Before the mountains had names, before the rivers knew their courses, and before mortals learned to fear the darkness, there was Lun'Adrhu.
It was a land untouched by sorrow.
The sun hung golden over endless green fields. Rivers ran clear as crystal through forests heavy with fruit. Flowers bloomed in every season, and no child went hungry. The creatures of the wild lived beside mortals without fear, and the dead passed peacefully into the keeping of the gods.
It was called the First Garden. A land of prosperity for all. A utopia of wonder.
And the gods walked among its blessed people.
The gods of Lun'Adrhu were not distant beings. They lived among their worshippers and taught them the laws by which the world was made.
Law gave structure to existence.
Mercy gave purpose to law.
Justice punished cruelty.
Compassion healed suffering.
Truth prevented deception.
And together, the gods created a perfect balance.
Mortals prospered beneath their gaze.
They built great cities of white stone, planted orchards that stretched for miles, and raised temples whose towers touched the clouds. There was conflict, certainly, for mortals were still mortal, but the gods kept the worst impulses of their children from overwhelming the world.
Lun'Adrhu was not perfect. It was protected.
And among the divine family there was one who watched the prosperity of the world with increasing resentment. Her name was Eschelon.
She was a demigoddess, born from divine blood but denied the full authority of the pantheon. She possessed power. She possessed ambition.
And, above all, she possessed a growing desire that hungered in her soul.
She wanted what the gods had.
She wanted their worship. She wanted their thrones. She wanted her name carved into eternity instead of theirs.
Most of all, she wanted them to acknowledge that she was their equal.
But the gods refused.
They saw something within Eschelon that frightened them.
Where they saw abundance, she saw possessions.
Where they saw worshippers, she saw servants.
Where they saw the prosperity of Lun'Adrhu, she saw something that should have belonged to her.
And so Eschelon's admiration became jealousy. Her jealousy became resentment. And her resentment became hatred.
Eschelon could not simply attack the gods. They were too powerful. So she devised another plan. She would trick them into surrendering their power.
For several days she approached the gods one by one.
She challenged them with riddles. She offered bargains. She presented impossible choices.
She whispered accusations. She appealed to their pride. She asked questions whose answers contained hidden traps.
"Give me a portion of your power, and I shall prove myself worthy."
"Trust me, and I shall accomplish what you cannot."
"If your law is truly just, why should I not possess it?"
"If your mercy is endless, why would you deny me?"
The gods refused her.
Again. And again. And again.
But every challenge weakened the barriers between the divine realms and the mortal world. Every spell Eschelon cast tore another thread from the fabric of creation. Every lie she spoke became a crack through which something terrible could enter.
The people of Lun'Adrhu began to notice. The days grew shorter. The nights grew longer. Animals were born with strange mutations. The people changed and through her influence evolved into changelings, drow, demons, but also elves, giants, and gnomes and dwarfs, and the animal and elemental people. Lun'Adrhu was populated by various species and cultures that grew to distrust one another. The gods were losing their worshippers, and Chaos began to hold sway over their minds. Children dreamed of places they had never seen. People began hearing voices beneath the earth.
And then—
the first monster appeared. Unlike their factions, the monsters were nothing but manifestations of chaos, ruin, and desire. They hungered, not merely for power and control, but to consume and eat. These were mindless creatures that never knew peace and prosperity. The people of the realm tried to fight back but the monsters were too plentiful. In desperation, even the faithful among the peoples stopped worshipping the gods in fear of Eschelon and her brood.
No historian agrees upon how many nights the catastrophe lasted.
Some say three. Some say seven. Others claim there were thirteen--an unlucky Baker's dozen.
The oldest surviving tablets simply call those unnumbered days:
During those nights, the darkness became alive. Creatures emerged from places where no creatures had existed before. They were twisted reflections of Eschelon's own spirit—manifestations of her anger, hunger, jealousy, greed, and hatred.
Some walked like mortals. Some crawled. Some flew. Some had no bodies at all.
They appeared wherever Eschelon's influence touched the world. A jealous thought could birth a creature with a hundred eyes. A moment of rage could summon a beast that burned with black fire. An act of greed could awaken something that devoured gold, stone, flesh, and eventually souls.
The creatures were called many things.
The Unmade. The Hungerborn. Eschelon's Children.
But the oldest name was simply: The Chaos.
They ravaged Lun'Adrhu.
Cities burned. Forests withered. Rivers turned black.
The dead rose without the blessing of the gods.
Disease spread from settlement to settlement.
Neighbors turned against neighbors.
The innocent were consumed.
And everywhere the monsters appeared, Eschelon's voice could be heard whispering:
"You were given paradise.
You were given everything.
And still you denied me."
The gods fought back. For days they battled the manifestations of Eschelon. But every victory cost them more strength. Every monster destroyed returned in another form. For Eschelon had discovered something the gods had overlooked. She did not need to defeat them. She only needed to make them spend their power. She sought to drain them dry to feed her cruel ambition.
