Location: Nektar’s Cauldron
Timeline: Sixth Age, 53rd Year, Spring
The air atop the volcano that was once my home did not blow—it lacerated. Here, at the jagged crown of the world where the sky bleeds into a permanent, bruised twilight, I stood, the sulfurous updrafts catching my robes as I rejoiced in the reunion with my own stolen essence.
I reached beneath the silk and shadow, my fingers tracing the ridge of my prodigal rib: Dagaal, The Bone Dagger. Vile Lucifer cruelly tore it from my frame ages ago, during those eons when he exercised his suffocating dominion over me in the hellish wastes of Illusia. For time uncounted, he tortured me with my own anatomy. Every time I was forced to descend into his underworld to beg for the <hellfire> life-force that sustained my godhood, the Demon Lord would draw Dagaal. He ravaged my soul with the constant, whispered threat that this blade would “unmake” me—dissolve my consciousness into the void—if I did not break the barrier keeping him and his “father,” Zebub, locked in their prison-dimension.
Naturally, I was the scapegoat for that cosmic fiasco. Even though it was Lucifer’s own staggering hubris that constructed the walls of Illusia, he saw fit to rewrite history, claiming the creation of the underworld was my design. It was a lie. I knew it, he knew it, and every shrieking spirit in the pits knew it. But when you are groveling before a superior who holds your very existence in his talons, you play the part. Without his “gift” of <hellfire>, my dreams of one day planting my boot upon his face were worth naught. So I wore the guilt like a leaden shroud. I admitted to every crime, promised every penance—I would have licked the dust from his hooves if it meant securing the fire I needed to endure.
Lucifer always gave it to me, of course. We both understood the unspoken truth: I was his only tether to the Middle Plan, his best hope of escaping that sunless prison and perhaps one day getting his revenge against The Great Creator A’H. So my master gave me life, yes, but only after twisting Dagaal in the wound of my pride.
That was our stalemate for time uncounted. But then—roughly eight hundred years ago, at the dawn of the Fifth Age—the game shifted. During that visit, Lucifer let it slip with a serpentine hiss that Dagaal was no longer in his possession. It had been stolen. He wouldn’t say by whom, only that it was now back upon Terra—where any pissant mortal or rival deity could use my own bone to extinguish me. Naturally he claimed he’d helped me, he’d protect me, but only if I helped him, only if I found a way to release him.
Imagine my despair. My own rib, a splinter of my divinity, was loose in the world I claimed to master. I knew immediately it was a power play, and I didn’t have to look far to find the architect. Lilith. The way that Queen of Shadows looked at me—her eyes cold as The Ice Walls of Lemuria—those eyes told me everything. She knew that I knew. Lucifer just slithered a smile, watching us, while the crowd of Baals—those horrific demon-children she birthed for her King—cavorted in delight at my expense.
The Fifth Age was a dark time for me. I drank too much Nepenthe, grew soft and heavy with depression, and obsessed over the shadow of my missing rib. But then, I found my spine. I conceived a plan—the one I detailed in my Apocrypha regarding the War of the Ghast. Untold thousands of mortals perished in that conflagration, a necessary pruning of the herd that I found rather refreshing. I was sad that I didn’t find Dagaal for all my efforts in conspiring that war, but I sated myself with the fact that I’d stumbled upon something just as delicious: The Grim. A black dagger forged in secret by Rhokki and Mindos. Like Dagaal, it could unmake a god. A problem, yes—but also an opportunity. If I could possess both, I wouldn’t just be a player in the Great Game of The Gods, I would become The Dungeon Master!
I spent the centuries following the War of the Ghast scouring the Flat Earth. I searched star-forts, ransacked pyramids, and sifted through the dust of fallen empires. Gwar and Inanna were useless; I suspected those two were in on the original heist from Illusia, giggling behind my back as I searched.
I finally nailed down The Grim’s location to a dwarf kingdom in the Akka Mountains of Northeast TerrVerde – sending numerous pawns to retrieve it for me, whilst I continued the more urgent quest to find Dagaal. You know the story from there – as I wrote about in The Resurrection of The Grim book of my Apocrypha, after battling it out in the sunken ruins of Atlantis, I learned that it was in Lemuria. A quick hop skip and a jump past the Ice Walls and a little magic of my own to take down the techy new version of the Mylars 2.0 and I finally had it back – Dagaal was home – with me, where it belonged.
