The Leviathans were vast, primordial beings—city-sized masses of flesh and tentacle, crowned with eyes like suns and hungering minds older than time. They moved in the drowned world before light, before sky, before even the concept of solid ground. Born of the Endless Night and bound to the pressure-wracked womb of the deepest sea, they were not shaped by the world—they helped shape it.
From their writhing limbs and alien broods came the first crawling things—the spiders, the cephalopods, the centipedes, the deep trench anemones. All that creeps, slithers, or pulses with many legs bears a trace of Leviathan design.
They are not merely old. They are foundational—life’s strange first draft, written in the dark.
Origin: The Crawling Genesis
When the world was naught but an endless ocean of formless dark, the Leviathans rose from the depths, stirring the deep with motion and mass. They were not the first minds—those were the realm of the Necrist—but they were the first to bleed form into the chaos.
The Leviathans did not create in the way of gods or sculptors. They spawned, they split, they shed. From the shedding of their hide came hard shells. From their feeding arms came grasping limbs. From their visionless children crawling in the muck came the infinite design of legs, feelers, and creeping motion.
The first crawling things were not born—they leaked from them, and learned to live.
Form and Presence
Leviathans are massive beyond comprehension—moving islands of glistening tentacles, chitinous ridges, and shifting mouths. A single one could shatter fleets, or sink coastlines beneath its mass. But they are not beasts. Their movement is measured, their silence calculating.
Descriptions of their forms are fragmentary and vary by region and legend, but common features include:
Hundreds of tentacles, each capable of independent action and thought
Eyes that do not blink, enormous and reflective, perceiving things beyond sight
Flesh that changes, shedding limbs or birthing spawn at will
A core mass, described in some texts as a knot of impossible geometry or a furnace of cold thought
Some Leviathans traveled the trenches. Others coiled beneath the same sea for epochs, feeding only on thought or dream. A few rose in times of great upheaval, dragging themselves toward land to watch—or to punish.
In the War of the First Ones
The Leviathans were never allies, never truly part of the First Ones’ councils. They did not fight for territory or ideology. But when the war disrupted the balance of ocean and storm, they stirred—and their wrath was indiscriminate.
Whole coastal regions sank into the sea. Mountains were crushed beneath waves. Even Elder Dragons and Necrist titans fell when caught in a Leviathan’s path. One tale claims a Radiant guardian descended into the sea to reason with them, and was never seen again—her light swallowed by infinite pressure.
By war’s end, the Leviathans had returned to sleep, indifferent to victory or loss.
Intellect and Motive
To call the Leviathans intelligent is an understatement. They are ancient sentiences honed by endless solitude and pressure. They do not speak, yet their presence is felt in:
The strange synchronous migrations of sea life
The pulse of the abyssal lights
The dreams of those who sleep too near the trench-rifts
They are not hostile, nor are they friendly. They are indifferent—curious in the way one might observe an ant colony, but quick to cleanse what becomes noisy, bright, or irreverent in their domain.
Some cults insist that the Leviathans remember everything—every swimmer, every whisper across the ocean floor. If true, they may be the most complete record-keepers of the world’s past.