The silence following the crash was absolute, a heavy, ringing vacuum that smelled of ozone and shattered crystal. I lay in the crater of the Lumina-7, my skeletal fingers twitching as my “god-aura” still flickered like a dying candle. The Vril-essence I had siphoned from the pilots acted as a numbing salve, stitching my essence back into three-dimensional reality.
Then, the chattering began.
It was a wet, clicking sound—a language of the throat rather than the light. I sat up, bone grinding against bone, and saw them. Dozens of wide, weeping eyes peered from the shadows of the crystalline canopy.
Dregs. The thought stuck in my mind as I used my powers to infiltrate their psyches. I’m not familiar with this species. They remind me of the ancient Mylars, but…
The chattering grew louder, shifting from a wet clicking to something resembling a heated debate. Before I could fully stand, a net made of shimmering, fiber-optic vines dropped from the shimmering trees.
I could have burned it. I could have turned the air into a furnace and cooked these creatures in their pelts. But my essence was still “settling” and using Hellfire now would be like trying to fire a cannon with a cracked barrel. Besides, I quickly realized my captors weren’t any threat – they were poking me with sticks tipped with glowing recycled “Vibration-Cores.” Clearly I wasn’t in any danger. In facts I was a bit amused.
“Careful with the ribs, you overgrown rodents,” I chuckled at the situation.
They didn’t listen. To my surprise, four of the largest “Dregs” hoisted the net onto a long pole.
“Well this is a new one.” I laughed at the absurdity of the situation, but again, instead of resisting, I was in a bit of an impish mood and couldn’t help but let it play out. Oh, I fully intended to destroy every last one of those little furballs, but for now, I let them have their fun.
As a result, I let these strange creatures carry me through the Glass Forest like a prize pig at a county fair, swaying rhythmically as these Dregs marched deeper into the shimmering undergrowth.
The Village of the Refuse
In a short time, we arrived at their “fort”—a chaotic, sprawling nest built into the hollow of a massive, dead Resonance-Tree. It was a masterpiece of architectural theft. The Dregs had used discarded Mylar hull-plates, glowing conduits, and even broken gravity-fins to patch together a multi-leveled slum. It looked like a junkyard that had gained sentience and tried to build a sort of cathedral.
They dumped me in the center of a mud-slicked plaza. Hundreds of Dregs then swarmed the edges, their oversized eyes reflecting the stolen light of their scavenged lanterns.
During the journey, I’d learned a bit about them and also picked up their language. Their story was a fascinating one but I wanted to see what they’d reveal on their own too.
“So,” I said in their tongue as I sat up and looked around. “Who is in charge of this… charming disaster?”
A Dreg stepped forward. He was ancient, his fur turned a sickly shade of silver, wearing a necklace made of “Memory-Crystals” that glowed with a faint, dying amber. He looked at me, then at the Shard of Varysha still in my chest, and bowed so low his snout touched the dirt.
“I am Krr’ka. You… carry the First Light,” he croaked. “You are the Deep One. The one the High-Spires fear.”
“I am many things, little fur-ball,” I replied, leaning back against a pile of discarded gravity-stabilizers. As Krr’ka spoke I sifted through his mind. In the Dreg dialect, Krr represented the sound of grinding stone (the earth), and Ka was the breath or spirit. Krr’ka thus translated to the “Spirit of the Stone,” the one who remembers the weight of the world before it was turned into glass.I preferred to just think of him as Old Moss-Back. Meanwhile, I added, “I find myself curious. Why do the ‘Pure Ones’ let you live in their forest? Do they not care about your slums?”
