I do not own Slayers. I do not own the Lord of Nightmares, Shabraningdu, Ceiphied, or any of the other interesting people that may one day show up. If I did, there's no telling what may have happened. I can't even claim access to Hammerspace.
Oh how I wish I was wrong.
Hammer Space, a naturally occurring phenomenon that to this day, continues to baffle the human race. It was particularly confusing to those of the male persuasion, who never could understand how women managed to fit so much in their purses. It is, in general, the space between the four dimensions and is accessible from every dimension. It is also known as the astral realm.
Overly emotion females have been known to store and retrieve varying items in this space, usually ranging from mallets in the younger generation, to rolling pins and iron pans in the more aged generations. Occasionally, a more specialized weapon will be stored and called upon, such as a glaive, a sword, and from one particular dimension, a child's training potty in the shape of a swan. Oddly enough, the last was used by a young man as a projectile weapon.
Of course, it is easy to believe that one day, somehow, and from any dimension, something would be stored in hammer space that really shouldn't be there in the first place. Like, for example, a human being.
Humans are made of two parts. There is the body, which rests in the physical realm, and the soul, which remains in the astral realm. Human bodies were not meant to join their souls in the astral realm. Nor were their souls meant to be pulled out of the astral realm along with their bodies afterwards. The end result, unfortunately for that poor human, was the complete death of his body and soul.
Naturally, it made the mages curious, and of course, there was nothing else to do but experiment. Preferably with someone they wouldn't miss. So, they tossed the child of one of their particularly irritating political enemies into the astral realm head first. To their surprise, they failed to pull said child back out. Not from the lack of trying, mind you, she- the child, that is- was stubborn and managed to get a grip on something or other in the astral realm. The end result was a tug-of-war between a particularly tenacious teenaged soul, a bunch of mages, and their magic.
Unfortunately for the mages, they failed. To the victim's delight, she accidentally stole their magic, which grew exponentially over time. On the other hand, as the astral realm insured her soul was never injured and never aged, she never died, either. So, some thousands of millennia later, she had an immense amount of power, was still a teenager, was still trapped in the astral realm, and was horribly, horribly bored. It was a rather unstable recipe for chaos.
This is how the entire mess started.
She was bored. Humans had become extremely predictable within the first fifty or so millennia of Her rather irritating state of being, and nothing She did seemed to fix the problem. Nothing. As She sat and watched, the humans routinely advanced technology, and then obliterated themselves in a petty squabble over land, just for the survivors to get sent back into the Stone Age and start all over again. And it was the same in all the dimensions. Oh, and they always managed to rearrange the landmasses in the process.
Actually, one dimension was about to finish the squabbling stage again. As She watched, spouts of fire shot into the air as missiles in each country fired at whatever nation they could reach. An hour later, the world was once more radioactive.
She really was sick and tired of watching them do the same thing over and over again. She thought over the problem, trying to find a possible solution. "Maybe if they weren't the only intelligent beings…?" She wondered, bored. She reached out with Her power and poked a random creature. The fish She poked visibly changed, growing arms and legs. "Well, aren't you a strange looking thing?" She asked distractedly. She changed a few more to match, and left them alone. It was up to them to survive.
Some eleven thousand years later in that same dimension, almost double the time humans ever managed to last on their own, they finally blew themselves up again, taking the fishmen along with them. The fishmen had not only managed to survive over the years, but they even somehow evolved enough to breathe above land. She had been fairly amused by how the two races had reacted to each other. Giving what could pass for a grin, She changed a few other creatures, granting them intelligence as well as a humanoid form. A select group of cats, foxes and wolves stood tall and marveled at their forms. And things began again, with a few more players.
Her favorite dimension was in utter chaos, and She laughed in delight. There were so many cultures and races sitting on one little mud ball of a planet, magic was rearranging practically everything, and mages had made some truly interesting advances. Despite all that, the races were coexisting fairly peacefully, for the most part, with the exception of a few rogue mages. She stopped laughing, stunned, when someone actually tapped into Her magic and pulled on a small, practically microscopic amount, by her terms. She sighed in exasperation as the rebel human who did it destroyed the world, only this time using magic. There was always one.
And things began again.
