Eshemial had slept for a long, long time. Her dreams were a hellscape of searing heat, immense crushing pressures and ancient lava pools. Here she dipped her toes into the liquid molten rock, and laughed great plumes of sulphur as she danced under the pale sun.

But those were just memories. The true reality around her sleeping form was of icy rock, and damp, mouldering stone. Nestled deep underground, in the cold and the dark, she never shivered whilst she slept - her long memories of the ancient time before were enough to keep her warm.

Eshemial was one of the first creatures ever to walk the planet. Before Leviathan, before Eve, and long before Demons, her environment was the bubbling, super-heated mud plains of primordial Earth. She flourished for billions of years, until, over time, the planet began to cool and change around her and she had no choice but to crawl away to sleep, until the day would come when the sun would swell and bloat and finally absorb the entire planet, Eshemial included.

And in her cave, she would have stayed, should have stayed, slumbering as the human race began its evolutionary journey, dragging itself out of her mud pits, growing, walking and smothering the continents before their eventual and inevitable extinction, without her ever knowing they had even existed.

But she knew of angels. Before she lay down for her long sleep she had seen them birthed and laughed at their brightness, their etherealness. So when a sudden scream cracked through the earth, powerful, angelic, pervading her sleep, rousing her mind, she recognised its essence –it was the one known as Lucifer.

She sleepily reached out around her, testing the Earth and its atmosphere. So much had changed since she surrendered to rest! Curious about her new planet, and what upon it could cause an angel to scream so, she pushed out with her senses, and…there, she felt the touch of an entity even older than Eshemial herself.

She felt the Darkness.