The drop to Battgjald’s surface was extraordinary, a miracle of dizzying height through fogged layers of mirk and cloud and rain. Balavad, called His Holiness by the folk of Battgjald, stared downward, his celestial sight easily piercing the billowing, smog-brushed thunderheads. There they were, all of his people, milling about in their factories and industries, their fights and struggles, ruining themselves out of misguided—or unguided—ambition. His Holiness had not intervened on their behalf in millennia.

And he, the designer of all that was known as the realm and reality of Battgjald, had been forgotten.

As Balavad observed their teeming, roiling mass of madness, he understood. Eventually, he even accepted responsibility for such a milieu of devolution and decay. And it made him want to weep. A member of the race of Verities, his nature was extracorporeality, so much greater than the simple, mortal reality of his human creations. Balavad was not only their Holiness, but their maker, the reason they were. He had brought them from the void of nothingness into existence, into being. It was his responsibility to protect and lead them along his hallowed paths of the absolute, the reality of his design. He had made them, and they had worshipped him. And that was how it should always be.

But centuries of being worshipped had led to a thing he had not foreseen. His greatness was so clear, so innate, and their worship reflected this. But now, when he looked into that reflection, it was as if he stared into a mirror that showed him…nothing. He had withdrawn from his creations for a time to consider what he had glimpsed. What was this absence, this darkness behind his power? Was his own greatness a lie? What did it mean to be a Verity, and what was a Verity without the worship of his creations? Haunted by these questions, he had grown afraid. Afraid of his own reflection. Afraid of the darkness hidden behind their fragile worship. Afraid, even, of his own reality.

He was a Verity, a creator of reality, and he was afraid of it.

More ages passed and this fear grew. As it grew, it twisted and took on its own bestial strength, becoming his enemy as well as his tireless devotion. He nurtured this fear through constant attention, hoping to find a way to demolish it, force it to dissolve, disappear, cease to be. Yet it seemed the more he fought it, the stronger it became. He could feel it within, whispering, sometimes getting beyond his control and seeping outside of him to fall on his creations below. He was His Holiness, a Verity in a pantheon of Verities who created everything that was or could be, who comprised the Syzickí Elementum—yet his power was nothing compared to this fear. It ate into him, swallowing him like a wolf swallows a rabbit. Tore him into pieces until he could not move, could not think, and worst of all, could not look after his creations.

He hid.

More ages passed, and he remained in his dark tower, refusing to leave, refusing to acknowledge anything that could remind him of his weakness or his fear. He forgot his people. And they forgot him. Without a guiding force, they no longer flourished. But the notes of his fear that had escaped his control began to hum in their ears. Their ambitions grew disproportionate to their humility, then became greed, then became war, then became ruin. Their sense of place in their reality became too bloated and too cumbersome to continue in its harmony. The symphony of joy and light they’d once played for love of their Verity jangled, the strings of its instruments snapped, the notes fell out of step. The balance broke.

It was this discord that finally penetrated Balavad’s envelope of protection. He heard their despair and awoke. He dragged himself to his throne room’s terrace, the vessel that served as his physical body having become as light as air through centuries of hiding and stillness and neglect, and looked upon them. And now, the desire to weep became the act of weeping.

His tears of sorrow over the devastation caused by his delinquency flowed, first as one followed by another, then as a stream, and finally as a raging torrent, a river of guilt. Each drop that fell stayed where it landed, coalescing around his feet like a stagnant marsh, an insipid reminder of his failure to his creations. He kicked at his tears, the wet judgment, and they flowed around him languidly, seeming to mock. Flailing, his rage began to grow and the tears turned into a frothing beast, rising and falling with his struggles, finally flooding like a tempest over the parapet onto Battgjald below.

The fighting and warring people of his dominion were deluged, and their wars could not sustain themselves in the tsunamis that wracked them. Their despair grew deeper and their decay grew damper. Those who had not fallen completely to the demons of ambition and still maintained a fragment of the original spirit of love that had been Balavad’s first gift, took to the task of saving them all. They built dikes and ships and dams and skyborne vessels, led massive migrations to the planet’s tallest peaks, searched for ways of harnessing or at least living harmoniously with the seemingly never-ending rains. For a time it seemed their world would be saved and the differences that had led to their wars could be allowed to drown in the floods. Some even rediscovered and returned to the ancient ways of their original worship, invoking His Holiness once again to aid them.

Yet Balavad, still fighting his fears and his rage, did not see it. He continued his crying and his thrashing, despairing through the fog of his tears that would not let him see that he was not forgotten or that his fears of the dark that seemed to skulk behind their worship were unfounded. His creations needed but a hint of his continued existence, and they would have swarmed back to his protection and never left him again. But his watery suffering would not cease, and he condemned his creations for his fear.
What could cure this wretched dread? He knew of only one thing—absolute, irrevocable, utter control of what was his, of what he had made. He would bring them to their knees before him, ruin them so that they were powerless against him. Rather than continue into eternity in torment, he made his decision: he would be their unquestioning master.

Or he would destroy them.

Balavad dove, alighting from his terrace parapet into ether and falling, like a liquid swan, to Battgjald’s surface, what little of it remained. The first to discover him did not realize what he was, for it had been so long for most of his creations since they’d even heard the myths of their own maker. The few who had revived his worship had long since been shunned as heretics. Balavad took this as a sign that his decision was for the best—and he laid waste.

The floods, which had been monumental but gradual enough to allow the survivors of Battgjald’s long deterioration to adapt, became tsunamis. Their ships were sunk, their remaining cities riven, their pleas ignored. Balavad no longer thought of himself as a Verity; he became the Desecrator, the Venom of Scorn. And their tears mingled with his, becoming a titanic endless ocean of misery. He laughed at their suffering, condemning them for what they’d brought on themselves and now begged him to undo. He showed them mercy in the form of a choice: join him and be consecrated into the ranks of his army, the Raveners of the Tooth, who would soon set forth with the mission of bending all Verities’ treacherous creations to his will. Or die.

The insipid fear that had forced him to hide would never imprison him again.