Sometimes it happens that the beginning of a story isn’t really the beginning. The tale of the rebirth of the second world is such a one, for it begins epoch upon epoch before the boy who would come to be The Tairn drew his first breath. Indeed, before the first of his line set foot upon life’s path. Before, even, the first of his kind struck two stones together to form their first tool.
A great war was waged. Greater than any since the beginning of time, for U’shaal the Many Limbed, who would become the God Eater had decided itself alone to be deserving of worship. It had called upon the peoples of the worlds given unto it by the Great God and sent them out to seek the homes of its brethren and consume them.
Years passed, eons, epochs, and the conquest spread. From the first blow struck in the name of the Many-Limbed against the chosen of another godling, creation itself teetered on the brink of a yawning abyss.
The peoples of the other gods were, at first, surprised. Unprepared. They fell as chaff from the scythe. Later, as word began to spread, it was already too late. The chosen of the Many-Limbed had grown too strong with conquest. Generations fell upon the fields of battle, whole peoples were lost to the memory of the ages.
While U’shaal’s chosen crushed any and all resistance that could be mustered against them, their god, with unholy zeal, consumed its siblings in the ethereal plane.
Despairing gods began to seek U’shaal out upon the otherworld, where they might confront it directly. Even this was too little too late. U’shaal had, by this time, absorbed the essence of thousands of its brothers and sisters. Wielding this added energy, it could not be beaten by any single god. And with each added victory, it grew stronger.
Long had it been since the Great God had moved on, leaving its children behind to see to the universe, and yet they cried out in what could have been a single voice, lamenting its absence and begging its return. “Save me!” each of its offspring cried in its own stead, raising solitary limbs to the heavens. If it heard, the Great God chose not to answer.
For more than a billion years as we reckon things, the chosen of U’shaal spread and devoured, casting down the rivals of the God Eater and absorbing or consuming their peoples. Until they came at last to the backward people of a particularly insignificant child of the Great God. Not an especially prepossessing species, they were weaker in every way than the chosen of the God Eater, save one. As water against a cliff, then, the chosen of U’shaal beat against these new people, and as water against a cliff, they were thrown back upon themselves.
For the first time in its existence, U’shaal knew something other than greed, or hunger, or arrogance. It knew frustration. From that grew hatred of a special sort, and from that something entirely strange. A desire grew that wasn’t covetous. A desire grew for revenge. U’shaal would crush these new people and their guardian not to gain what was theirs, nor to absorb them into its own or for its own greater glory. U’shaal would crush them simply so that they would no longer leave a stain upon the face of existence. And so it marshaled its forces once more, with —this time— a single goal....
* * *
The place was known as U’che’at’shaal to its inhabitants. It lay in the first of the lands to bow to the Many-limbed. It had known greatness for longer than most worlds had existed, for U’shaal was one of the first of the Great God’s children. For nine hundred thousand millennia it had served as the seat of power for those who did the god’s bidding. Now it served as their last refuge.
U’shaal watched from the not-world of the ethereal plane, raging with impotence. Its chosen surged forth against the invaders — a feeble effort to one who’d seen them blanket entire systems. Energies lanced out from the invading host, slaughtering the ill-equipped chosen in windrows of sizzling death.
No longer could the God Eater bear to watch. There would not be another sally, and only defeat remained. Defeat and extinction, for there would be no mercy from those who sought the end of U’shaal’s chosen.
It was time, at long last, to do that which the God Eater had hoped never to do again.
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Into the last refuge of the battered chosen, within the heart of U’che’at’shaal, there came a sound — a ripping that yet might be a splashing. A small tear appeared in the fabric of the air within the temple of U’che’chkook’shaal. Through this tear, U’shaal poured its essence, filling the edifice that was the greatest construction ever raised by mortal hand.
Once coiled within, the God Eater called forth its arch-priests — those most devout and powerful of its children, steeped in magic and trickery. When they had gathered from all the corners of U’che’at’shaal, U’shaal made them know its final desires for the chosen. It bade them pass on these final orders and then return.
