In the beginning, there was nothing. No light, no land, no sky—only the great and endless Void, black and without form. No mind could grasp its depths, for it was emptiness itself, unbroken by time or measure.

Yet in the silence of that abyss, echoes lingered—whispers of something beyond. The eldest beings of the cosmos, those who have endured the turning of uncounted ages—the Reanimators, and even the Dark themselves—speak only in cryptic riddles of a reality beyond our own. A great and infinite expanse beyond the veil of our universe, a place whose denizens are known as the Absconcious, or the Unknown.

It is said that in the age before memory, one of their number was cast out, a giant beyond reckoning, whose name was Essentia, which in the tongues of mortals means “Existence.” Bound within the void, alone and forsaken, Essentia could not endure its fate. And so, in its grief and madness, it perished by its own hand.

From its sundered form, its blood poured forth into the abyss, burning with light and fire. The scattered plasma drifted, gathered, and was bound by unseen forces, forming the first stars. These celestial beacons, bright and searing, were not mere embers in the night—they awoke, bearing their own minds and wills. And from the corpse of their progenitor, they shaped the worlds, each one seeded with fragments of their own essence, giving rise to the first mortal beings.

Ages passed, and the worlds turned. Races rose and fell; kingdoms crumbled into dust. Of all those that climbed from the ruins of the old worlds, none stood as high as the Domnus. Masters of Affinity, they bent reality to their will, shaping existence itself as a craftsman bends iron to the forge. Their name became known across the vastness of time and space, and to all lesser races, they imprinted their tongue upon their minds, so that their rule might never be questioned. It is from them that men learned the first words of what would become Terran Basic, the root of their speech.

Yet knowledge breeds hunger, and the Domnus were not content with mastery over their own realm. They sought to breach the veil, to undo the exile of the Absconcious, and to call forth the great unknown. In their pride, they sought to unmake the boundaries of existence itself.

The Dark did not stand idle. Once more, they rose from their eternal silence, and once more, they wove their will into the fabric of all things. The war that followed was unlike any before or since, for though the Domnus wielded the might of Affinity, their strength was a flickering flame against the endless abyss of the Dark. The battle was long, but the end was certain—the Domnus fell, their legacies crumbling into whispers and ghost stories. Their great works were undone, and their name faded into legend.

Once more, the universe was left to its own design.