The Elder Dreg sighed, a sound like rusted bellows wheezing in a drafty cave. He then told a tale that took far longer to get out than what you’re about to read, but I’ll spare you the tediousness…
“Long-far… before the stars were counted,” Krr’ka began, his cloudy eyes fixed on a guttering Vril-lantern. “There was only the One-Flesh. We were all the same. We walked the mud. We felt the rain. We were… Heavy.” Here he gestured with a gnarled, fur-matted hand toward the shimmering spires visible through the canopy. “Then the Bright-Voices came. They found the Great Hum—the Song that lives in the stones. They sang and they sang, and their blood began to turn thin. Like water. Like mist. They wanted to climb the Song, to go up-up where the air is thin and the light never blinks.”
“Fascinating.” I smiled as I began sizing up which of these creatures I’d murder first. “Tell me more, Old Moss-Back.”
Krr’ka leaned in closer, the scent of wet fur and ozone thick around him. “The Song has a price, Deep One. You cannot go up unless you leave the Heavy behind. It is the Law of the Balance. For every one of them that turned to Glass and flew into the Sky-Nest, a piece of their ‘Dirt’ had to fall. We Dregs are that Dirt.”
“You don’t say?” I played along, by now practically salivating at a few of the more plump dregs I’d identified as my first victims.
Thinking he had a captivated audience, Krr’ka grabbed a handful of the iridescent mud from the floor and let it ooze through his fingers. “They call us ‘Echoes.’ They say we are the sound the Song makes when it hits a wall. The Old Ones told us that the Sky-Makers keep us here because if we vanish, they will float away into the Great Cold. They need us to stay in the mud so they know which way is ‘Up.’ We are the anchor. They are the kite. They give us the Leavings—the sour-light, the ghost-juice from the pipes—just so the anchor does not break. They do not help us walk tall, because a tall anchor is a dangerous thing.”
“Funny you should mention danger, friend.” I began to rise up, ready to take my first victim.
Krr’ka didn’t notice my threatening pose and instead continued. He looked at me, a desperate, animal glint in his eyes and I couldn’t help but play along so I sat back down as he said. “We are the ‘Weight’ they threw away to become ‘Light.’ And for a thousand-thousand sunsets, we have sat in the damp, watching them dance on the ceiling of the world.”
I looked at the pathetic creature. This wasn’t a true history [but then there’s no such thing as ‘true’ history is there?]. This was a ghost story they told themselves to make sense of their misery. They were a biological tax paid by the Mylars to achieve divinity. Ultimately Krr’ka’s story matched what I’d gleamed from the minds of the rest of the villagers.
When the so-called Great Alignment happened, the Mylars chose the Sky. They refined their blood into light. The Dregs became their refuse – after all you cannot have a peak without a base. While the Mylars had evolved into willow-thin beings of light, the Dregs had regressed into “The Heavy Ones.” They were hunched, covered in patches of coarse, dark fur, with muscular limbs built for the soil rather than the sky. To them, the “Pure Ones” were gods who lived in the sky; to the Mylars, these creatures were a “Harmonic Necessity”—the refuse that allowed their light to seem brighter by comparison. I surmised that the Mylars didn’t destroy them because such genocide would “lower their vibration,” so they practiced the more cruel art of calculated neglect – the Mylars thus let the Dregs starve in the glow of a new civilization they weren’t invited to be a part of.
This little fairy tale was all well and fine, but it was time for me to feed again and I’d already calculated how many “grayed” husks it would take to fuel my flight to the Central Island. But as I rose up to take my first victim, a ripple of necrotic energy surged from the Shard of Varysha and quite something unexpected happened. The essence I had stolen from the Mylar sextuplets earlier hadn’t just sat in my gut – it sort of fermented. It had mixed with my own darkness which was then refracted through the Shard to create a corona of bruised violet and flickering gold that now cast long, terrifying shadows outwards from my being.
The Dregs immediately fell to the ground. “Forgive us, forgive us,” they chanted, their voices a discordant chorus of gravel and grief. They began to crawl forward, not as attackers, but as supplicants. They pressed their snouts into the iridescent mud, shivering as the dark light my aura washed over them.
“We thought you a prophet,” Krr’ka stammered, his silver-matted forehead nearly touching my ashen toes. “Forgive us, Lord of the Heavy! We did not know the Dark Sun had come to walk the Dirt!”
