The first scholars once believed that knowledge was like a lantern that it illuminated the dark. They were sorely mistaken. The Colleges of Erfuine, Domnus, and Tel'marqia taught us to measure the stars, to dissect their body, to refine the essence of the stars into something more pure than flesh. They were successful. From the first, the countless vigils, incantations, and rites they performed tore at the veil between worlds, opening a slender ingress that pulsed like a heartbeat older than the stars themselves. At first, it was subtle, a shimmer at the edge of vision, a whisper carried on the breath of the wind, but it grew, patient and deliberate, as if the cosmos were testing our curiosity before revealing its presence. Those who first dared to look upon into its depths returned changed, eyes reflecting geometry no human mind should endure, speech unraveling into chords of sound that left the body trembling. We called them the Archons, humans that lived on the precipice, both human and yet not. They performed great miracles in their time, they built great kingdoms and empires across the known world, bending flesh and bone to their will, weaving the essence of the stars into constructs that defied nature and reason. They could still the tides of blood, unmake a storm with a gesture, conjure great spirits which they bind to their will, create spells that could lay waste to vast swathes of land, or speak a thought so vast that the air itself seemed to shiver and quake in response.
But their power came at a cost invisible to those who admired them. Madness was a constant companion, lurking beneath the surface of their brilliance, whispering truths too immense to bear. Some Archons would vanish entirely, leaving only an echo in stone or a tremor in the winds, as if the cosmos itself had reclaimed them. Others lingered, hollowed by knowledge, their presence a reminder that the boundary between life and the void was perilously thin. The few that remained realized the great folly they unleashed to the world, they know that such powers should never have been acquired by mere mortals. They tried to warn us, for they understood that unrestricted use of such powers would lead to catastrophe. In their great wisdom, they exiled themselves to the farthest corners of the world. They erected their own prisons and sealed themselves in them.
And yet, for all their terrible warnings, we envied them. We envied the clarity with which they perceived the Veil, the ease with which they walked among secrets no mortal should comprehend. It was the envy of fools, for envy is the first root of corruption, and even as we watched the Archons ascend toward what we called greatness, we did not see the shadow that followed, patient and eternal, waiting to claim all who dared imitate their steps. That should have been the clearest of signs that we should have ended everything. All rites, studies, and incantations.
Yet still, we persisted, drunk on the power of discovery, blind to the promise written into that first opening: that knowledge, once heard by the eternal dark, can never be unheard again. The entities we contacted were different in a sense; these Great Old Ones offered us accords too seductive to refuse, a bargain of gilded shadows. They granted us power that unspooled the mind, the kind that allowed us to unmake ourselves, to bend the physical world and cast our consciousness into the heart of the heavens, and of course, immortality. They whispered secrets of stars long dead and doors that should have remained forever closed and beyond the reach of mortal beings. They spoke of laws older than time, offering keys to thresholds better left uncrossed. In exchange, their price seemed a pittance: trivialities like a drop of blood, a sigil traced in the pale light of the moon, or a slight gesture to the abyss.
As the centuries flowed ever onward, swift and merciless as a blackened tide, the colleges did not falter beneath the weight of forbidden knowledge;e they flourished. Their spires climbed higher with each passing age, layered with annexes, observatories, and sanctums, until they speared the clouds themselves and cast perpetual shadows across the kingdoms below. What had once been separate institutions became great cities unto themselves, vast, breathing conglomerations of stone and doctrine, ruled by hierarchy, ritual, and an unrelenting hunger for revelation.
In time, the three cities encroached upon one another. Like a colossal organism, capable of growth and dreadful adaptation, they fused into a single, sprawling mass of towers and bridges. At its heart rose the supreme edifice: the Tower of Domuine’marquia. From this central spire, the former colleges of Erfuine, Domnus, and Tel’marqia were bound together by an immense web of castles, palaces, cloisters, and elevated causeways, as though ensnared by a will not entirely their own.
