---
⚫ The Pressure
It began with nothing.
Not the comforting nothing of silence or sleep.
This was dense. Crushing. A weight with no shape, pressing against the idea of being before the word "being" was ever uttered. No stars. No gods. No time. Only potential, coiled and festering in blind hostility.
Then the first pulse.
A ripple across the formless dark. Something had... stirred.
From that pulse, the First Layer cracked into existence like a scab peeling away from the skin of void. There was no explosion. No bang. Just a slump. A collapse inward, birthing a land soaked in black fog and rotting heat.
The ground was made of corpses—though no one knew of what. Bones without owners, blood without memory. Chunks of sinew pulsed as if they remembered the idea of muscles, but had forgotten their purpose.
From this grotesque womb, life oozed.
---
⚫ The First Screamer
It was not a scream of pain, nor of purpose.
Just a long, wet cry gurgling from a thing that barely deserved the term "creature."
It had no face. No limbs. Just a bloated sack of gray flesh wobbling on a trembling stalk of cartilage. Its skin steamed under the heatless sky, quivering in agony with each twitch.
But it lived.
Other blobs soon followed. Tumors dragging themselves from cracks in the land, birthed from the heat of decaying matter and soaked in Abyssal breath. Some twitched once and died. Some crawled into piles and merged.
One, fatter than the rest, consumed its sibling. Its skin hardened. Its tremble slowed.
And then — it hissed.
The first act of domination had begun.
---
⚫ The First Conflict
There were no names yet. No language. Only instinct.
And instinct said: survive or be torn.
The creatures began biting. Not with mouths, but with jagged tears in their forms.
They slashed with bones that grew like thorns. They howled not from lungs, but from vibrating sacs of mucus. Every movement was inefficient, grotesque, and raw—but it worked.
The survivors adapted.
Some grew limbs — crooked and mismatched.
Some learned to roll, compress, flatten.
One slithered, leaving acidic trails that melted rival spawn into food.
The land fed them. Or perhaps, tested them.
Above, something pulsed in the mist — a colossal root of flesh hanging from nowhere, dripping black nectar. A few brave crawlers drank from it and convulsed. Some exploded. But one — just one — grew eyes.
Eyes that didn't see, but felt.
It began to stalk. To choose. To plan.
And for the first time in Abyss, a predator was born.
---
⚫ The Ash Tribes
As cycles passed (though time was still young and unformed), patterns emerged.
Creatures grouped not by choice, but by resonance — a shared pulse, a similar scream.
Some shared heat and huddled near corpse-fires. Others gnashed and tested each other until a pecking order formed. Eventually, rudimentary tribes were seeded.
The two largest were:
Ash-Eaters, born from the flamepits, their hides crusted in soot and smoke
Hornblacks, brutes with twisted bone-horns, fueled by marrow and instinct
They did not speak. They marked territory with carcasses. With bile. With howls that echoed for hours.
When two patrols met, they didn't parley.
They tore each other apart.
And from the blood, new hybrids were born — malformed, stronger, dangerous.
Conflict bred evolution.
Evolution birthed Tier 1.
---
⚫ The Watcher Below
Beneath the battlefield, deep under layers of bone and bile, something... watched.
It was not alive in the way the others were. It had no need for flesh.
It was an idea seeded into the Abyss itself — a leftover thought from a world long devoured.
It stirred in response to violence.
It smiled (or tried to, through fractured memories).
Its voice did not echo in air, but in instinct. It whispered into bloodstreams, into the crawl of creatures nearing death. And sometimes, the dying would stop... and rise again, changed.
These became known—much later—as Whispered Ones.
And one of them... would one day remember.
---
⚫ The Pillar and the Breath
It began as a dream. Not of sleep, but of structure.
Amid the flesh-storm and howling winds, a Pillar rose—gargantuan, obsidian-black, layered with veins that pulsed lightless crimson. It wasn't built. It emerged. Like a tooth from the land's gums.
When it breathed, the Abyss shuddered.
Every living thing felt it.
Some died instantly, their minds bursting from exposure.
Others... heard music.
A rhythm. A call. A purpose.
Those who crawled near the Pillar began changing. Faster. Deeper. Tier 2 no longer seemed a dream, but a punishment.
The Pillar didn't speak in language, but in visions. Dreams of power. Shapes of the Demon God. And something else—
—a flicker of outside.
A world not of the Abyss.
Something the Pillar wanted.
Something the Abyss would one day consume.
---