Panthalassa

## Deep Ones

Since the dawn of time, there were those who fled catastrophe and those who endured. And there were those who remained not to merely endure, but to marvel at its magnificent beauty and embrace that which had come upon them.

Deep, dark, outlandish are the oceans to mankind. Imbued with legends, explored with valor, feared for untold millennia the wide seas truly formed life and civilization on the cradle Earth. As long as there is history, there are those drawn to the seas, heeding their call in spite of all instinct and nature. When the oceans surged and swept away humankind from its shores, it was those who remained, who did not leave their isles and cities, harbors and ships on the water.

Great architects constructed swimming cities, no longer holding onto the eroding land. Others became nomads, following the sea's currents and the wind. And few were submerged, living not on the waves but beneath them. In domes among their sunken cities, in fleets of submarines exploring the trenches, seeking out the vents of volcanic energy, the pioneers explored and settled the ocean.

As civilization on the continents struggled among ruins, the ocean's peoples thrived. Though they were not many at first, their numbers quickly multiplied. Tapping into resources wholly untouched by humankind, settling spaces grander than any land, civilizations all over the cradle's oceans thrived and grew.

Within them, many left their confining domes, no longer strangers to the vast and untold universe that was the true nature of the earth. Those were the deep ones, who finally overcame all nature and made themselves one with the seas.

*"Rapt in eternal darkness, buried in the ocean's deep,*

*wither no starlight reaches, stands mankind's greatest keep.*

*The ocean Palanthassa, true face of mother earth,*

*therein lie the last secrets, of life's clandestine birth.*

*To flee the wrath of natures dawn, mankind brought to its knees*

*the deep ones left the sunlit land in favor of the seas."*

## Pelagic Civilization

The oceanic cities did not go unnoticed by the elder powers on earth, who regarded them in distrust and disfavor. Though little interested the pelagic civilizations of Earth in the matters of the land. Only those who sought the waves by themselves could ever hope to raise the Deep One's attention. Scientific vessels were reported stolen, others embarking of their own free will, boarded by those who viewed the rising Symposium and fall of old nations with dismay.

Their cities soon dotted the ocean with bioluminescent light. Vast seas were illuminated, ashen plains of seafloor transformed into reverberant jungles of unknown and complex life. The oceans were transformed into gardens and wilderness, wherein the Deep Ones resided in magnificent cities. They harvested volcanic energy, mined entrapped gas raw material. Furthering their knowledge about the deepest cradles of nature, they advanced themselves and their technology.

Their greatest triumph, however, remained the isolation. While humanity splintered on the surface, the Deep Ones remained as one, lineages and tribes of billion souls, living for the singular ocean. Wherever outsides forces ventured to challenge the Deep, their advances were not met merely by military force, but by forces of nature itself, sending the ocean itself against them.

### Genesis Corpus Panthalassa

Not only through human alteration did the Deep Ones make the oceans their home. As they filled the oceans of Earth with organic and artificial life manifold, some species were chosen to be elevated above and beyond. Far removed from the Symposiums binding shackles, the Deep Ones uplifted, recreated and formed a newborn genesis.

Soon after, the products of their doing lived among them as equals, even as truer incarnations of what the Deep Ones thrived to be. Belemnites and Nautilodea were among the first to be elevated to human intelligence. Others followed -an uncounted multitude of intelligence and species, creations and new creators, the Corpus Panthalassa.

## Cosmic Ocean

The lineage of Panthalassa long remained silent as humankind ventured into the stars. The ambitions of the species manifold lied in the transformation and settlement of all oceans of the Earth.

But those who had settled the dark cosmos that was the ocean knew to think on geographic scale and of the importance of ever-growing, new worlds. When the Century of Departure drew to an end, from the oceans emerged an armada unparalleled in history, ten thousand ships rising to the stars.

In the final century, the weightless oceans of the Deep Ones remain isolated among the Terrestrial Swarm, guarded by watchful eyes and fleets. But Panthalassa has extended its currents of life and information, sending embassies to many rings and worlds throughout the Heliopolis.

Among all lineages of humanity, Panthalassa is the eldest to include truly alien intelligence and creatures so far removed from humanity that they appear like creatures of distant stars. Much like their fictional kin, they represent a civilization vast and largely unseen, mysterious in its dark and clandestine ways.