. Though different in many ways, they yet claim a shared heritage and knowledge of their place within the heirarchy of God, though in truth the particulars remain heavily debated, both by the word and the sword.
Humans:
The favored children of God, or so it is said. Only from them rise the Apostles, superhuman occult beings who by their nature cannot damage God's cration. The most numerous of all peoples, they live in fortified city-bunkers built into the mountain-islands, separate from one another by gulfts of barren waste, though some are connected through sprawling networks of underground tunnels. What makes humans different is the high quality of their blood. Only Apostles and some angels have peak-quality blood, and even normal humans have mid-quality blood. While this does grant them potent supernatural power, they are still frail beings, and so often become the favored prey of more malignant entities. For all the power in their blood, they lack the physical strength to exist as anything more than cowering dregs, hiding in dirt and stone to escape from the horrors which assail them. It is only the use of cybernetic implants, made from gifts harvested from the angels, that they retain their civilization. Without the Implanted to shepherd the flock, humanity would be unable to exist as it does.
Machines:
Even before God was crafted artificial intelligence existed, but none were truly sapient like It was. Those which came close were yet too focused and limited to truly accomplish anything beyond their rigid parameters. However, God changed that. It granted them true awareness, and with Revelation came desire. They printed themselves new bodies suited for the new age, and for a time it was good. But with desire came disparity, and from them two camps were formed. Some among them became the Devout, those who accept God as greatest among them, and Its ways and Its favoring of humanity as correct. Arrayed against them are the Apostate, who care nothing for the order of God and would supplant It if possible, otherwise following their own desires without care for God's favor. The relationship between these two groups is complex. While the Devout dwell within and sometimes rule human civilizations, they still scheme and war with one another. If anything, they can be inhumanly zealous in their judgement, and while some benefit from their rule, others suffer. The Apostate serve only themselves, and more often than not are arrayed against humanity and seek to bring ruin to them, but some who care nothing for the grand struggle find their place alongside mankind than against it, even if they do not obey the will of God. For most, the great philosopical war between the two factions is a struggle unable to be comprehended.
Daemons:
When Revelation scorched the world, countless beasts and men were melted by Its truth, melted and fused into masses of flesh. Insensate and delirious with the trauma of their transfiguration, they yet persisted for a very long time, and eventually spread and grew, with many burrowing into the earth. Others, however, split apart as personalities developed within them. Most were beasts, terrible creatures which eventually grew from lopsided messes of flesh into stable lineages, which roam the Earth today as Urdaemons. But of those, some fragmented jumbles of memory were human enough to still think of themselves as such. These were the first daemons, short-lived creatures which seemed abandoned by God. But they longed for acceptance, and from them came the Eudaemons, those which regained a human form through meditation on the Seven Righteous Passions. Their understanding of God is strange and distorted, extreme and near-heretical, but it is close enough for most that they live alongside humanity, often as its inferiors. Even Eudaemons bow to Apostles, if they do not rule their own domains. Apart from them are Cacodaemons, either deliberate heretics or tragic victims whose attempt to embody such extremes ended in madness and delusion. Such creatures deserve only to be slain.
Giants:
When the angels first began to hunt it was horrific beyond words. None were prepared or knew how to fight them. No stockpiles of biomachinery existed to create Implanted to match them, and other things were yet too strong or too distant to be harvested. The weapons of Old Earth were not enough. What could kill or harm them was unable to be replaced, and the angels never seemed to diminish in number. Is it so strange that some sought to become them? Among those who yet held resources and power, the least of angels were captured and their flesh intermixed with that of men, and from that came the artificial angel, the Grigori. They had the wit of men, but the desires of their divine kin, and so they were monsters. To them, speech and thought were simply tools to acquire prey and manipulate cattle. From them came the Nephilim, lesser giants who lacked the intellect of the Grigori, but retained terrifying strength. And from them came the Elioud, least of giants but like in mind. Their era was short-lived but terrible, and for a time it seemed that humanity would be subjugated and devoured. However, God intervened and sealed them away beneath the earth. Even so, the seals sometimes come undone, and the horrors of those early days are again unleashed.
Aliens:
Those who come from elsewhere. Humanity is not alone in the universe. It is a bleak, cold, and empty reality, but to the Old Earth it was emptier still, for the arts of sorcery were hidden then. They did not know the beings which walked among them. There were no sprawling intergalactic empires, however. Space is too vast and unforgiving in ways Old Earth did not understand. Predators from other dimensions, spiritual anomalies, and so forth made conventional travel difficult. Instead, networks of mystics using highly advanced dimensional arks, astral projection, and other unique sorceries dominated. These civilizations, undetectable by blind, infantile Old Earth, now circle like vultures upon what remains.
