The Undergod

> "*Behold, the shattered mirror held against the visage of our world, so pure and untouched that those who gaze upon it would weep vacuum. For its form is void, so unknowable, so tantalizing in the coming darkness and inferno that yearns to consume our land - for the light that touches all would be snuffed out, its beaming proclamation of salvation for all to flicker and die, and the children within would reach for the fading light with outstretched arms and gaping mouths, only to swallow oblivion."*
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> —Unknown
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Following God's Suicide, **the Undergod** entered the mortal realm, bringing forth an era of eternal darkness. The Undergod is an incomprehensible eldritch deity, the definitive antithesis to change and growth, and the main antagonist of all mankind.

## General Information

### History and Origins

   Since far before the First Age, hidden vestiges of the worldly plane were said to possess ancient and otherworldly tomes containing forbidden knowledge that no mortal souls were meant to comprehend - to know these secrets was to live an eternal nightmare where the mind was forever overtaken with the aggregate of existence itself. Those who returned with this knowledge were cast into the farthest confinements of catacombs and dungeons, their writings burned by scribes under orders of the very clergy they pledged affinity to. For all their rantings and despair, those who would foretell of blackness beneath the fabrics of our reality were considered madmen, pronounced insane for espousing the truth.

And yet, despite every inkling of inquisitorial censure, even the harshest of scrutiny became unwarranted in the face of a lack of knowledge - for without conception by any mortal being was a truth so unfounded and beneath determinant features of the afterlife, or even of Hell itself - lurking in the dark shadows of nonexistence, shielded from the understanding of any being of mortality or divinity alike, was a fact that would spell the undoing of everything - and so indeed, men of holy esteem ascribed earthly titles for this inevitable truth.

This new calamity was finally christened during the aftermath of God's Suicide, and for decades thereafter - for the precognitive conduits amongst the Loremasters of the Holy Inquisition were found to suffer many gripping nightmares as the unholy power of the catalysts were wrought upon Gaia during its infernal purification, and the maws of the Earth's mantle opened to swallow entire kingdoms and billow with the brimming monstrosities of the Begotten. The clergy, dazzled and terrified by the sudden affliction upon all of mankind, turned to their most trusted for ethereal guidance - only to find many of their archivists spiraling into frenzy. Over the course of days, these archivists would perish one by one, choking and spluttering as if suffocating on their words alone - some foaming at the mouth as horrible sickness overtook their body, their delirious minds knowing no quarter. It is said that beyond the Gate of Glaze, within the grand magistrate's catacombs beneath District One, one of the Empire's most composed librarians awoke from a madness-induced slumber, just as the chamber Medici had tended to his care - witnesses spoke that he had restrained the assistant Medicus to his side with great panic and frustration, any and all semblance of soul devoid in his crazed eyes. Shortly before his heart was said to give out, with a single guttural avalanche of hysteria, he warned all who would listen of the eldritch curse that had finally manifested itself beyond the slivers of happenstance, the same being that was responsible for the fall of the great empires at the hands of the Begotten - a being which he coined as being "below God Himself" - and so, church recorders baptized this entity as "the Undergod".

Since God's Suicide, and the decades which followed, the Undergod has continued to exact its sacrilegious influence upon the wasteland - its composed silence and unfathomable nature showing no desire for tithing paid be it in commodity or iconography. From the spiraling voids and infinite blackness from which it came, the only predictable facet is its hatred for all things living, and the slow, calculated vanquishing of existence itself. And then so was the Undergod's crusade into Satan's Inferno - daemonology dictations show the everlasting struggle and massacre of Hell's order at the hands of the Begotten armies. This has given the souls of the mortal planes temporary respite - at least for now.

### Appearance

The rumination of the Undergod in any semblance is considered a high crime, an unforgivable blasphemy by almost every leading faith authority within the lands - for the temptations of the icon lead to deprivation and dullness of the mind. To contemplate the Undergod is to dispel one's own faith, a willing transfiguration of the self into a beacon for demonic attack. Despite this, the last century of peasant rabble had convened in secret, muttering to one another their limited conceptions of what the Undergod is.

As a result of these conflicting, sacrilegious accounts and texts, it is impossible to determine the true form of the Undergod - when not taking the form of clouded blots and subterranean tendrils that span for eternal intervals, the preferred anthropological icon of the Undergod is that of a newborn baby, a man, or an apparition which draws from elements of both - the informative behind this artistry is clear, as the Undergod itself has been considered a "young" deity, but to do so would be sorely mistaken, as it would suggest the passage of time as a commonality between our realm and that of the Undergod. In more dramatic portrayals, this amalgam of young and old would wear breastplate stained with the blood of slain deities, and a massive, flaming sword of purifying white light - it is said that a single swing of this sword was enough to create the great rifts within the Earth which still remain today.

Despite the detailed nature of these depictions, no mortal being has perceived the Undergod in its true form - those who would, it is believed, shall be swiftly extinguished by the cleansing light of the Undergod's demonic essence.