Another twenty five millennia passed by, and She yet again had a human trying to draw upon Her power. Really, couldn't they ever learn? None of the other races ever tried to steal some of Her power. Thoroughly irritated, She let some of Her power go and watched the world go up in smoke again, conveniently taking out the manuscripts the humans were using to try and call on Her. She then began to work on some new, fairly dimwitted beings, ones that would hopefully distract the humans. Maybe with the orcs and trolls running amuck, they would find something else to focus on, besides destroying each other and the world. She equipped the races with a fast regeneration ability, and She cackled as she set them loose.
And things began again.
She watched in interest as the races warred among two groups, the humans, beastmen and fishmen allied in one group, the orcs and trolls in the other. While the human's and their allies were winning, they were given an immensely difficult job of it. The trolls, if not the orcs, had grown more intelligent over time, and the trolls made use of their gained intelligence to lead the orcs into battle. The orcs, the trolls had apparently decided, made for very good cannon fodder. The End of the World, oddly enough, actually took longer to occur with the menaces running loose.
When the world finally fell apart again, She started Her final creations. Dragons. She made black dragons and gold dragons, with a race of dark green dragons being the most powerful. There were also other colors, with the intelligence of a particularly cunning wolf at best. She figured it would be amusing to see how her latest creations would react to her prior races.
And things began.
It was during a battle between the humans and trolls that a new trouble came to light, one that She had not foreseen. A meteor, of all things, was falling to the planet surface. She watched in stunned silence as the world, for the first time in all Her hundreds of thousands of millennia, was destroyed by something other than humans. She snapped out of it just in time to insure that the planet didn't split into pieces; however, there were a few odd… consequences.
A relatively microscopic piece of Her power, about enough to destroy the world, split in two and reformed into two beings. One formed out of the light side of Her chaotic power, while the other was trying to form itself out of the dark portion. The latter was having difficulties stabilizing itself, and seeing no reason not to, She helped it form. The light portion, now in the form of a dragon of sorts, smirked from the sidelines. She gave it a light smack and told it to behave. When the dark half finally managed to take form, She had no clue what it was supposed to be. Beauty in the eye of the beholder, She supposed, but it certainly wasn't a form She would have chosen. Still, so far, She already preferred the monster to the dragon.
"Momma?" She stared, the dragon tried to hide a snort, and She would never have expected such a word to come from the creature's mouth. She smacked the dragon upside the head again and gave the monster-No, mazoku, it sounded much more fitting- an evil grin. A diabolical look lit up it's face in return. Oh yes, the mazoku was definitely Her favorite.
Her time from then on was spent somewhat differently. Her "children" spent a lot of their time next to Her, observing the humans and making comments. The dragon- who named himself Ceiphied- was endlessly disgusted by anything he deemed "Evil", but seemed to think the ends justified the means. He was a rather impolite brat to tell the truth, unless he was trying to hide his temper. Shabranigdu, on the other hand, was always polite. He was also impressed by how tenacious and creative the races were, and how ruthless they could be. He often went out of his way to point out how much of a hypocrite Ceiphied was. Ceiphied ignored him, of course. It was something the two brothers often argued over.
The fight often took humorous tones now and then, though. At one point in time, Ceiphied took to calling Her Nightmare. Shabranigdu ignored it for some time, but eventually (for the first time, actually) lost his temper and snarled at Ceiphied saying "It's Lord of Nightmares to you, you ungrateful bastard!", and the name stuck. She didn't mind- she had long since lost her name to time, and Lord of Nightmares had a nice ring to it. Besides, she was too busy trying to decide whether or not to create more of her "children" to put in charge of the other three dimensions. She later decided that yes, it would probably be a good idea. Maybe then, the other dimensions would last more than six millennia. She had the feeling that thing would be much more interesting in the foreseeable future.
(As an interesting side note, the still teenage Lord of Nightmares was just recently a grandmother of sorts. Shabranigdu's children were quite fond of her- Ceiphied's spawn, unfortunately, took after their sire and were arrogant, self-righteous little toe rags, with few exceptions. Unfortunately, Ceiphied also took charge over the gold and black dragons. Snobbishness ensued).
I still have to figure out what to do with the other three dimensions. Can you believe there wasn't a choice in characters for LoN? That's just not right. Review, Please!