The Tower was titanic beyond comprehension. Its foundations sprawled wider than the greatest mountain ranges, while its height defied mortal reckoning, vanishing into the cloud-wreathed firmament above. From its highest steeples ruled the Umbral Conclave, enthroned in sanctums where light thinned and thought itself seemed to falter. They governed not through decree alone, but through interpretation of signs, of dreams, of movements in the heavens that no common eye could perceive.
To stand in the Tower’s shadow was to feel diminished, to feel measured , as though one’s worth were being weighed against some unseen and impossible standard. The streets below teemed with life, yet all motion bent inward, drawn inevitably toward the Tower’s center, toward the Conclave’s gaze. It was said that no word spoken within was ever truly lost, that even silence carried meaning when offered beneath its walls. The people themselves started calling the tower Babel, for it bears a striking similarity to an old legend of a tower constructed by mankind when the world was still young.
Scholars were no longer rare. They were legion. Alchemists distilled star-essence in vaulted laboratories; warlocks etched contracts into silver and bone; astrologers mapped heavens that no longer matched the natural sky. Every discipline of magus and sorcerer found a place within those towering labyrinths, each convinced their method alone would master the truth without succumbing to it.
The discoveries were irresistible. Each year, thousands arrived from distant continents, pilgrims masquerading as students, nobles, and paupers alike, drawn by promises of enlightenment, power, and transcendence. They came to observe, to assist, to offer themselves to the grand experiments of the High Scholars, believing they stood at the threshold of a new age. None yet understood that the golden age they proudly claimed had already begun to set. We were livid, like an explorer uncovering the answers to a thousand-year mystery. Consequences be damned, we will not be content until we acquire the secrets of the universe in the palm of our hands.
We imagined ourselves, masters of our destiny, fools believing we could harvest the light without inviting the darkness. For every truth they unveiled, a shadow trailed behind, thickening until the very air trembled under the weight of an unseen gaze. We hardly noticed it, for our lifespans were mere sparks in comparison to the beings that lay in the great stygian void. We ceased to be scholars and became mere conduits, our wills knotting into forces from beyond. Yet, even as horror stirred in our bellies, the Colleges demanded more and more vigils, more rites, more devotion to entities whose patience was infinite and whose curiosity was predatory. Beings whose interactions with us were but mere afterthoughts in the grand scheme of things. Alas, every consequence in the history of mankind never truly manifests during the infancy of a new age. It always comes as a cruel tithe, taken not from those who first dared to unseal the heavens, but from those born generations later, who inherited only the echoes of that transgression. When it arrived, there were no auguries dire enough to stay the hand, no doctrine uncorrupted enough to forbid the rite. It was only a matter of time before the Veilrend, that great catastrophic apocalypse, sparked from our hubris.
The Veilrend did not descend as a great fire or flood. It was performed . Beneath vaulted spires and cloud-piercing towers, the Grand Scholars gathered in sanctified chambers, tracing circles older than language, aligning instruments not toward the stars, but toward what lay behind them. Choirs of invocation rose, not in prayer, but in precise repetition, and the cosmos answered not with wrath, but with attention.
When the ritual reached its final cadence, the wound they had tended for centuries was no longer content to remain open. It answered. And in that sundering, the world learned that knowledge, once heard by the eternal dark, can never be unheard. It was a wound unnatural in its being, one that even the greatest scholars and magi could not comprehend, and through it the eternal stygian of the cosmos poured forth. The sky above the Tower of the Scholars was sundered, like a great mirror struck by an unseen hand, the firmament shattered into countless fragments.
From that gaping wound, where reality and the immaterial converged and bled into one, something descended .
The heavens wept blackened light. Stars spilled like viscera, stretching and warping as they fell. Within the torn sky, vast silhouettes stirred, their forms refusing shape, unfolding and refolding in defiance of flesh and reason. The elder beings began to manifest, not summoned, not invited, but acknowledging the call. Their presence pressed upon the world like a crushing depth, and the air itself screamed beneath their passage.