Now, I have been back in my Cauldron for a year. Catching up on the world’s petty affairs through the Eye of Seraphiel, I felt a sudden, wicked urge to descend to Illusia off-cycle—just to rub Lilith’s nose in my triumph. She thought she was planting the seed of my destruction by returning my bone to Terra. She intended it to be the instrument of her revenge. Instead, the fool merely delivered the key to my ultimate dominion.
Bwwha-ha-ha!
As the bone settled back into its rightful place among my ribs, the world didn’t just look different—it tasted different. I could feel the “Ol’ Black Magic” pulsing through me, vibrating in sync with the very ley lines of the plane-t. It was a confirmation of my ascent. I am no longer just a governor of this realm; with Dagaal restored to my osteel frame, I am a greater god than this world has ever seen.
Stil standing on the obsidian balcony of my volcanic spire, I looked toward the horizons. My gaze, amplified by the restoration of my rib, did not merely see; it pierced through the heavy, sulfurous clouds to find my “peers”—those self-important squatters in the pantheon who had the audacity to think themselves my equals.
“Gwar,” I hissed, the name tasting like rusted iron and ancient, dried gore. Southwest of me, the God of War sat within the Aerie – his iron-ribbed fortress atop the island of Kagor. I could see him in my mind’s eye, a hulking shadow sharpening black-iron axes while his Myz legions swarmed like carrion flies on the Killing Fields below. Gwar was always a blunt instrument. He hungered for a grand conflagration—a glorious, brainless collision of screaming armies. He never understood that true victory wasn’t found in the thunder of the charge, but in the cold silence of the betrayal.
With Dagaal pulsing once more against my black heart, I could feel the tether to every creature of shadow. I could make his own Myz look at him and see a rival to be butchered instead of a master to be feared. The very marrow of his soldiers, born of the same dark essence I now commanded in full, would soon answer to me as their rightful god.
Then there was Inanna. Oh, the Goddess of Lust remained as predictable as a moth spiraling toward a funeral pyre. From her throne of ivory and silk at the Pleasure Palace in Ramos, she wove her webs of desire, convinced she had stolen my pawn, Kaoz, away from my service. She believed that by seducing the Myz, she had weakened my hand in Orkney and positioned herself to seize The Grim before I could lay my claws on it.
I was never worried about her. Inanna was merely a creature of vanity; she spent her eons admiring the shimmering surface of the waters that cascaded down the thousand-foot Falls of Karkamesh, never suspecting the kraken waiting in the silt at the bottom. She wanted Kaoz to find my treasure for her, but my bone was back in my side, and I could feel the vibration of every heartbeat in Fubar. Whatever Kaoz found for her would turn her “lust” into a frantic, rotting obsession, for The Grim would be mine – of that there was no question.
My gaze drifted further east, toward the verdant, suffocating canopy of the Great Forests. Alyssa. The Goddess of Love. In my arrogance at the time, I was only vaguely aware of her influence then. I dismissed her as a flighty, ethereal creature who lacked the stomach to be a player in worldly affairs. That was my crowning mistake.
While my Apocrypha now painstakingly details the exploits of her champions, Emcorae and Nathily, at that moment I remained blind to the fact that Alyssa was forging them into a divine weapon aimed at my throat. I dismissed her along with her consort, Pan, viewing their realm as nothing more than a theater for hedonistic sexual escapades.
“Let them roll in the moss,” I had thought with a sneer. “I’ve got a world to run.”
Finally, I turned my eyes to the northeast corner of TerrVerde—toward the snowy realm of Fubar. There, the little Viperz Ramssee was scurrying about his “Imperial” business like a rat in a granary. He thought he had outsmarted his god. While paying me the hollow lip service of a devoted servant, he had long since abandoned my mission to find The Grim. He wanted to be “Ramssee the Great,” the first Emperor of a new age, and he had been meticulously planning to rid himself of King Diked, the Myz Kaoz, and eventually, the “inconvenience” of my own divinity.
I laughed then—a deep, guttural sound that vibrated through the stone and sent a massive avalanche tumbling down the mountainside below me, burying the pine slopes in a shroud of white. I had a delicious plot for him. It was a masterpiece of irony: the more he climbed toward his throne, the deeper he was digging his own grave.
“The circle closes,” I whispered, clutching my chest where the Dagger sat nestled perfectly within my frame, humming in symphony with my dark heart. “The stage is set and I am finally whole enough to play the leading role again!”
The Apocrypha of Azazel 