The Primeval Era

<On the 72 Thrones Beyond the River: A Treatise Forbidden by Three Empires, Cont.>

Though many would refer to all 72 as Dukes, the lowest among them are the Counts and the Knights, and even these are terrible beyond what most Warriors of the Lands of Stone could survive encountering. A Count commands legions of lesser demons the way a Chieftain commands a tribe, and a Knight carries power enough to shatter the walls of any Sworn settlement without slowing. They are the foot soldiers of the 72, the ones sent to test borders and probe weaknesses, and entire tribes have been erased from the Lands of Stone by Knights whose names were never recorded because no one survived to write them down.

Above them sit the Marquises, and the Marquises are where the old records begin to fail. The Shamans who documented these beings did so from accounts given by survivors, and survivors of encounters with Marquises are rare enough that the accounts contradict one another in ways that suggest the Marquises themselves may have been altering what the survivors remembered.

The 7th Marquis Aamon is recorded as having walked the battlefields of three fallen empires and consumed the souls of their rulers while their armies watched and could not intervene. The accounts say his presence alone caused Warriors below the Eighth Circle to forget their own names.

The Dukes stand above even these. There are those among the 72 who hold this rank, and their power is such that the old Shamans stopped attempting to measure it and simply recorded its effects. Where a Duke walks, the land remembers fear for generations afterward. Where a Duke feeds, the spiritual fabric of the region thins so severely that Ancestral communion becomes impossible for decades. The 8th Duke Barbatos was recorded in the oldest surviving texts as a being who could see across time and distance simultaneously, who could speak to every bird and beast in a territory and turn them against the humans living among them, and whose appetite for young souls was so refined that she could taste the difference between a child raised in love and a child raised in neglect.

The Princes sit above the Dukes, and the Princes are not recorded in any text that has survived intact. What remains are fragments, sentences torn from scrolls that were burned by the very Empires that commissioned their writing, because the knowledge contained within them was deemed too dangerous to preserve. The 3rd Prince Vassago is mentioned in one such fragment as a being who could see what was, what is, and who used this sight not for wisdom but for the precise identification of which souls would taste best at which moment of their lives.

Another fragment, attributed to a Sangoma whose name was struck from all records, states simply that the Princes do not negotiate because negotiation implies the possibility of an outcome they have not already chosen.

Above the Princes, the old texts grow silent.

Not because there is nothing above them, but because what sits above them was considered too terrible to commit to any medium that human hands could hold. The Shamans called it the First Throne. The Sangomas called it the Mouth That Does Not Close. The fragments that survive from the oldest era, before the Three Pillars existed, before the Covenant was founded, before the Dominion learned to spell its own name, refer to it only as the Demon Emperor!

The Light of The Emperor.

What little can be pieced together from the surviving records paints a picture that the mind resists holding. The Demon Emperor does not rule the 72 because he conquered them. He rules them because the 72 were born from him. Every Duke, every Prince, every Marquis and Count and Knight emerged from the substance of his being the way fingers emerge from a hand, and they remain connected to him the way fingers remain connected to a palm. When the Demon Emperor wishes to act in the Lands of Stone without crossing the River himself, he extends a hand. Literally.

The old texts describe a ritual through which the Dukes and Princes can channel a fraction of his power into the mortal world, a manifestation they call the Hand of the Demon Emperor, and this manifestation alone carries enough force to reshape the geography of whatever it touches.

The Shamans who first encountered this manifestation did not survive to describe it themselves. Their apprentices described it for them, having watched from distances great enough to preserve their lives but not great enough to preserve their sanity. One such apprentice, a woman whose name is recorded only as Amahle, wrote the following before she stopped speaking forever.

"It reached down from a sky that had turned the color of old blood, and where it touched the earth, the earth did not break. It did not shatter or crack or crumble. It simply stopped being earth. What remained was not a crater. It was an absence. The land itself had been consumed, and the souls of everything that had lived upon it had been consumed with it, and the silence that followed was not the silence of death but the silence of a place where nothing had ever existed to die."

She wrote nothing else. She lived for forty more years and never spoke another word.

The 72 do not invade the Lands of Stone because they must. They do not really cross the River because hunger drives them or because territory compels them. They cross because consumption is what they are. It is not their purpose. It is their nature, the way fire does not choose to burn.

The River of the World holds them back not through strength but through ancient agreements forged in an era when beings powerful enough to negotiate with the Demon Emperor still walked the Lands of Stone.

Those beings are gone now.

The agreements remain, but the hands that enforced them have long since turned to dust. And on the other side of the River, the 72 have been patient for a very long time.

Patience, among beings who do not die, is a terrifying strategy.

- Compiled from forbidden archives across three territories, sealed by order of The Hallowed Voice, The Obsidian Throne, and Emperor Vakochev.