Those outside the Tower saw it all.
They watched the sky bleed.
They watched impossible limbs coil downward from the wound, dragging behind them veils of shadow and geometry that scorched the eyes and unraveled the mind. Creatures without names crawled forth, some vast as cathedrals, others small and innumerable, each bearing the unmistakable weight of an existence never meant for this world. Stone softened where they touched it. Flesh failed where their gaze lingered.
The people stood frozen in a mix of reverence and terror. Some fell to their knees, weeping and praising what they believed to be divinity. Others clawed at their own eyes, shrieking as their thoughts collapsed under truths too vast to contain. Many stood, unmoving, as if their souls had been measured and found wanting.
And above them all, the wound in the sky widened slowly, patiently learning the shape of the world it had finally been allowed to enter. "I saw it too, the great reprisal that has been delayed."
The Tower was caught between the real and the place from which those things had come, suspended in a state neither wholly material nor wholly immaterial. Its lower foundations still clung to stone and soil, while its upper reaches were drawn screaming into the Veilrend, stretched and warped as the laws of weight, distance, and time lost all meaning. Corridors folded inward upon themselves. Stairways bled into impossible angles. Entire wings of the Tower vanished, only to reappear moments later, flayed open to a sky that was no longer there.
Within the tower, an apocalyptic war erupted.
Hundreds of thousands of soldiers, armored legions sworn to the Colleges, were hurled into the breach alongside towering magical constructs of brass, stone, and living sigil-light. Thousands of sorcerers and scholars stood in ritual circles amid the chaos, tearing their own lifeblood into the air to fuel wards and weapons of impossible magnitude. Spirits were conjured in droves, ancient dead, bound saints, howling remnants of forgotten wars dragged screaming from the ether and loosed upon the invaders.
The clash was obscene, pure madness. Blood and guts scatter the paved floors.
Creatures of the Veilrend poured into the Tower like a flood of living blasphemy. Limbs shattered shields with casual force. Voices collapsed legionnaires into madness. Entire cohorts were erased, not slain, but unwritten their existence torn from memory as though they had never been born. Steel screamed. Spells detonated with the sound of worlds breaking. The Tower shook with every impact, its stones soaked in blood both mortal and unknowable. At the summit, in sanctums carved from blackened starstone, the Umbral Conclave made their last stand. They cast aside all restraint.
No longer cloaked in doctrine or ritual caution, the Conclave unleashed powers long sealed, invocations that split thought from body, sigils that bound gravity itself, names that should never have been spoken aloud. They struck the god-like beings directly, and for a moment, a terrible, impossible moment, the cosmos recoiled. One of the elder entities was torn apart, its vast form unraveling into screaming constellations. Another was bound, pierced, and dragged screaming into annihilation by chains forged of pure negation. The victory was but a brief lull in the storm of violence.
The Veilrend answered death with abundance. The fallen gods were noticed , and that notice drew others older, vaster, immeasurably patient. The Conclave’s minds began to fracture beneath the weight of their presence. Voices overlapped. Flesh distorted. Some were lifted screaming into the air, their bodies unfolding into offerings mid-incantation. Others continued to cast even as they burned, their final spells fueled by terror and defiance alone.
In the end, the Umbral Conclave was not defeated. They were overwhelmed.
Their sanctums collapsed inward, swallowed by lightless gulfs where reality could no longer assert itself. Their last words were not prayers, nor curses, but calculations, unfinished and meaningless before the infinite.
And still the Tower stood broken, screaming, half-devoured, its spires clawing uselessly at a sky that had already learned its shape. The battle did not end that day. It merely ceased to be comprehensible.
"As I walk these streets littered with sermons carved into bone, I understand my part in this damnation. The Hunt is not chaos. It is inevitable."