At last, the gods understood. They could not save Lun'Adrhu by fighting on the surface. The world itself had become Eschelon's weapon. So the gods devised their final protection. They opened the gates of the Underworld. Not the realm of the dead. Not a prison. But something far older. A primordial world beneath the world. A vast subterranean realm stretching beneath Lun'Adrhu, reaching down toward the heart of creation itself. It contained all aspects of the outer planes. To prevent corruption of one realm to another, the gods descended into the darkness. And they called their faithful to follow. Millions abandoned their homes. Families carried what they could. Priests carried sacred relics. Farmers brought seeds. Smiths brought their tools. Scholars brought their books. And the people descended beneath the earth.
The gods promised:
"Remain below, and you shall live."
"Trust us, and you shall endure."
"The darkness shall be your shelter until the storm has passed."
But there was a problem.
If all the people remained together, they might eventually rebel. They might return to the surface. They might seek the paradise they remembered. So the gods divided their people.
At the deepest reaches of Lun'Adrhu, the gods created the Divine Giants. They were beings of impossible size. Each was bound to a particular node protected by a series of gates where the power of the gods intersected with the foundations of the world.
The Giants were given a single purpose:
Each Node became the heart of a new underground civilization. And each civilization was given its own traditions, laws, faith, language, and purpose.
The people were told:
"You are the chosen guardians of this Node."
"The others cannot be trusted."
"The surface is death."
"Remain here."
"Wait."
And so the survivors separated. Generations passed. The people forgot they had once been one civilization. They forgot the cities beneath the sun. They forgot the taste of the wind. They forgot the feel of sunlight on their skin. They forgot the stars. Some even forgot that there was a world above them.
The Divine Giants remained. Silent. Immortal. Watching.
But the gods had not forgotten Eschelon.
They knew they could not destroy her.
She was too deeply connected to the world.
Instead, they would divide her.
The gods captured Eschelon.
And for the first time, the demigoddess screamed.
They stripped away her divine essence. They drained her power into vessels, artifacts created from the bones of the world.
But Eschelon's power could not be contained as a single thing. It had become too corrupted. So the gods separated her essence into its darkest components.
Her Greed.
Her Jealousy.
Her Rage.
Her Hatred.
Her Pride.
Her Deceit.
Her Hunger.
Her Cruelty.
Her Ambition.
And finally—
Each fragment was imprisoned within an artifact. The gods scattered the artifacts throughout Lun'Adrhu.
Some were buried. Some were hidden within temples. Some were entrusted to the Divine Giants.
Others were sealed in places whose names were deliberately erased from history. The items of power were scattered in the underground and left unburied and forgotten so no one would attempt to use them.
The gods believed that if Eschelon's essence remained contained within the items, she could never again become whole. And thus Eschelon was reduced from a goddess-that-might-have-been to something far more terrible.
Simply a hunger without a body. Something that ached to consume.
The gods then performed their greatest act of protection.
They sealed the passages between the surface and the underground realms.
Stones became walls. Walls became mountains. Mountains became myth.
The entrances to the surface disappeared. Protected behind forgotten and forbidden gates.
The survivors were safe.
Or so the gods believed.
Then came the final revelation.
The gods had spent nearly all their strength fighting Eschelon. They could no longer remain. So they departed. They ascended beyond the mortal realm into the higher planes. Before leaving, they spoke one final command to their people:
"Do not open the gates. Do not return to the past. Stay safe in your own realm and build prosperity and peace once again."
Then they vanished. And for the first time since the beginning of creation—the gods were gone.
But Eschelon remained.
She had no body. No kingdom. No throne. No worshippers. Only hunger.
She wandered the ruined surface as a shadow upon the world. And she discovered something wonderful.
The people who had escaped her still existed underground. Their descendants lived beneath the earth. Their souls were untouched and ripe for feeding.
Their gods were gone. Their defenses were weakening. Chaos began to shape the underground as it had above.
And Eschelon realized that she did not need to reclaim her old power. She only needed to consume the souls of those who had escaped her. Every soul she devoured would make her stronger. Every artifact destroyed would free a fragment of herself from its vessel. Every act of greed, jealousy, rage, hatred, and cruelty would feed her. And so Eschelon waits.
She whispers through cracks in the earth. She appears in dreams. She speaks through cursed artifacts and false idols. She tempts the desperate. She promises the ambitious exactly what they desire. And somewhere beneath Lun'Adrhu, the Divine Giants still stand.
Watching. Waiting. Guarding the Gates for heroes to survive their challenges, to prove their worth.
Among the oldest surviving tablets is a prophecy known as The Last Dawn.
It says:
When the Giants kneel,
the Gates shall open.When the Gates open,
the children shall remember.When the children remember,
the fragments shall call to one another.And when the fragments become whole,
Eschelon shall walk beneath the sun once more.She shall not seek the throne of the gods.
She shall not seek their worship.
She shall not seek dominion.
She shall seek only what was denied her.
Everything.
The final passage is badly damaged.
Only one sentence remains legible:
"And on the night when Eschelon consumes the last soul, Lun'Adrhu shall become the paradise she always believed she deserved. It will all be hers. Alone."
Whether this means salvation or annihilation is unknown.
But there is one final mystery.
The gods told their people that they fled to the heavens to escape Eschelon.
Yet no message has ever come from them.
No blessing. No miracle. No divine voice.
Nothing.
And some ancient scholars have begun asking a forbidden question: