Nimagos
Born as the sole spirit of endings in a family of creation spirits, Nimagos has always resented his role within the cosmos, a role he never wanted or asked for. According to his brother Ardün, their mother, Ynara, had created them as opposites to prove whether creation or destruction was the greater force in the cosmos. Despite his brother's belief in their natural rivalry, Nimagos spent much of his time attempting to create new creatures in the same manner as his brother. Instead, his efforts were met with horror, fear, and disgust among his primordial siblings, particularly his brother who misconstrued Nimagos's efforts as an attempt to undermine Ardün's own supremacy as the spirit of creation. Indeed, Ardün's favorite hobby became hunting down and slaughtering his brother's children despite Nimagos's attempts to hide them from his brother's sight.
As the years wore on, their rivalry grew more and more bitter. Ardün continued to hunt his brother's monstrous children, inciting Nimagos's rage and pain. At one point, Nimagos Unmade his brother's right hand when he attempted to kill his first child, the kraken. In retaliation, Ardün plucked out his brother's eye, just to see if he could. The bloody exchange brought Nimagos's fury to a boil. Seeking to protect his children, he shut them away in prisons hidden beneath his personal sanctum and set to work on a new construction project, one that would have altered the very fabric of existence had his temper not been checked by his youngest sister Ellastrophel, the primordial of mystery and the unknown. Instead, he hid away the fruits of his labor in the deepest cell in his sanctuary.
The violence between the two continued to escalate to the frustration of their sisters until it seemed that they would crack the very world apart with their fighting. Finally, the sisters decided that they had had enough. Calling a truce between the two brothers, they challenged them to work together to devise something new and revolutionary that would showcase both their unique talents in the hopes that such an enterprise would open the brothers' eyes to the gifts each other possesses.
Unable to refuse the challenge, Ardün and Nimagos bent themselves to the task, working tirelessly to conceive of a project that would unite their opposing natures. Eventually, their efforts bore fruit in the form of a new race of creatures not unlike themselves in countenance. Their composition was a marvel of creative and destructive forces, requiring both to sustain life, yet Ardün saw only their imperfections: the weakness of their eyes and ears, the lethargy of their movements, the limits of their strength, the fragility of their form. As such, he refused to bless the creatures with his creation spark and instead told his brother to do what he did best and destroy them while he made a better version on his own.
But Nimagos refused.
Despite their flaws and imperfections, Nimagos loved his newest children for all their wonderful potential and decided to call them humans. Yet without the blessing of a creation spark, his children were inert and unresponsive, though their bodies functioned exactly as designed. Nimagos searched desperately for an alternative solution, but with Ardün having already convinced most of their sisters that Nimagos had sabotaged their project by contributing only destruction, his search for help was in vain. Only Ellastrophel found beauty in his strange new children, just as she had always found beauty in his first creations. Then, one day, Ardün revealed the grand project for which he had abandoned humanity: a new race of gods, called eidolons, one for each of his siblings, even Nimagos. While the Sisters were amazed and delighted by their new companions, Nimagos understood the gesture for what it was: proof that Ardün could have extended the same breath of life to the humans still in Nimagos's care, but preferred to let them waste away to nothing.
Disgusted by his brother's arrogance and cruelty, Nimagos exorcised the shapeless spirit he had been given from his presence, despite its own lack of form or identity, and retreated into seclusion with his sleeping children.
Eons scraped by with only the arrival of a new spirit to replace the one he had cast out so long ago to break the monotony. This being, called Síorladh, who had been raised initially by Ellastrophel, was undaunted by the Unmaker's acidic tongue and glowering silence, instead resolving to wear him down with unflinching kindness and curiosity. As the years dragged on, eventually Nimagos accepted that in order to give his children the life they deserved, he would need to instill within them a touch of the luminous creation spark that filled his other siblings. Armed with his resolve to save his children, Nimagos approached his favorite and youngest sister, Ellastrophel, for support in summoning their mother to gift him with his own spark from the fire of creation.
But Ellastrophel had another idea in mind.
Telling her brother that he must learn to love the unique gifts he had rather than covet the ones he did not, Ellastrophel offered a counterproposal that Nimagos could never have anticipated. Having witnessed humanity's particular strengths and weaknesses in the first days of their existence, Ellastrophel understood that the minds and bodies of these incredible creatures were not built to withstand the inexorable toll of time and entropy. There would come a time and place when each human would need to be released from life, yet if they were gifted with the touch of a primordial to create a soul, that same animate energy would need somewhere to go when it was finally released from the trappings of flesh. They would need death. And Ellastrophel intended to give hers.
