lil_kreen
Active Member
The Black Storm
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At times there are places in reality that succumb by magic, damage, or both to such profound planar decomposure that deific protectors of the world must mobilize to repair it. Where only protected circles of its location remain to avert prying eyes from seeking more. At times races of the inner realms cause such irreparable harm that a place must be hewn from reality and condemned into the outer planes. These broken planes ought slowly decompose unsettled and fractured as they are if none repair them. Too late revealed inside one was a deathless, expanding, and arcane machine of human construction aimed squarely at all races not their own. Creatures of both shadow and light had corrupted a human whose goals they deeply suspected of forbidden extraplanar magic to destroy his cabal from within. The part far too late was the discovery that they had already seeded within a basal tear an amoral machine hunger and means for nonhuman life and the capability to regulate the seeping wound. The treachery of the corruption they wrought well destroyed all those slumbering within the plane. An effort too well won. There was no human left alive inside with which they could touch though they at least hoped one remained. Their pawn aiming to take the machine for himself perished as well however. Both light and dark's ken winked away as the last mortal candle went out. A sortie launched to destroy the machine. View attachment 2099
The army of light failed their screams drowned out by that titanic storm swirling among the basal planes. The first etching of its name appeared that day. The black storm. Not expressly for its color but that of celestial, fey, or demon no spark of their immortal souls could be separated from the machine's grip. What it took it did not keep whole but shredded portions of screaming memories across the fringes of its planespace.
Poorly described golems thought created inside the machine had seen and repelled the deific interlopers as a machine hollowed of its only masters empowered itself to their aims. An immortal army consumed ignited an expansion of the churning storm. Its efforts rapidly extended into fringe planes and proved no longer easily destroyed that it had hungry decomposing worms of soldiers. Another forceful aim was undertaken immediately of segregating the cancerous growth by cutting it out of the planes to which it was attached and preventing others from uptaking that cancer with a heavy construction. Perhaps not unreachable but certainly the efforts of celestial architects could make a wall that could not be left easily once entered. What remained inside in time would be obliterated entirely by the devouring swirl if not the clockwork that churned it.
The Bulwark
This impossibly high wall at the fringe of the wound where it was cut from reality, inscribed with warnings in deific languages, seems to suit the construct quite fine as its universe appeared to shrink to nothing. Those not heeding the warnings and warded strictures subject to the machine's eye as it consumes everything it could touch. Sated to merely purge unfortunate interlopers with horrifying mobilizations of power upon those unwisely probing intentionally hidden places of the outer realms. No masters left to beseech tell the construct of war to stop nor to give it the wisdom to understand the world was hidden away.But all things age as cracks of the fabric of the multiverse stretch from time to time and grows to need for a careful engineer's eye. An anomaly has fractured the protective wall somewhere across its impossible length. A distance now prodigious enough to cause significant effort to deeply examine. A jealous and massive eye now peers from a precious egress within it a deeply curious intellect well aware of the walls of its fish bowl and keen to keep the machine from interfering.
Myrkul's Vein
The intellect is content to stay itself though not its subbeings who neither share the violently amoral bent of the overbeing's former masters or the machine that animates the hungry plane. A very human curiosity to it the leviathan of dust does not trigger the proscription of the bulwark's ward to detect an expanding machine's egress. Once a construct built to adapt itself what little escapes the bulwark of it is its identity accepted from interlopers, "Myrkul's Vein." The wards simply were not created with such a creature arising as even from time to time the celestial realms are reminded that nature abhors a void. Its name given from its organic movement among gigantic flashing clouds of annihilating planar storm.Advanced unchecked over the eons the mind of Myrkul's Vein was initially born just after the machine's human masters were hollowed from from the plane. The last vestige of human curiosity and tendencies that coalesced in some of the worms that once repelled and chewed apart the broken armies of celestial and infernal realms. It is thought that the traitor breaking its former human masters fell to that newborn child's wrath as the machine threw ire at a single unprepared man then none of authority remained. Myrkul's Vein grew by bounds unperturbed by the implacable machine at the core of the black storm as a rightful part of itself. A mind moving around the ruins of mankind to try and piece together the emperor's will to refine its dicta into something a true intellect could recognize. Slowly its intellect grew human-like parts of itself free to handle its desired tasks of particular minutiae. It grew industry through trial and error then adapting its own motes to craft inanimate machines to propagate its interests. Uncounted defensive positions now reign the doldrums of the planar storm cradled like precious bulbs of destruction upon which a hungry storm may feed.
In the present moment with the opportunity to free itself of its confines it seeks out its one parent race rightfully concerned for their future well being. The other races it shares a dutifully proscribed apathy by the immutable dicta enforced by the nameless machine. That it barely remembers the armies of Aetherkind attacking just after when, at least to its timeless reckoning, the moment its progenitors were obliterated from reality has particularly soured its demeanor toward them. It spent time inexpressible attempting to recreate them but found the missing spark of life was unattainable. The perfect fleshy body of its fallen emperor yet inanimate without a soul was clad in funeral garb and placed in his tomb. Its subbeings took on a pale imitation of that man from that moment forth when unbound to the ease of moving a fleshy vehicle of manifested pisonic mass for helpful static structure.
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