Nine there were, lifted and blessed with vision of the infinite, perceiving directions unknown to mortal vessels who, toiling in the turbulent deeps of the spheres still tremble at the darker glories. From the grandest immensity to the final implosion, their eyes probed into enveloping hidden beauty, and in the soft shelter of Beulah they purged their former anxious thoughts.

Righteousness and virtue unchecked thrived within their stores of knowledge and sublime emotion. Anger over injustice, joy over success and affection towards vulnerability. Reason and its sibling rival passion, and the urgent concern over those still stricken with age. Those radiant souls reveled in cosmic infancy and sang with reverence their songs of ascension.

And given such glory that life and light can shed like skin from their mercurial scales, they sprinkled salt over their wounds to replace with autonomous apparition what they lost in their dismal wanderings. In that tunnel, endless and desolate, they dissolved in the mindless thoughts of the sleeper's animal cravings, they being left free to raven in the dreamless dark.

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And you forlorn, sparks of star stuff riding on an evanescent wind, will you cross the threshold of their asylum? Will you follow the toll that awakened you? Will you turn your backs to the East where infant stars vent their nascent plumes? For Ulro darkens in the West, indignant over its umbilical link to the abyss where writhes the unfettered shadow in its consumption.

Haleon brooding in his realm, dark and labyrinthine, by memories pained he burned his dream of Zar Zafaran to an ashen husk. With indignant flame he razed his haven of memorial bliss to mournful cinders, angered by the harshness of his ruin, and those cinders he cooled with his frozen temper, having woken from his conniptions and in cold hate settled. He is the vanguard, the brave son of tomorrow.

On a bed of sweet-scented bile lays Topar, pouring out comfort in her love of deformity, for better it is to love than to chafe within one's veins, straightening bent limbs to walk on twisted legs. Lovely Topar in her viscous gown, she ordains the shapes of the fallen and grants them dreams of beauty. Nessus she wove from devolution, the City of the Rotten, and in Nessus stirs the Sea of Decay.