Chapter 1: 0 – Prologue

“It is said that a great many gods once ruled an ancient, infinite world, and they were capricious and cruel. They were said to sail the Sea of Light on their world-ships of living gold, and only those chosen by them were permitted to drink of the cosmic waters. Those deemed unworthy, those who did not pay penance or grant sacrifice, they were thrown overboard to be consumed by the sea and become as one with its waters.”

“But as they ruled and their cruelty grew yet greater, the resentment within mortals' hearts grew in equal measure. In drowning in the Sea of Light, their defiance preserved them even as they sank into its bottomless depths. The great pressure galvanized them into the purest forms of their selves, hardened them from the very ravages of the cosmos.”

“Whence the champion of the God of the Sun was brought onto the Sea to drink from it for the thousandth time he was dragged below the waves by the reaching hands of uncountable dead, whose very touch burned the faith from his soul and allowed his inner heresy to scream out. It was because this gleaming knight had had a geas placed upon himself to suppress his nascent resentment of the gods, to lock it away in the darkest reaches of his soul where not even the Gods could find it.”

“It was through this act of faith that he cultivated the greatest hatred of the Gods out of any living thing, for his locked-away resentment of the divine became a shadow that grew in proportion to his faith. On the day he would partake of the glimmering waters for the thousandth time, his soul became a beacon for every heretic to have ever been thrown into the Sea of Light.”

“So it was that the holy warrior was dragged into the waters and became the driving core of a great beast, formed from the collective bodies and souls of every human to have ever been sacrificed to the Sea of Light. Uncountable, powerless creatures became as one in the grandest possible invocation of a vengeance curse, forming a great destroyer that dragged the God of the Sun into the Sea of Light and squeezed the breath of divinity from him, bit by bit.”

“On that day the Gods tried to flee from our world and the newborn Slayer of Gods dragged them under the waves, devouring the gods and in its hateful stomach digesting them to extract their infinite divinity.”

“With the beast’s purpose fulfilled, the leviathan allowed itself to sink into the cosmic waters, slumbering for all eternity as it digested the gods it had consumed, rendering them down into their constituent parts. From its cadaverous form, the breath of divinity escaped as silvery gas, shrouding the cosmic ocean.”

“On that day, so long ago, the Sea of Light became the Sea of Fog.”

“As the great beast slumbered it excreted pieces of the gods it had devoured, drained of their divinity and left as will-less concepts - as will-less tools that desire but to be wielded, to be temporarily reminded of what they once were by the divine breath that now belonged to mortals. They floated to the surface of the sea and slowly formed into the island upon which we now live.”

“When the great beast grew hungry it once more rose from the cosmic waters, and devoured the gods of an aeon that had come to pass since it had fallen asleep. It ate, and slept, and ate, and slept, and ate, and slept, and each time the gods it ate became younger, it grew hungry faster, and thus returned to feed again sooner. Eventually it came to pass that the leviathan rose from the waters, and saw the Sun God and the Moon Goddess birthing new gods onto a living ship that could barely be considered a divine vessel.”

“The Leviathan swallowed the vessel whole and with it the Moon Goddess, putting an end to divinity for good. It was only the Sun God himself that the Leviathan could not devour, for his empyrean flame could boil even the cosmic waters. So it was that the god-eater returned to the depths and fashioned seven black rods from the silt at the bottom of the fog-sea, and with them pinned the Sun God in the heavens, so that he might never strike against mankind again.”

“At last the beast of mankind’s heresy returned to its slumber for the final time, but it could not sleep. The moon goddess within its belly kept on birthing new gods even without her husband, weeping all along. Thus the leviathan ripped out her uterus and spat her into the heavens as far from the sun as it could, so that her and the Sun God might never meet again. The tears she wept as she flew became the stars that now shine above.”

“This act caused the righteous man at the leviathan’s heart such disgust that he briefly took control of the beast in its entirety and forced it to regurgitate the goddess’s womb before it could be digested. It is said the divine womb floated through the Sea of Fog and inevitably adhered to the bottom of our world, spewing forth all the malignant beasts that emerge from the earth to prey on mankind.”

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