I watched them with a detached, clinical amusement. One female Dreg, her fur falling out in patches from Vril-sickness, reached out a trembling claw and touched the edge of my shadow. As the dark energy bit into her, she didn’t scream; she let out a low, purring moan of ecstasy. To her, the sting of my darkness was the only “warmth” she had ever felt that didn’t come with the cold sting of Mylar neglect and contempt.
I stood tall, allowing the Shard to flare. I drank in their terror and their adoration like a vintage wine. It had been eons since the temples of the First World had smelled of my incense, and even though this village smelled of wet fur and decay, the devotion was just as sweet. My assumption was that for creatures like these Dregs who lived on the scraps of radiation, I was the most radiant thing they had ever seen. They continued worshiping me – with little effort on my part to encourage them. I was quite touched. I guess you could say it had been a while since I’d received that kind of treatment.
“Puny, broken things,” I rasped, my voice vibrating through their very marrow. “I accept your praise—for it is rightly given. I am indeed your God. I am the shadow that defines your light. I am the weight that gives you form. Attend to me!”
The Coronation of Scraps
Once the initial terror had passed and my status as the “Dark Sun” was solidified, the village of the Dregs transformed into a feverish hive of hospitality. I was led—not carried this time, for I refused to be a pig on a pole—to the “High Seat.” It was a throne fashioned from the crushed cockpit of a crashed Mylar scout ship, padded with the molted fur of a dozen generations of Dreg elders.
I sat. Yes I, Azazel, who was used to sitting on the glorious throne of obsidian and bone in The Gallery of Unholy Death in Nektar’s Cauldron, now reclined on a recycled chair made of trash and matted hair. It was hideous. It was insulting. And yet… I found myself leaning back into the cushions.
I’ll admit, my time with the dregs was a kind of surreal interlude in the dark comedy of my long life, but if I’m being honest I rather enjoyed being treated like royalty in that kingdom of garbage. Yes, I loathed the filth, but given my recent pains and failures, my ego was starved for the nectar of adoration. As a result I allowed the absurdity of the situation to continue – at least for a time.
The Dregs thus began their ministry of “care” for me as their Dark God with a frantic, clumsy devotion. I don’t remember everything they did, but a few memorable events stuck with me.
First off, a group of female Dregs approached me, trembling. They didn’t have sacred oils or myrrh. Instead, they brought wooden bowls filled with a shimmering, bioluminescent nectar harvested from the Glass Ferns. With hands that smelled of damp earth, they began to rub the glowing sludge into the ashen, desiccated bones of my feet. It was cool, and despite the indignity, the nectar possessed a faint Vril-trace that eased the ache in my joints. I was in fact my first ‘spa’ experience and I loved it so much I made a note to capture of a few of these female Dregs and bring that back with me as slaves to The Cauldron so they could perform this little massage for me every night before I retired.
Some time later, the village treated me to a banquet in my honor. It was a grotesque parody of a royal feast, served on a table made from a repurposed wing-flap of a fallen Mylar cruiser. I played along and ‘blessed’ all their food and the crowd had a raucous good time. Eventually Old Moss-Back, with a look of agonizing solemnity, presented me with a rectangular slab of “honeycomb.” It was actually a Mylar atmospheric filter, a mesh of fine silver wires that had likely spent the last fifty years catching the oily runoff from one of the fort’s ventilation system. It was dripping with a thick, iridescent sludge that moved with the slow, viscous dignity of cold molasses. Krr’ka treated it as holy manna.
I stared at it. The “honey” smelled like a mix of scorched wiring and wet dog. “If I eat this,” I thought, my internal monologue dripping with more sarcasm than the filter, “I might either become the most powerful being in this dimension or my ribs will simply slide off my spine and hit the floor.”
