Prologue
Things change.
What was once solid as stone, real as sky, cannot remain so forever. Things, inevitably, shift and change with time.
How much time does it take, then, for a thing that is no longer to be forgotten?
Some things are forgotten in moments, left behind in the dust of the past as soon as the present steps to the fore. The history of a tool may be remembered for years, or even to the point of its breaking. The name of someone loved or feared may last a generation, perhaps more. The name of a land or a home may be carried down and recorded, brought into a temporary timelessness with ink and paper and will. The scars and glories of conquests and tragedies may be remembered for eons, twisting and changing as they crawl through time on the backs of those most affected.
But eventually, everyone forgets how things were. Those which live in the moment forget themselves, and forget what has brought them here. Call it the will of heaven, the marching of time, or the fate of the living, but they have lost that which they knew, and forgotten what they should fear.
Once, titans walked the earth, each step reshaping reality itself. Angels, gods, primordials, their names were myriad, given by the children they formed and eventually split from themselves like offshoots and tumors. Where they walked the laws of space, of time, of decay and growth, of air and ground, of what is real and what is not emerged from them as delusions, forming from madness and will concepts which grasped the world. They infected the formless chaos, fed upon it and rutted and birthed and reshaped it into their own image, each more horrifying than the last. They spawned endless wars, wove between and against each other as only the mindless and the mad can bear to do for long, and from chaos, built the rotten, alien thing that is the world. Eventually, even this was not enough for them, and the things of formless aeons crawled their way up through what IS AND WILL BE, leaving their least favored children and the ruinous mutants they spawned and interbred with behind in their wake. They abandoned the mindless, mewling, misshapen things to their fate, to rot and reproduce and desperately attempt to ape and understand what they could have been and once were, what their gods and creators might still be.
And so, much is forgotten.
Uncountable times passed, and things changed once and many times more. The lines of the spawn divided, interbreeding and fighting, things of incomprehensible yet imperfect nature and forms fucking and killing and building and destroying. They grew and twisted, grew mad and wise and mad again like the things which ate and birthed the world, and in their madness and wisdom and newfound freedom they tore apart and reconstructed the things left behind. No longer was each concept a mechanism woven into a machine, no longer a carefully woven treaty between one insanity and the next; instead one flowed to the other, like the rivers and forests and deserts and fires that mirrored them, life and concept melding and remaking the world from what it was left as.
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And so, as time passes, much is forgotten again.
They spawned and interbred more, uncountable eternities waging war on what is possible and what is likely, until the greatest among them had long passed, and the thing they had made of the world could not feed more than a few, even of the minute shards that they now were. Small, twisted aberrations roamed the world, starved for things they had never learned and could not remember, their bodies malformed to the point of impossibility, surviving on the scraps they could scrounge and the few remaining organs and thoughts they could hold in themselves. But some were still raised on stories, of the old days, when gods were gods, and snakes ate the sun, and the clouds would twist into colors and doors and perfect, spiral worlds. And so these few drew themselves up and began to dream, singing in minuscule words and barely-larger ideas, in desperate bids to grow, to find the food so long denied, to change and become more than they were born as. They hoped to ape their long-gone ancestors, to curry favor with those who remained, to harmonize with the leavings and mutations of the impossible that formed their very world.
And some did.
And just as what was forgotten and never learned from, they repeated the actions of those that came before, and began killing each other.
They kill each other even now, these things, these macabre reflections of deific monsters. For things they have made, for words that they have allowed to fester, for the base instincts they are so often slaved to, beasts of chemicals and survival that they are. They call life and its struggle many things, and claim to many glories, and in all of them there is the desperation of the ignorant who know not what they do not know, and seek instead to mold what they can to comfort themselves.
And so - as wars wage, lines are drawn and desperate bids for understanding warp what is. More is forgotten.
Today, the Empire rules over almost all the world, and certainly all within its grasp, the bloodline and star-infested flesh of its Emperor spread into countless descendants and armies. Most of the great beasts slumber, measuring time in the movement of continents and oceanic shifts rather than days beneath the shifting, many-limbed sun, and the writhing of the world is muted, settling closer and closer to stillness. So much is pursued, so little understood, but yet again, as is always and forever true, things are changing, and things both wondrous and horrible are nearly ready to yet again take the stage, many of them guided by the hand of the golden, star-burnt flesh of those who rule over all with iron fists and honeyed smiles.
So few live longer than a flicker. So few ever survive the process of growth. Even fewer of those ever understand a fraction of what has come before or what is, and of those, fewer still ever manage to change themselves with it. They are bound by convention, by stunted birth, by blind minds, and by the gnashing claws of the other crabs in the bucket, the desperate hunger of the other maggots in the pile.
And so more is forgotten.
And yet.
Despite it all, every now and then, one of them finds something. Not the same blind truths they have been taught, or the watered wine of understanding that others tell them is ambrosia. They remember something, or find something, build something small, something perfect, something unique, like a pearl, wrapped in filth beneath the muck. Different than what came before, and better than what is now. And from a pearl, or an egg, or a single, burning ember, many things can come to be.
It is an age of monsters, like every age before it. But in ruin, new things can be forged.