The world of Khthonia is a wound that never closed.
Its crust pulses with veins of light—the Aetheric void—circulating energy so vast that oceans themselves bend along its hidden geometry. Mountains grow in spirals, deserts hum at dusk, and storms trace runes older than speech across the upper atmosphere.
Nothing in Khthonia is still; everything remembers the moment creation misfired.
No one knows who, if anyone, shaped it.
Fifty-two beings are recorded in myth and census alike, called gods for lack of a cleaner term. Some walk openly; others remain as constellations, voices, algorithms, or ruins that continue to think.
Six religions claim to know their origin, each contradicting the others with equal conviction.
The scholars of the Spiral Archive say the gods are by-products of Aether's sentience.
The priests of the Radiant Choir insist the opposite, that Aether is the breath the gods exhaled when they first saw themselves.
Khthonia's inhabitants measure themselves against that uncertainty.
Those who can channel Aether are named Aetherborn. The rest, the Nonci, are considered void-blooded, the inert residue of creation.
Aetherborn build the cities, speak the law, and bind the Nonci to their service.
The Nonci till the fields beneath floating citadels whose shadows never lift.
In the markets of the capital, their chains are etched with runes that drain the faintest trace of resonance from their bodies, ensuring they remain what the Aetherborn say they are, silent matter.
Across the continents rise the Noble Houses, each a philosophy given flesh.
Their names are spoken rarely in full, for to name something completely is to bind its Aether.
They rule from towers that touch the sky's edge, teaching their heirs to turn thought into weaponry, language into command.
Beneath their dominion, the cities breathe in rhythm with their power, and the Nonci whisper of freedom in dialects long forgotten.
The power system of Khthonia is simple to name, impossible to master.
Aether flows through three channels: Body, Word, and Will.
The Body shapes matter; the Word bends perception; the Will alters causality.
The strongest Aetherborn align all three, becoming what the chronicles call Triarchs.
Beyond Triarchy lies only speculation—the realm of gods and monsters.
Every child of noble blood is tested before their first decade:
a shard of mirrored crystal pressed to the sternum, its reflection revealing the resonance pattern of their soul.
The result determines one's rank, destiny, and worth.
In most cases, the crystal flickers briefly, recording a measurable frequency before dimming.
But rarely, the shard hums—and does not stop.
When that happens, the examiners whisper of a fracture in the void itself.
In the northern dominion, such a hum was heard twenty years ago.
A newborn's cry echoed through marble halls built atop veins of living light.
His mother's heart stopped as his first breath drew in more Aether than her body could bear.
Servants fled. The void beneath the manor brightened until the horizon glowed.
They say the child's eyes opened immediately.
They say he did not cry again.
They say the world listened.
And in the silence that followed, the void murmured a new equation into existence:
> —One has awakened who remembers the pattern.
—Let the experiment resume
---
Birth of Iblis
There was no light, only the sensation of being remembered.
Consciousness formed around that memory, tightening until it became shape, pressure, warmth—the suffocating rhythm of a heart not his own.
He realized, dimly, that he was breathing before he had lungs.
> A tether connects you still, whispered something vast and toneless, though you severed it once.
Return or descend, the choice no longer matters.
Then came sound: the shuddering pulse of Aether around him, the low hum of a world made of energy instead of mercy.
He knew, before opening his eyes, that he had reached Khthonia.
And he smiled, internally, faintly, with the restrained joy of one who has orchestrated his own damnation.
When his eyes opened, the ceiling above him was a dome of polished obsidian carved with veins of silver that pulsed in time with his heartbeat.
He could taste Aether in the air: metallic, heavy, infinite.
His thoughts were strangely clear—far too coherent for an infant.
I shouldn't remember. Memory collapses at birth.
The words surfaced like bubbles through deep water.
He waited for them to fade. They did not.
He felt the pressure of a thousand lives whispering in the marrow of his soul, the echo of Zha'thik, the god he had devoured in another existence.
Fragments of that divinity coiled inside him, dormant yet alive, muttering equations in the language of entropy.
So this is what you stole, something thought through him,
and this is what it costs.
---
A sound interrupted him, a gasp, then a sob.
A woman's voice, trembling, weak.
"Kaelith… it's too much… the Aether—it's eating—"
Her words dissolved into silence.
The energy in the air shifted. The hum around him peaked, then broke.
Somewhere beyond his blurred vision, instruments shattered. Flesh tore. And then, absence.
The absence of a heartbeat that was not his own.
---
When the newborn's cry finally escaped him, it was not sorrow but the automatic convulsion of lungs learning air.
His cry resonated against the void beneath the manor, splitting it like crystal under pressure.
Outside, every candle in the House of Veyrahl guttered simultaneously.
The father, Lord Kaelith Veyrahl, stood over the body of his wife, expressionless.
The Aether had devoured her from within, her veins aglow like molten glass.
He looked down at the child—his firstborn, the heir to a legacy of silence and precision.
The midwives trembled. Kaelith's voice, when it came, was devoid of heat:
"Dispose of the body. Clean the boy."
No one moved.
He turned his head slightly, eyes pale and calm.
"Now."
The servants obeyed.
---
Hours later, in the stillroom of the manor, the child lay upon a silken cot.
His breathing had steadied; his eyes were open.
Kaelith regarded him as one would regard a complex weapon.
"You killed her," he said, not with accusation, but curiosity.
"A thing that destroys as it arrives. Perhaps that's what House Veyrahl needed."
He reached out, touched the child's forehead with a gloved hand, and murmured something between a blessing and an order:
"Remember this: affection dulls instinct. Pain clarifies purpose."
The infant did not blink.
He watched the movement of his father's lips and committed the words to memory.
---
Beyond the void, in the folds between Aether streams, a presence stirred.
It remembered being devoured once. It remembered the taste of its own ruin.
And through the newborn's gaze, it looked again upon the world it had once tried to unmake.
The child's breathing deepened.
The world, for a moment, tilted to listen.
> Name unassigned, the void whispered.
Designation pending recursion.
Then silence.
---
When dawn came, the first light of Khthonia touched the marble spires of the Veyrahl estate.
The wind smelled faintly of ozone and iron.
And within the nursery, the newborn stirred—not in confusion, not in fear, but with the faint, deliberate motion of one reacquainting himself with flesh.
He did not yet know what name he would take.
Only that it would not be given, it would be chosen.
And that choice, when it came, would change everything.