Monsters and Abominations

The tier begins with a bargain. "When Aezithis made his foul deal with the dark, he opened forth the corruptible pits of his heart, and since his power of creation was stolen from him, and the dark waters of chaotic creation were gifted unto him, the age of nightmarish abominations had begun." Everything written below came out of that spill, or came in through the hole it left.

The horrors arrive from two directions. "Twisted and macabre, the monsters and abominable entities of this world have clawed up from beneath and above the soil. Whether the mutated remnants of an ancient subterranean society, flooded with the corruptible Crimson blood of their father, the God Of Stone, and his fall from grace, or torn from the void itself, and shattered into this world as the physical embodiment of the void terrors, this world is filled with horrors." Below is Aezithis: his blood is the Crimson, his heart-wound is the ravines, and out of the ravines crawl the Abominations of Chaos. Outside is the void, and the void does not come in on its own.

The summoning law is the spine of this tier and it is arithmetic. A void summoner sacrifices souls. If the sacrifice is large enough and the summoner strong enough, the casting tears a fissure in the Caelyrean, the filter Hyton laid over the world, and through that fissure comes a mass of a Void Prince rather than the Prince entire. A hair off a Void Prince is an eighty-foot Remoulded standing in a field. That is the scale being worked with. A Prince entire would take thousands of years of unbroken casting and has never been carried to completion by anything that survived the attempt.

When the summoner is too weak, or the souls too few, the fissure still opens and something still comes through, and what comes through is smaller and less sentient. That is a Shattered. The difference between Class One and Class Two is how much of the god the caster could afford.

Five classes, ranked by mind rather than by lethality. Class One, the Remoulded of the Void, hold a court and are the cleverest things in the world. Class Two, the Great Shattered, are the same substance with the mind left behind. Class Three, the Dreamt Ones, are souls and forgeries of souls, made by mortal error. Class Four, the Abominations of Chaos, are Aezithis' second children. Class Five, the Crimson Horrors, are every other people, spoiled.

Four of the five have no biology in the sense the rest of the record uses, and the entries change their method to suit. Where a people would have a Body, a Remoulded has a substance and a set of retained features; a Shattered has a process that hardens; a Dreamt One has whatever tissue is being held, driven or forged; the Crimson has a material and a progression through somebody else's flesh. Only Class Four is made of cells throughout, and Class Four is the class whose cells cannot agree on a shape. Where such a thing can be said to fail, sicken or wear out, that is set down under Frailty, because a horror that cannot be hurt is furniture.

The Monsters are the Sixth Estate of the Imperial Diet, with roughly one hundred dens seated beside the nobility, the gentry, the clergy, the peasantry and the autonomous tribes. The Diet, in its own phrasing, "has their boot over them." This is no wilderness anyone clears. It is a constituency.