At first, Nimagos vehemently refused. How could she ask him to kill her? He would no sooner Unmake himself than bring an ounce of harm to his youngest sister. But Ellastrophel was insistent that this was the only way to accomplish what they both wanted: a chance for humanity to live and a chance to build the greatest mystery of all. In the end, Nimagos acquiesced, and so, they began to conspire. They knew that death would be necessary, not just for humans, but all the myriad creatures that might one day inhabit their tender, young world and need to rest. The problem was that they also knew that such a proposition would be received very poorly by Ardün, who would understand it as an affront to his infinite nature, and would thus seek to control it, exploit it, and bend it to his will. As such, they would have to move quickly and quietly. While such a task might have come more naturally to Nimagos, they both agreed it was too dangerous for him to leave D'neth with Ardün unchecked, and more importantly, Ellastrophel was eager for the task. She envisioned the creation of a series of Gates to guide humanity down the path of reincarnation until they were ready to return to the spirit of Ynara, the mother at the heart of the cosmos. This project would be the primordial's greatest masterpiece, the exploration of what lies Beyond.
The two divine siblings agreed to tell no one besides Síorladh of their plan, so as to prevent any interference in Ellastrophel's transformation, but once the deed had been done, Nimagos could explain her disappearance to the rest of their family. When the day finally came to enact their plan, Nimagos held his dear sister with all the care he possessed in his hands made for breaking as he gently removed the creation spark from her form.
Calamity.
The moment Nimagos sundered his sister's soul, he realized the flaw in their plan and the task that now fell to him. Having had no way to understand or anticipate the gravity of killing a primordial being, neither Nimagos nor Ellastrophel had foreseen that Ellastrophel could, let alone would, be separated from her Tower upon death, the bastion of her primordial power. In the vacuum of her absence, the edges of reality began to warp and blur, the edges of the known and the unknown rippling like waves on the ocean, and Nimagos realized that he would need to bolster his sister's essence by turning her very existence into a mystery or else she might be lost in the Great Beyond forevermore. Rather than telling their siblings as they had planned, Nimagos would have to keep his silence eternally and damn the consequences of his supposed crime. But for now, he had work to do before his other siblings caught up with him. Letting Ellastrophel's body sprawl across the floor in his haste, Nimagos hurriedly divided her spark into thirteen shimmering fragments. Twelve he gave to his children, seeding them with the spark of life freely given by his sister, and the last he released into the ether so that Ellastrophel could begin her work and hopefully stabilize the very foundations of the cosmos. He kissed each child on the head, bestowing them with the dubious protection of an entropic deity, and then he fled.
For many years, he managed to evade his brother who hunted him relentlessly across the world by seeking out the darkest corners of D'neth in which to hide, catching only fleeting glimpses of his beloved children, but eventually the day came at last when Ardün finally caught up to his brother and dragged him before their sisters. As Nimagos stood trial for his supposed crimes, he held the silence he had resolved to keep for his youngest sister. He did not crack or break, not even when he learned that the spirit he had once dismissed so out of hand had not only survived but been raised by Ellastrophel's own hand and had now been pressed into her Tower, forced to take up her mantle in her absence. Though his heart ached to tell the abandoned eidolon what had happened to her beloved companion, Nimagos resolutely held his tongue and accepted whatever sentence his sisters saw fit to pass.
Yet Nimagos did not foresee the verdict they reached. Determining that Nimagos had acted out of jealousy and a desire to gain an edge in the eternal struggle between the two brothers, the sisters decreed that both entities were equally to blame: Nimagos for striking the killing blow and Ardün for giving him a reason. As such, in light of the eidolon's recent and unexpected escape from the Tower of Stars, they would both be sentenced to occupy the Tower together until their sisters felt better about them.
For many long ages, the two brothers spent their imprisonment alternating between pointed silence and all out fighting, but eventually, they both grew weary of the conflict and began a tenuous conversation. Knowing that he had to keep silent about the true circumstances of Ellastrophel's death, Nimagos instead attempted to understand his brother's enmity for him, while Ardün came to realize that rather than battling his brother, he should have been eradicating his sisters to prove his divine dominance. In his mind, the true enemies were the one who had orchestrated their imprisonment, and those who had done nothing to stop it. As Ardün expounded upon his new conviction, his words began to twist around inside Nimagos's head, subtly convincing him that destruction was all he would ever be good for, a creation born to break everything it touched. As his barbed words sank into Nimagos's soul, the Unmaker became convinced that his only salvation lay in tying himself to his brother. And so they decided to strike a pact. Should one of them ever escape their confines, they would do whatever they could to release the other. To seal their bargain, the brothers made a soul pact. To replace the eye that he had once ripped out of Nimagos's head, Ardün removed one of his own and pressed it into his brother's vacant socket. In return, Nimagos sundered his own right hand and gave it to Ardün to graft onto his wrist, hoping that at least some part of him might finally be a part of creating something good. In doing so, the brothers indelibly tied themselves together, body, mind, and soul.