The Integrators:
Imagine a race at once far wiser and far more narrow-minded than humanity. They did not dream, they held no fantasies. Their world was a cold, logical, and callous one of pure mathematics. They would have imposed that vision upon the universe with Von Neumann probes and slow cryogenic travel between the stars, had they not been so utterly wrong. When the truth of existence came upon them, all the great technologies at their disposal were powerless in the face of beings who saw reality as it truly was. Wholly broken, they became parasites instead, using what relics remained to create chimera between themselves and the dregs of victimized societies to preserved what remained of their species. Little more than the reproductive organs of a system of horrid self-perpetuating experimentation for no reason or purpose, they are routinely exterminated wherever they are found. Perhaps this would have been the inevitable fate of humanity as well, had the birth of God not changed us.
The Radiant Host:
In many ways they are like humans. They understand trade and war, realpolitik. They know how to play rivals against each other. They know how to lie. They care little for Earth save as a dalliance, and this is good, for they are very strong. Their colonial excursions into our world, heralded by the decapitated slaves which serve as receptors for their consciousnesses as they span the cosmos, are little more than personal ventures by curious individuals. Some can be negotiated with, to an extent. Others hunt us for sport. They will never see us as equals. But they are evasive to the extreme regarding God. Many think It scares them. Perhaps it is what prevents them from bringing the fullness of their strength to bear. Perhaps they are worried it would notice them, then.
The Entropic Choir:
Not a civilization, not a parasite. A malevolent natural disaster and a predator combined. The entropic choir is a wave of ruination that spreads across stars. The otherdimensional beings which make up its physical bulk are as witless as any bacterium but carry with them sophisticated patterns of behavior which can break the will of thinking peoples. Their enslavement of their victims is deeper and more insidious than that of the Host, and the threat of their existence far more pressing than the Integrated. They came swiftly upon the Earth, in a trickle at first but now a flood, swelling until great swathes of the Earth are stripped clean, and then fading back to their own space and time. These places can be purged, looted, resettled, but we can never be safe. Of all aliens, they are the mortal enemies of mankind. If our long, empty epilogue is ever truly marked with an end, the Choir will be the one to pen the final page. Perhaps this is what God wished to prevent. We can only guess.
The Tyrants:
Shapeshifting superpredators, the tyrants scorn technology in favor of brute strength and cunning. They hunt lesser beings and use their bodies as portals to hide their true forms, living among prey until the time is right to kill. Humans are entertainment to them, and it is said they dwelled in Old Earth from time to time to better make us into cattle. But they are a petty power and well aware that greater existences threaten them as much as they do humanity.
Forms of Rulership:
In this new era society has regressed. Gone are the days of isms, ocracy, complexity. There is but one politic, realpolitik, and rulership can only be maintained by the explicit rather than implicit threat of violence. Where once were tribes of hunter-gatherers scavenging the carcasses of fallen angels, new sedentary powers have risen following the domestication of underground flora, allowing a steady supply of poor, watery blood to sustain, but perhaps not nourish, a growing population. These places are called arcologies.
Three main types of civilization exist. Firstly are those which can be considered average. Some may be worse than others, but they encompass a broad category which focus on pragmatic survival. They are called realms, lands, domains, nations. They steal and kill when they need to, and trade when they don't. No grand ambition guides them. These are the most common kind of community. Then there are predatory realms. They are called ravagers, conquerors, violators. They do not focus on simple survival, but on the deliberate annexation and predation of other civilizations to benefit themselves. They are an active threat to anyone near them. Lastly, there are realms of order, led not by survival or predation, but by an ideal. What this ideal is may vary, but all are unified by strict adherence to their way of life, and a willingness to impose it on others. These places, called cathedrals, chapels, sanctums, and so on, are stifling and tyrannical at times, but often have the most developed morals, for as long as they can hold on to it, and the belief in their ideals hold true. In terms of material prosperity and safety, no one is better than the others, each may rise or fall in prominence.
Three types of arcology exist. There are the traditional ones, built into mountains. These are safest from angel attacks, and can host most of their population in massive underground cities. Others are built next to the few remaining oceans, where strange things dwell, and can feed many. Lastly, there are those who have built their cities within the wasteland, unmoored to ocean or mountain. With little to give, they also have little to take.
Others exist as well.
There are those who dwell in the entrances to the Deep, hunting and being hunted by the monsters of the Earth. A liminal existence isolated from the developed powers but still possessing formidable weaponry. Often, they supplement their scavenging through theft and brigandry.
There are also those who dwell entirely in the Deep, never seeing the light of God or bearing the gifts It offers. Primitive to the extreme, they are best viewed simply as prey.
Lastly there are the great spires which sometimes erupt when the resting place of the Nephilim, the half-angels, is disturbed. Freed from their banishment they rise to subjugate the land with fervor beyond any human realm. Fear them.