The skies were still filled with lightning and fire by the time the priests reentered the great temple to report their duties done. They begged permission to follow and die with their brethren. Their god, however, had other plans for them.
The light within the temple changed, going from bright white to ruddy red and then an insane blue-black. One hundred thousand priests cried out in unison, overcome with fear and wonder. But their cries were cut short as the light began to undulate with a rhythmic and compelling pulse. A pulse that called to the innermost recesses of their souls, drawing them, pulling them inside out. Hearts took up the rhythm, brains went numb, and the undulating, living darkness began to caress and intrude.
The priests unconsciously drew closer together, darkness entwining, slithering, englobing. None screamed after that first impulsive echo. None struggled. Tighter together they pressed, the essence of the god enfolding them in the form of the darkness. Tighter until the various bodies had nowhere left to go and began to merge, oozing within and through neighboring bodies, melding together into a single writhing mass of living blackness.
U’shaal, once more the Many-Limbed, rested within the blackness of the temple, gathering strength. The priests had ceased to be. Only the god remained. Outside, all was silence. A gentle wind stirred the hangings and caressed the swirling mass that was the god’s new body — its first upon the physical plane in seven hundred thousand years. The sensation was strange and unpleasant.
A new noise intruded upon senses made keen by multiplicity. Thunder. The thunder of displaced air. T’was the cliff come to call, no doubt, now that the water had gone. Leave them have the empty place. Aye, and all the others as well. U’shaal would have it all back eventually, and what was time for one who would someday take the place of the absent Great God. For now, only the revenge mattered.
The god gathered itself, its thousand thousand limbs twining and signing, its hundred thousand mandibular mouths uttering harsh obscenities of magic and power. Around it grew a nimbus of the same impossible black light, lifting its horrid mass up from the stained paving of the dead temple. The nimbus expanded, pressing against the walls and pillars, pushing at the roof. The contest was brief, and the nimbus expanded beyond the shattered debris of the greatest structure ever to be raised by mortal hand. Larger and larger until it stretched beyond the bounds of the capitol city of the departed chosen.
It paused for the barest of instants, filling the horizon and glowing with an intense darkness before collapsing upon itself with a thunderclap that pulverized the remaining structures of U’che’at’shaal. The echos of the collapse were still fading, drowning out the steadily increasing roar of the approaching enemy, when the darkness vanished into itself, leaving no trace.
U’shaal had done what —even for a god— should have been the impossible. It had transported its physical body to the ethereal plane.
The not-world wasn’t prepared to accept such an unnatural arrangement. It pressed upon the physicality of U’shaal the way an ocean presses upon a bubble of misplaced air — squeezing, seeking to expel the unnatural creature. Even as its awareness sought to assert itself with unfamiliar senses, the dark god sensed the anger and confusion of the not-world. Entities not unlike antibodies raced for the intruder, spanging against the wall of dominating force that still enshrouded it.
Energy from all quarters lanced at the globe of blackness, then, as everything within the plane struck out individually at the intrusion. With a silent explosion, the bubble of force collapsed, shattering the body within into a hundred pieces and squirting them out of the plane in a hundred directions.
* * *
In a time and place far removed from the explosion within the ethereal, in the skies above a plain of ice, a strange comet hurtled earthward, trailing black fire. It landed with a crashing roar and disappeared into a crater of its own making, causing the ground to shake and buck for hundreds of miles in all directions.
After a bit, as the ground calmed itself, a figure, indistinct in the glaring whiteness, crawled from the pit. Only a fraction of the size of the comet, which itself had been only a fraction the size of its parent, it paused to orient itself at the lip of the crater, eventually striking northward upon unsteady limbs. As it moved, the figure changed, limbs shriveling, drawing together, body compressing in upon itself, until, at the last, the footsteps in the snow were that of a smallish human.