the divine beast

Good and Evil, Law and Chaos. Some gods live and breathe the conflict, while others see them as trivial. For some creatures, it is all they know. Others spend their entire lives philosophizing and wondering, is that truly all there is? What do we see as ‘good’ and ‘evil’? Most believe radiant light and life to be good, and see the shadows, and the energies of death as evil.

In truth, those things are not dictated by mortal perceptions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. They merely are. They exist without alignment. Make no mistake, my children, Good and Evil do certainly exist, and the battle between them is fierce and unending. The forces of Good did certainly gravitate to Light, just as Evil to Dark. But Radiant Light, and Necrotic Dark, exist without alignment. They are the manifestations of the very furthest outer planes of our universe: the Plane of Positive Energy and the Plane of Negative Energy.

The positive plane suffuses the raw energy of life, from the titanic to the trivial, while the negative plane neutralizes that life force and gives rise to the energy that animates the undead. They are equal and balanced and each one cancels the other out. What lies between those planes are the realms that we know as the material world, and beyond them, the Far Realm. And beyond the Far Realm, other worlds entirely with their own laws of nature and living beings and ways of being that most of us can only imagine.

But the material world, our material world that we reside in right now, didn’t always exist, you know. The story goes that the energy given off by violent clashing of the two baser planes, the chaos that lay between the raw forces of ether, one day eventually coalesced in an egg. A simple, singular egg, alone in the churning void, incubated by the fires of the positive and kept from cooking by the chill of the negative.

The egg soon hatched into a great and powerful beast, whose body shimmered with Light and blended with Dark. The hatching of the egg began Time itself as we know it. Its cast off shell fragments became the first vestiges of the planes, and the fluids inside, shaken off by the Divine Beast, became the first nebulae and galaxies. When the Divine Beast breathed, space began to grow, and as she wriggled about in the void, she carved out the universe we know from the mother and father planes that bore her.

She soon became enamored with what she had created, and sought to expand it, bending those shell fragments into planes and planets and condensing the nebulae into stars. She came to love the universe she had made, and wished nothing more than to see it grow and thrive. But she knew that she could not do such things alone if she was to grow and expand her world. She learned to manipulate the energies of the positive and negative planes into Life and Death. She supplanted life to inhabit the universe, and she made Death so that it would never grow too crowded. From her, came the first living beings, and from those living beings came the first Gods.

She knew not Good and Evil, those ideologies, beliefs and states of being were created by the Gods she created. She knew only love, and the great expanse before her between the two outermost planes. So she flew, and with her flight, came along with her the bounds of the world. She grew the world as far as she could, and then she expanded into the planes above and below her, imbuing that which expanded into them with the powerful energies of Light and Dark. It was with that expansion that the mostly-false perceptions tying Light to Good and Dark to Evil came into being.

Soon though, the two planes were as shells, protecting the Universe from that which lies outside. And still, she wanted to grow her world. She wanted to give the living beings she had created enough space to thrive for all eternity. She had seen the shadows of the great and alien beings that exist in the Far Realm her whole life, but as she reached the edge of her creation, she now saw things she had never seen before. Other worlds, some much like hers and others not so much. She knew the dangers of crossing the Far Realm, but she wanted so badly to visit these worlds.

Not wishing to leave her world alone to fend for itself, she drew energy from the positive plane and implanted it inside herself. She soon bore four clutches of eggs, and laid them in four corners of the world. One clutch was laid in the center of a sun, and one floated among the stardust. One was hidden away in the darkness between the stars, and the last was tucked into the craters of our moon. These eggs hatched into dragons that embodied their birthplace like no other, and carried the blood of their mother goddess.

With that last duty done, the Divine Beast set forth from the center of our universe and traveled off into the depths of the Far Realm, which the stories say she’s traveled ever since. That’s not to say our world was left completely devoid of her presence, however. Peculiar places began to spring up, wells of her energy, pockets of timespace twisted around and bent sideways. They say in those places, the bounds of the world wears thin. Those in tune with the ethers of the Divine Beast say that when they set foot in these places, they see visions of the worlds she’s seen, and so they are marked by beautiful works of art depicting alien landscapes and events that others think as works of fiction.

They also say those mysterious dragons still drift out there among the vast sea of space, descendents of the first clutches. Guarding their various domains from those who would do them harm, defenders of moons, stars and entire solar systems. Never seen by the denizens of planets nearby, whatever those might be.

This tale is known by few nowadays, forgotten and left by the wayside by the squabbling of the gods and the battles of Good and Evil. But, my children, know that it is the truth.