Eventually, their solitude was broken after all. Piercing through the howling darkness, a shard of light from beyond the Cage breached their prison as one of their own human children, a young woman named Rhuel, offered her hand to the shackled gods. In an instant, Ardün rushed for the breach, seizing his chance at freedom, yet Nimagos hung back. Despite his desire to see him children, both human and otherwise, once more, there was yet a part of Nimagos that felt that he deserved his punishment, that believed in his own legend. Instead, he implored his fleeing brother to release his remaining children from their prisons in his sanctuary and then watched Ardün disappear beyond the Gate. As Ardün was pulled from the confines of the Cage, the primordials and eidolons descended upon the cave to slam the Gate of the Tower shut on his heels. In the breath before the Cage was resealed, Nimagos watched this woman called Rhuel, the child he had never gotten to know, be obliterated to ash.
Alone at last in the confines of the Cage, Nimagos was finally able to appreciate the full horror of his prison: the crushing darkness, the pounding silence, the complete and utter lack of sensory input. With Ardün in there with him, there had at least been someone to share the emptiness with, but alone? Nimagos could feel the weight of his inevitable eons press down upon him.
Desperate for relief from his isolation, Nimagos grasped at the ethereal tether that connected him to his brother even from across the Gate. And found horror.
Freed at last from his unwitting imprisonment, Ardün had wasted little time in pursuing his own ends. Mere days after emerging from the Cage, Ardün had sought out the long abandoned sanctuary where Nimagos had conducted his work, looking to release the creatures he had once hunted but that his brother now wished freed. But to Nimagos's growing dread, Ardün delved deeper and deeper into the stronghold until he uncovered the very specimens Nimagos had once thought to hurl at his brother: the Four Sorrows, Hunger, Slaughter, Madness, and Malady. Hardly daring to believe his stroke of luck, Ardün released the contents of a veritable Pandora's Box upon humanity with sadistic delight to officially inaugurate his first contribution to the world post-incarceration: War.
Watching his brother use his own hand to wreak havoc upon their children while laying the blame on his shoulders for birthing such monsters in the first place, Nimagos felt something in him crack. He had given Ardün his hand in good faith in the hopes that it might finally atone for the blood it had shed by crafting something good and kind and gentle. Instead, Ardün was using it to unleash horrors yet unknown upon the very beings Nimagos had fought to protect. Powerless to stop his brother from burning the world down, Nimagos could only watch as the world was consumed by war and suffering.
As the years crawled back, daubed in blood and misery, Nimagos ruminated on his pain and resentment. At last, tired of hurting and being hurt with or without his consent and thinking only of removing the part of him that felt such pain, Nimagos reached into his core and tore out his own heart by its bloody roots.
Leaving the sundered piece of himself bleeding and trembling on the floor of the Tower, he withdrew into further isolation, drawing the silence and the darkness into and around him like a tide until he felt he could drown in it.
There in his darkness Nimagos remained, the wound he had inflicted on himself festering within his breast, fed by the void and starved of a healing hand. As he incubated in his prison, Nimagos came to the understanding that theirs had been a failed experiment, a lost cause of their mother's. Neither he nor Ardün were worthy of their roles; from the beginning, the entirety of their existence, including every choice that had spawned exponential suffering and incited tenacious growth, was a mistake and a waste. Instead, it would be far better for the cosmos if they all simply followed Ellastrophel into death and freed their energy to become something Else. It was on this philosophy that Nimagos brooded until at last, from the very edges of the darkness, there came a sound. A sound that was not quite a sound so much as a presence or the memory of one. Drawn despite himself to the sensation of otherness, Nimagos found a most curious anomaly: an echo of an eidolon's essence. On a surface level, Nimagos understood that he should know whose essence this was, but he found that the name was gone, or rather, not gone, but blotted out, removed. He had a vague memory that the eidolon had once been involved with the Tower in some way, but the details swirled out of his grasp like eddies in an elusive current. For the first time in untold eons, Nimagos felt curiosity stir within him. Seized with the hope that he might have contact outside of the Tower that didn't involve his brother's cruelty, Nimagos plucked the mote of essence free and made contact with the mysterious spirit.
