Editor's Note
Tameel's fall scatters a darkness that breeds in the great and small alike. The records here are sparse; names come in fragments. What follows is a gathering of shadows—their voices and the ways they move among the living.
Chapter III — The Shadows and the Whispers
In his fall, Tameel's pride consumed him. Unable to bear his failure, he fractured himself into seven pieces—each a reflection of his corruption. Tameon, the most subtle, carried the greatest essence of what Tameel had once been.
From this shattering came seven shapes, not of flesh but of will, of hunger. They seeped into the world like ink spilled across parchment, each seeking its own dominion over mortal hearts.
For centuries they worked in secret, their corruption spreading like a plague of the spirit. Generations rose and fell under their influence. Villages that had once shared freely began to hoard and scheme. Kingdoms that had known peace found reasons for war. Trust, once given freely between neighbors, became a rare and precious commodity. The world grew darker with each passing age, though few understood why.
A thousand years would pass before their corruption grew bold enough to strike at the brightest of the Saints' new lights.
It was only after watching this slow decay corrupt generation after generation that the Animas recognized the need for champions among mortals—Saints who could stand against the growing darkness.
First came Kazabi, who moved through courts and war councils like smoke through cracks in stone. His voice was a lullaby to kings, soft as silk and sharp as steel: "Take what is not yours. Rule—and fear no god." In a northern kingdom, a young prince heard these words while staring at his father's crown. By dawn, poison had done its work, and by dusk, the prince wore gold that had never been meant for his brow. A ruler obeyed. A city trembled. War was born with a whisper, and brothers took up arms against brothers in fields that had known only peace.
Pach drifted through the hearts of children, turning unformed fear into terror that would shadow them all their days. He crouched beside a boy hiding from storm winds and murmured with the voice of creaking timber: "They will abandon you... they will leave you to the dark." The boy woke screaming, and though his mother held him close, the seed was planted. In time, that child would never trust another's love, would hoard affection like a miser hoards coin, and would die alone despite a dozen hands reaching out to comfort him. Nightmares were born in that moment, and they spread from child to child like plague.
Satan—so the scribes named him in their careful script—spoke in merchants' mouths and thieves' bargains, sowing greed like seeds in fertile soil: "Why give when you can take? Why toil when wealth can be claimed?" In a coastal town, a baker who had fed the poor for twenty years heard these words while counting his meager coins. Within a month, he watered his flour with sawdust and charged double for half-loaves. Entire hamlets succumbed with no blade drawn, their hearts hollowed by want until neighbor stole from neighbor and children went hungry while granaries stood full but locked.
Cholie curled into lovers' ears like a serpent seeking warmth, turning trust into suspicion with words sweet as honey and bitter as wormwood: "They love you to use you. Guard your heart." A young woman, weeks from her wedding, began to see calculation in her beloved's every kindness. She counted his gifts like debts owed, weighed his words for hidden meanings, until love curdled into resentment. On what should have been her wedding day, she stood alone in an empty church, having driven away the one soul who had truly cherished her. Where Cholie fed, closeness shrank to nothing.
Kasem moved through halls of learning like a whisper between scrolls, seeding envy and rivalry with the patience of centuries: "Your neighbor knows more; he will shame you." In the great Library of Seren, two scholars who had labored together for decades began to eye each other's work with growing resentment. Secret experiments replaced shared discoveries. One poisoned the other's ink; the other burned a lifetime's research in response. Knowledge became a weapon, wielded to wound rather than to illuminate, and wisdom died in the ashes of prideful rage.
Apollyon prowled along the edges of armies and shadowed alleys, inviting destruction and cruelty with a grin like broken glass: "See what happens when you strike without mercy. Taste the power." A captain, weary from years of just war, felt that whisper during the siege of a rebel city. When the walls fell, mercy fell with them. What had been a clean victory became a massacre, and the captain watched children flee through streets slick with their parents' blood. He tasted power, as Apollyon had promised, but it turned to ashes in his mouth, and he spent his remaining years trying to wash the stain from his hands.
Finally came Tameon, the most subtle of all, who slid among ordinary folk like mist through market squares, whispering small lies that gathered into ruin like pebbles becoming an avalanche: "Do this. Do that. Take more. A little won't hurt." A farmer's wife, honest all her life, began to keep back a few coins from the tax collector. Just a few, she told herself. Enough to buy medicine for her sick child. But the coins multiplied in her hidden purse, and the lies grew to match them, until she was stealing from her own neighbors and her child lay dying while she counted gold by candlelight, having forgotten why she began. The world grew heavy with such dissonance; trust frayed in homes, markets, and fields like cloth left too long in the sun.
They did not speak as one, yet their chorus moved like tide, each voice finding its own rhythm in the great symphony of corruption: "Ah—take. Be more. Hide. Strike. Fear. Want. Hate." Men and women did not see them, but they felt the nudges as surely as the wind touches skin. The Shadows were patient, content to plant seeds and wait for harvest.
Those who yielded became Blight—hollowed hearts, dimmed eyes, souls eaten from within until only hunger remained. They walked among the living like moving wounds, spreading the infection of their choices to any who would listen. The first creeping sickness of the world was not in land or water but in human hearts, and it spread faster than any plague of the flesh.
Still, some resisted. Small lamps of steadiness remained, trembling but unextinguished. These would become the Saints, though they did not yet know the name. In workshops and fields, in mothers holding children close and farmers sharing grain with hungry neighbors, the light persisted. It was fragile, often flickering, but it would not be snuffed out entirely.
The Shadows whispered, always and everywhere, a current beneath the currents of life. But even in the growing dark, small acts of kindness blazed like stars, and hope—battered but not broken—endured.