Interlude 1

In the beginning, Redna, God of Time, and Malo, God of Space began a love affair that formed a planet from the all-encompassing nothingness. Their happiness manifested as many stars in the night sky.

Their timeless affair blossomed and bore twin fruit: Edall, God of Justice, and Nodon, God of Growth. They were delightful children and brought their parents great joy.

Redna and Malo gifted the planet Jita, the first planet capable of sustaining life, to the twins to govern over. Today we know them to be the Four Creators.

-excerpt from the Scriptures of Vine and Blade

In the universe there was a great hunger, a mass of madness constantly devouring all it beheld. From the very moment it became aware, it fed. As it fed, it grew. It grew into an unspeakable hulking shape, mottled and mutated, shifting and slithering through the cosmos. It shuffled through the endless black on many tentacled limbs, always hunting for sustenance.

Its numerious blind eyes sensed the soul energy from inhabited galaxies and planets stretching out across the universe and sought it out with a terrible malicious killing intent. Everywhere the mass moved there would be untold devastation.

Supervolcanoes would explode and large scale earthquakes would rend entire continents apart moments before an entire planet popped like a grape under the tremendous pressure of a tentacle. Anything that remained went into the maw.

Entire planets, civilizations, histories, all of it was forever lost, sucked into the shapeless, razortoothed maw.

Across the cosmos, it sensed a certain blue and green planet, young and ripe with soul energy. For the very first time, the unknowable horror stopped. It probed the planet from a great distance with its unfathomable senses. The planet was densely packed with soul energy, billions of morsels of it, in fact. A delicacy!

F E E D

It moved again, now with greater purpose and urgency, brushing past stars and planets it now deemed as inferior in pursuit of this newfound delicacy. Stars in its immediate vicinity burned brighter, hotter, then winked out of existence. Planets spun faster on their axis causing catastrophic tsunamis and windstorms. Entire planetary ecosystems fizzled out. A giant planet directly in the horror's path crumbled into dust when it was struck aside; its remains would eventually enter the orbit of other close by planets and become dazzling rings.

F E E D

It opened its great maw in anticipation of the great feast, sucking entire galaxies into its bottomless stomach without any thought or recognition. Everything it had consumed up until this point could only be described as mediocre hors d'oeuvres at best.

F E E D

A few seconds or millennia later, it came upon the pretty little blue and green planet and swallowed it whole. It paused. Something was different.

The great hunger, the mass of madness, was finally sated.

Not knowing what to do, it slept.

And dreamed.