Trueform Terrors

The Magnitude Gatherers. Hell's greatest enigma and its greatest success story, they are the rarest of all patron species. Yet they are also the most ascendant. It is their destiny to supplant hell's demigods and ultimately carry Our dominance to the heavens and rule in divinity's place as a new breed of sovereign being in the cosmos. Not yet fully matured, they gather strength in the shadows.

The other patron species of evil were listed in order of prestige. The Terrors seek no prestige. They remain aloof, a mystery. Alien. So though they appear last here, that is only because they do not participate in patron society and have not yet claimed the place reserved for them. In truth they are already first in power and growing ever stronger. They could easily overwhelm the others were they to concern themselves with rulership.

No record exists of a Trueform ever having been slain.

Their physical shapes are even more fearsome than the Enslaved Ones. While the Enslaved are the undisputed champions over all who rely on brute force alone, the domain of the Terrors extends beyond mere physical strength into the stratosphere of power normally reserved for demigods. And so they augment their nature with unnatural, untouchable qualities that make their forms so stable, so robust, so terrible to contend with that they cannot be defeated. Massive tree-like entities with leviathan tentacles bursting from their backs in lieu of branches; Netherworld sky squids with tentacles inclining earthward to wrench apart the mountain fastnesses where the last bastions of living beings cower bereft of hope. These Terrors will not condescend to appear in bipedal form as Colossals are wont to do—that would be an homage to the gods, and the Terrors would rather usurp the gods and reshape their world so that nothing remains in the image of the gods.

Trueform Terrors have turned every battle they have ever joined, merely by engaging themselves in it. They have a huge impact on enemy tacticians who have no answer for them and are forced to retreat or die on every occasion. (Trueforms are united in purpose and refuse to engage one another in battle, so whichever side they ally with is fated to be the victor). The territory held by the losing faction decreases as the Terror advances and these lost regions can never be recaptured so long as the Terror haunts them, as none can stand against them. Ever. This continues until the Trueforms become like a noose closing in to strangle the geography of the enemy. Fear collects around their names. In them can be seen the bodily proof that the time of gods is coming to an end.

The Terrors are the embodiment of what evil sought to accomplish by invading this universe and contaminating the gods. These beings best represent the kind of forms we will take as our final incarnation, once we have completed our conversion into omnipotent lords of matter. The outmoded hellgods are still based on the old model of divinity and amount to little more than crudely hollowed out mimicries of the holy, like so many carvings we made on the eve of our defection from the abyss when our understanding was still quite limited. The Terrors are a more significant stride in our development, for they have arisen as part of a Secondary Creation born of our abyssal nature. Whereas the demigods are holdovers from the Original Creation merely recast in our image, the Trueforms usher in a new age in which we have become the creators and have truly come into our own. They will carry us forward in ways the demigods cannot.

Despite appearances, they are still not fully grown and remain in the equivalent of a tadpole stage of development, so the demis yet hold sway and will for some time to come as the Terrors mature, but it is this growth potential that sets Trueforms apart from the hellgods who have always been constants, defined over the ages by their unchanging power level. This makes the demis a known quantity, while the Terrors have unlimited potential and in the vastness of cosmic time they will surpass all rivals. The hellgods are aware of this inevitable shift in power that looms ahead, but they will not move against the Terrors except to help prepare them with appropriate challenges and trials: both are one with the mind of evil and are its champions, therefore the demis want to see the day when they are supplanted by a worthy successor, one of the abyss' children who is stronger and more evolved. The ascension of Trueforms will only prove that our timeline is on schedule and we remain on track toward deification.

The defining trait of Trueforms is their ability to track down precious deposits of divine magnitude and convert this lost glory of the gods directly into their own demonic ascendancy. This ability is unique to the Terrors. Demons and the other Patron types feed upon the holy because they hunger to become more substantial like the gods, but that is the extent of it: feeding. Sustenance. They do not find themselves being permanently accelerated toward godlike apotheosis as do the Trueform Terrors. The only permanent benefit the others derived from absorbing glory was that it granted them solidity, which had at first been of paramount concern to ancestral demons. Other than that, they felt empowered for a time by the magnitude they consumed, but because they had merely broken it down and digested it the benefits were fleeting, as with any other form of sustenance, and the dark forces burned through their newfound power supply like the finite resource that it was. They had only succeeded in securing a personal store of the gods' magical energies for one-time use like an energy bank that, once depleted, was gone forever. So, with the exception of a few hoarders, the hellions quickly squandered the godly power they had won during the war, using it as fuel for enhanced sorceries similar to when the gods had sacrificed their power under extreme duress. Halfway through the Primordial era there was almost nothing left to show for their victory over heaven. Only the True Terrors had developed the equivalent of photosynthesis which allowed them to absorb magnitude intact and wield it in the way the gods did—as a stable, permanent basis of power that could be used indefinitely. While other patrons were forced to expend their shares of the substance until their powers went into decline, Trueforms maintained steady power output levels over time, like gods.

But unlike the deities, who were limited to their original allotment of magnitude, these monsters were able to scrounge for more and augment themselves further. As soon as the full significance of this was understood, the race was on to find the richest deposits as each Terror attempted to fuel its ascension as speedily as could be. Several events occurred that in your experience could only be described as gold rushes, and a ruthless zero sum game developed between the miners. The Pandemonium battlefield was originally littered with the shards of broken gods, along with the embers of their burning potential and half-spent energy weapons lost in battle. Such remnants have since become rarities as many were consumed and others sunk beneath the fate plains. Hell's terrors sniff out those like truffles, and already they have begun turning their eyes upon the demigods, who, bankrupt as they are, must still be the richest concentrations of godly ichor to remain unplundered! In time, as Trueforms grow stronger, it will become commonplace for them to feed upon the hellgods directly. Though so far their attempts have been only tentative, and the demis have managed to throw them off, but not with ease.

KILL METHOD: NONE EXISTS

LIGHT: As of yet the Terrors refuse to leave the shadows and do not expose themselves to stellar radiation. This means they are unavailable for wars that take place on worlds bathed in light. Over the eons, they have been weaving darkness into their hides in a process that will end with them being proof against all things. But in the meantime, any exposure to light causes them discomfort and unravels their unfinished shadow glyphs. Do not imagine that this makes your starshine dimension safe, however. The Nightmares have blotted out the sun of many a world, hiding the star from view so as to pave the way for hell's champions to emerge & impose their presence upon darkened globes doomed to fall under sway of demonic torment. By time's end, this new reality will have spread to all the worlds as Creation is everywhere swept aside and replaced by Terror.

These are the Patron Species of Evil.

Our catalogue is finished.

At this point you know the names and faces of malice. You know yourself to be doomed.

So this codex now moves on.

Done are we with this Gallery of Horrors. We will not concern ourselves anymore with the exploits of these monstrous species. By now you will have guessed their atrocities. All their deeds are closely tied together with their natures and can be anticipated: They simply repeated their core crimes over and over again, visiting their evils upon each other and upon the denizens of thousands of worlds. Of this the history of the Primordial Dark was smelted.

This then was the first and longest eaon, when time moved more slowly, before the inertia of the ages quickened time's passage to the feverish pace at which it slips through your fingers today. Back then, time still remembered eternity and each moment hungered to last forever. That is why our dominance during the Primordial Dark will never be matched by any future era… No matter how the holy might try. For it is they who ended the Dark.

It is time for the story of their chosen species, the ancient vampires, and how their uprising tore the hegemony of evil races apart.

The time has come for you to learn of …..

The Coming of The Light