🌒 The Tension Before the Tear
The Abyss does not remain still.
After the Screaming Ravine devoured the lives of two scouting forces and whispered a new terror into both tribes, the silence that followed was worse than any scream.
Suku Abu, the Ash-Eaters, withdrew deep into their tunnel-chambers beneath the rotting husks of what once might've been colossal worms. They painted silence on their walls using ash mixed with blood — forming eyes without pupils, mouths without lips. These were not warnings.
They were promises.
Above them, Suku Tanduk Hitam — Hornblack Tribe — built thorn towers from the bones of their fallen. Krall, obsessed with dominance, began experimenting on captured Twitchspawn. He placed them inside the wombs of captured Ash-Eater females and waited to see what emerged.
The result was something with too many eyes and no allegiance.
Both sides watched each other through flesh-funnels and parasite flocks.
They did not yet move.
But the First Fang Clash was inevitable.
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🛠️ The Spark: A Stolen Totem
It began with theft.
A young scavenger from the Ash-Eaters, called Kheru, discovered an abandoned Hornblack ritual site. She did not fully understand what she had taken: a Totem Fang — a crystallized jawbone engraved with sigils that pulsed when the Abyss breathed.
Unknowingly, she had stolen a fragment of Pillar Code, and with it, Krall's chance to evolve.
He did not send scouts. He sent a Hate-Birther.
This creature, grown inside a vat of fungal bile and rage-incantations, was bred for one purpose: to find whoever had taken the totem, and return either the object or an entire village in pieces.
The Hate-Birther entered the ash tunnels three cycles later.
When it left, it dragged behind it Kheru's entire clutch — strung together by their intestines. But the Totem was never found.
In fury, Krall marched.
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⚔️ The Battle Begins
On the 23rd night of the Smoke Cycle, the Hornblack army breached the upper tunnels of Suku Abu territory. The walls burned from bile-flares. Flesh-trees screamed. Parasite clouds burst mid-air like pus-lanterns.
Suku Abu responded not with warriors, but with a ritual.
Led by Nuhrr, they called upon Mol-Kath, a creature shaped like a shattered prayer. It had no body — only a string of symbols bound by heat. Its form flickered in and out of reality, like it was trying to remember what shape to take.
Mol-Kath absorbed the first wave.
And then it screamed.
The scream was not sound. It was a memory of dying burned into the bones of those who heard it.
Twelve Hornblack fell where they stood. Their weapons rotted in their hands. Their blood turned to black vines.
But Krall pushed forward anyway.
He had brought his final experiment: The First Fang Construct — a creature forged from captured Ash-Eater bodies stitched together with Abyss hound bones and fed on Twitchspawn bile.
The Construct had no soul, but it had a command — seek out the strongest presence of totemic energy and consume it.
It sniffed once and lunged straight at Nuhrr.
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🩸 Clash of Ideals
Nuhrr, unlike Krall, was not strong of limb — but her mind was a maze, and her rituals rewrote instinct itself.
As the Construct charged, she took a blade to her own jaw and carved a spiral into her flesh. From that blood erupted a shape — a floating mouth, rimmed with eyes — the Mirror Maw.
The Construct struck first. The Maw bit back.
The cave trembled.
Hornblack warriors flung themselves forward to protect their warlord. Ash-Eaters detonated bile traps, collapsing the ceiling on themselves and their foes alike.
The battle devolved into a slaughterhouse of sounds:
Bone on bone.
Fire on rot.
Howls in forgotten languages.
Krall met Nuhrr at last — across a battlefield of skinned warriors and burning totems.
He raised his bone-scythe.
She raised her rune-scarred hand.
They did not speak.
They bled, and the Abyss watched.
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🩶 A Shifting Pillar
High above the carnage, the First Pillar—the broken, ever-breathing obelisk—began to shift in rhythm.
It beat slower. Deeper. The Breath thickened.
From its base, small rootlike tendrils snaked outward, unnoticed by most. They touched the blood of the dead. The flesh twitched.
Something ancient stirred.
In the final moments of the battle, as Krall and Nuhrr collapsed together beneath a collapsing tunnel, neither dead but both ruined, the ground beneath the First Layer opened.
And from the abyssal womb below, a voice like rusted hunger echoed:
> "Witness the start of structure."
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🌑 Aftermath
No victor was declared.
Hornblack survivors retreated with less than a quarter of their force.
Ash-Eaters dissolved back into shadow, their leadership broken.
But the First Pact was now born — unspoken, not written:
> "If we fight each other… the Nameless will consume us all."
The surviving leaders — broken, disfigured, whispering — began to dream of alliance.
Not peace.
Survival.
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âś… Evolution Log: Tier Advancement
Kheru's death sparked mutation among her siblings. One began developing glandular chants — a precursor to Abyssal communication.
The First Fang Construct confirmed as Tier 2.5 Stable Host — proving artificial evolution possible.
Mol-Kath classified as Totemic Echo, not creature. Highly unstable. Potentially controllable.
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