I reached out, my skeletal fingers delicately plucking the “delicacy” from the Dreg chieftan’s trembling paws. The grease was warm. It pulsed. I could feel the stray Vril-energy within it vibrating against my finger-bones like a trapped hornet. The entire village held its breath. Krr’ka leaned forward, his eyes wide, waiting for the “Dark Sun” to eat the gunk. And so, with the stoic resolve of a martyr, I raised the filter to my teeth and took a bite. The villagers cheered in wild delight!
Let me just say this – the texture was… challenging. It was like chewing on a piece of rubberized silk soaked in warm battery acid. As my powerful mandible crunched down on the metallic mesh, a squirt of the iridescent grease hit the back of my skull and instantly my vision inverted—for a moment I saw the Dregs as glowing skeletons and the Glass Forest as a field of gray ash – and it was magnificent!
I swallowed – and as the sludge slid inside me a small, involuntary puff of violet smoke escaped my nostrils. To the further joy of the crowd. I wiped a smudge of glowing purple slime from my jaw with the back of my hand. “Well done, my children. It’s very ‘Heavy.'”
At that the Dregs erupted into frantic, joyful clicking. They began to embrace each other, weeping with relief that their god was so pleased. Meanwhile, about a dozen Dreg children, their fur matted with the dust of the forest, soon gathered in a tight semicircle around my feet. They clutched discarded pieces of Mylar technology—sections of ribbed plating, dented stabilizer fins, and hollowed-out resonance tubes.
At a signal from the Elder Krr’ka, they began to strike their ‘instruments.’ The ‘music’ they produced was not a melody; it was more like a rhythmic, industrial throb. They hammered on the Star-Glass fragments with stones, creating a sharp, crystalline clink-clink-clack that was layered over the deep, metallic thrum of the larger hull-plates. One youth blew into a bent ventilation pipe, producing a mournful, low-frequency howl that vibrated through my very seat.
“It is the sound of a heartbeat,” I realized, my fingers tapping the arm of my throne in spite of myself. I’d heard Mylar music in ages past – it always like a mathematical equation made audible—perfect and cold—but this was a sound of blood and bone. It was the rhythm of the “Heavy Ones” trying to keep time with the universe that had rejected them. It was messy, it was loud, and it was…delightfully discordant. I rather loved it.
I sat there, the “Dark Sun” on a throne of junk, watching these small monsters bang on the ruins of a superior civilization to please me. I felt a smirk tug at the corners of my skull.
“Look at them,” I thought, watching a Dreg frantically fan me with a large, iridescent leaf. “They are terrified that if the fan stops, I will turn them into cinders. They are pathetic. They are clumsy. This nectar smells like a swamp, and the music is a rhythmic assault on my sanity.”
I took a sip of the fermented sap. It burned pleasantly.
“And yet,” I mused, “there is a simple purity here. The Mylars have spent eons trying to silence the noise of the world and to escape my wrath, yet these pathetic peasants love me. They worship Me. They don’t want harmony; they want a Master. They want someone to look at their misery and tell them it was part of a plan.”
I allowed a Dreg to drape a “robe” over my shoulders—a tattered tapestry of spun silver stolen from a Mylar villa eons ago. It was torn and stained, but it caught the violet light of the Shard in my chest, making me look like a king of ghosts. “Lap it up, Azazel,” I whispered to my inner shadow. “It has been a long time since anyone trembled at your shadow. For a moment, I almost thought about abandoning all my ‘work’ on TerrVerde and even giving up my goals to become the God of ALL and instead just calling it a career and retiring to live with the Dregs.
Almost.
“Enough,” I finally said, raising a hand and I leaning forward. The Shard flared with a sudden, sharp intensity that sent the Dregs scurrying back in a fresh wave of holy dread. I let the silence hang, heavy and pregnant, before I spoke.
“The nectar is… adequate,” I rasped, the lie tasting like ash. “But a God cannot live on sugar and song alone. You have fed my body, little ones. Now, I think it is time we discuss how you will feed my wrath.”
The Apocrypha of Azazel 