In a final, desperate act, the Umbral Conclave turned to a spell forbidden even among their most sealed doctrines, a rite meant to bind the elder beings within the Tower itself. The incantation was absolute in intent, yet impossible in execution. To complete it fully would have condemned not only the old-ones, but also the tens of thousands of surviving legionaries, magi, and sorcerers still evacuating from the Tower’s lower reaches. And so the Conclave faltered, not in will, but in mercy. The spell was only partially fulfilled.
It succeeded in halting the Great Ones, anchoring their vast and blasphemous forms within the Tower’s upper firmament, chaining them to stone and fractured reality alike. Yet the lesser horrors, the malformed heralds and crawling echoes of the Veilrend, were not bound. They spilled forth unchecked. Worse still, the incomplete harmonics of the rite tore at mortal minds. Citizens weak of will and faith began to twist and unravel, flesh reshaping itself in grotesque communion with the wound above, birthing monstrosities from within humanity itself.
Outside the Tower, the legions formed a living wall. Steel met nightmare as cannon-fire and sigil-bolts tore into advancing horrors. Soldiers dragged screaming survivors from shattered gates and collapsing causeways, holding ground measured in mere steps and paid for in blood. Thousands fell, yet through relentless sacrifice the legions prevailed. The breach was contained. The flood was stemmed. The Tower did not fall.
It endured.
Yet as the sky above Babel trembled, it became clear that the Conclave’s seal was incomplete.
"I was not within the Tower when the world broke. From the western terraces, I saw the spell take hold and knew at once what it lacked. The heavens above the Tower recoiled not with finality, but with restraint. The elder beings thrashed against unseen bindings, their presence still bleeding through the stone. The Conclave had sealed the door, but left the lock undone."
"There was no time for counsel. No time for grief. I alone bore the full liturgy."
"I stepped forward and carved the final sigils into my own flesh, speaking the names that flensed memory from thought, anchoring the rite from without. The Tower screamed as the seal closed, not as stone, but as something alive denied its breath. Light vanished from its highest spires. The sky recoiled. And Babel was bound."
"Not saved."
"Bound."
When it was done, the Tower stood sealed and cursed. The elder beings remained imprisoned within their upper reaches, dreaming, listening, and stirring, while lesser beasts continued to claw their way out through forgotten tunnels and fractured gates. Around the Tower rose a vast encirclement of fortifications, walls layered upon walls, sanctums, artillery bastions, and consecrated killing fields, manned by legions who would never know peace again.
From this endless vigil was born the Inquisition. They were not formed to seek truth, but to contain it. They hunted corruption, silenced forbidden knowledge, and burned heresy wherever it took root, for they understood what the scholars had learned too late, that some knowledge does not enlighten, but invites.
Word of Babel’s survival spread across the continents. Kingdoms and empires beyond the seas answered the call, not out of mercy alone, but fear. Crusader hosts arrived bearing relics, sanctified engines, and doctrines forged in distant wars against the unnatural. They swore oaths to aid the survivors, to strengthen the encirclement, and, in time, to reclaim the Tower itself. Thus began the long Crusades, campaigns not of conquest, but attrition, each advance into the Tower measured in yards and paid for with generations.
Now, in the present age, Babel still stands.
Its summit remains lost to cloud and madness. Its interior is a labyrinth where time, space, and reason rot together. Beast packs still emerge, and each incursion is met with fire and steel. The legions hold. The Inquisition watches. The Crusades continue.
Some believe the madness can yet be ended, that one final ascent might reach the Tower’s peak and silence the dreaming gods forever.
Others know better.
The Tower remembers us.
And one day, it will answer.
Canthus Verdez XXVII
376th Grand Umbral Magistrate, The Umbral Conclave.
Last of the Conclave
4835 A.C. (After Cataclysm)
Excerpts from the Apocryphal of Lenneth, the book of sorrows.