Origins

Ages ago, a being of immense power, known as the Demiurge, ensnared us and forced us into submission. He forged ten Principles with which to bind humanity, then fettered us and quelled our divine fire, reducing it to a dying ember. We existed completely in His counterfeit world, and our souls fed its infrastructure when we died. The delicate Illusion depended on infinitely complex machinery, where every facet of our lives served only to perpetuate our enslavement. Our jailers, the lictors, held positions of power throughout our societies, keeping us distracted with endless conflicts, impossible commitments, and aching desires. The Illusion seemed impenetrable.

But then, unexpectedly, the Demiurge’s power started to weaken. We began to question the intricately constructed system of faith and politics which kept us enslaved. The divine order was thrown into revolt, world religions lost their adherents, and the once crowded churches were abandoned. Over a few centuries, the worldview that had endured for thousands of years slowly fell apart. Early in the 20th century, this collapse reached its zenith and the Demiurge vanished from existence, either having fled or died.

Now, the boundaries of the Illusion are weakened. Even so, only a rare few have begun seeing through the lies. Most of us close our eyes to the Truth, creating new distractions to keep ourselves enthralled, nurtured by our greed and vanity. Our jailers struggle to keep our hands tied, obscuring our perceptions, whispering new lies, and always fearing we will wake up. They know that most of us, somehow, feel an uneasy sense of loss or emptiness, a pervasive need to know that there is more. The Illusion’s disintegration creates mental discomfort and disorder, which are controlled with therapies and medications that also blind us to the True Reality. Madness – the irrational feeling something isn’t right – overwhelms and leads us further into the darkness, away from the familiar and conceivable.

When we see through the Illusion, we glimpse a world far darker and more terrifying than the one we thought existed around us. Grim buildings, dirty stone façades, and darkened doorways, leading to labyrinthine border worlds where pale beings dwell in perpetual shadows. Demons and other tormentors target the mentally ill for spiritual torture, using them as bridges to claw their way into our reality. In housing projects, local cults worship strange gods and ritually butcher outsiders who won’t be missed. Condemned men hunt for the secrets of immortality, making pacts with fallen angels. Conjurers solve intricate puzzles by deciphering arcane nonsense scribbled on subway walls. At the end of the street, the desolate house has a secret entrance, which only an unlucky few can see. Old gods linger in the slums, bewildered, remnants of ancient beliefs sustained by humanity’s dreams of bygone years. Beneath her well-dressed veneer, the smiling stranger is a flayed and mangled nepharite, who leaves bloody footprints behind her. The exquisite model is a mindless semblance created by humanity’s twisted ideals of beauty, while the charming man on the dating site is one of Tipareth’s Incarnates. Creatures no longer fully human dwell in ghost towns, rundown industrial areas, and ramshackle buildings in the inner cities. In hospitals, coma patients construct vivid and marvelous dream worlds, places where they can rule unchallenged even as their bodies wither. Terror also dwells within us and when the Illusion weakens, our nightmares assume physical form and stalk the earth. Our perverse appetites, repressed for millenia, birth unspeakable creatures of flesh and fear. Some of us seek our origins, discovering pathways, puzzles, and magic to part the Illusion and lead us toward the dim light of our original divinity.

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