Initial progress with the spirit was slow. The creature did not seem to remember him either, but spoke of its pain and fear with words that might have touched Nimagos's heart had it still lived within him. Instead, he surmised that this eidolon might be the key to his liberation. The longer they spoke, the more Nimagos was able to piece together. This was the spirit he had rejected all those long ages ago. She had evidently been taken in by Ellastrophel and nurtured under her care until the latter's fatal departure. As Nimagos continued to put the spirit's story together, he recalled Ellastrophel's promise to return one day, saying that she had someone waiting for her.
At long last, Nimagos and the spirit reached an accord. She would do whatever she could to release him from the Tower so that he could hunt down his brother and end them both, and in return, [BLANK]. Naturally, his initial attempts to treat with Mora were viciously rebuked. The eidolon had been ravaged and scarred by Ardün's introduction of warfare to humankind. Her connection to the ephemeral world of dreams had resulted in her being inundated with the horrific nightmares of an entire world, thus opening an indelible fissure in the fabric of her being. As the wars between the human clans ground on, Mora began to resent her father more and more for unleashing such agony upon the world. Upon her.
But eventually, Mora gave in and allowed her imprisoned kin to make contact with her in the hopes that he might prove an unexpected ally against her father. Nimagos's offer was simple: help him escape the Cage so that he could permanently Unmake his brother. If the eidolon could help orchestrate a way to release Nimagos from his prison and allow him to deal with his brother, he would allow the eidolon her vengeance against him for all the wrongs he had done her, both directly and indirectly. Nimagos assumed that Mora was creative enough to find a way to destroy him in turn and welcomed the thought of true oblivion. Despite her wariness at Nimagos's deal, Mora tentatively accepted.
Over the long, intervening years, Nimagos watched the world slowly burn through the mote of Mora and the hand he had given Ardün, guiding the former and manipulating the latter. Working together, Nimagos and Mora began to formulate a plan based on their theory To aid in their efforts, Mora entreated Nimagos for a mote of his own essence with which to weaken the renegade creation spirit. Instead, she was testing her own theory for Nimagos's imprisonment. Having successfully removed a piece of himself without being ferried through the Gate by another prisoner, Mora was convinced that there was an alternative solution to their problem: if they could shatter Ardün using the mote of destruction, Nimagos could let the destruction shatter himself as well, thereby allowing him to slip through the cracks of the Cage, leaving behind his still shivering heart, and rejoin the outside world.
It was toward this end that the two divinities struggled for countless centuries, whittling away at Ardün's grasp on his people, his land, and his sanity. Dedicating themselves to nurturing the enmity between Ardün and the other deities, building up the god of war as a growing threat that must be culled. Yet when the stalemate finally broke, it was to herald a catastrophe that neither Nimagos nor Mora had foreseen: Ardün had stolen the mote of destruction and used it to annihilate the rest of the Sisters.
Reeling in the aftermath of the mass assassination, Nimagos scrambled to adjust his plans as the Pillars of Eternity began to crack and crumble in the absence of the Sisters. Moving quickly, Nimagos prepared himself to be equally shattered as the next generation of gods scrambled to assume the roles of their teachers and sent their greatest champions to destroy the god-killer. As his brother was torn apart by the power of his myriad children, Nimagos let the rush of destructive energy sweep over him and shred him apart as well, letting the pieces of his psyche seep out of the confines of the Cage.
Over the course of the next millennium, Nimagos remained at the mercy of Mora to be restored to his former glory so that he could personally Unmake his brother finally and forever. However, unbeknownst to Nimagos, Mora had her own plans in place. Rather than working toward reconstituting both gods for their eventual, permanent destruction, Mora had struck a pact with Ardün to repair his physical form in return for the knowledge of how to rebuild Ellastrophel. As she continued to collect the disparate pieces of the shattered god over the following centuries, she secreted the pieces away into a canopic jar until she could find the right host for her purposes. Finally, after nearly eleven hundred years of searching and testing and searching again, Mora found the perfect candidate for her plans: a lost Iron Prince.
But the plan to extract the last piece of Nimagos's soul went array, and it would be another eighteen years because Mora could at last influence a new candidate to reach into the howling Void and pull out the last mote of the Unmaker's soul. Before the Cage could begin to collapse in upon itself, Mora whisked the young prince to safety and sprung her trap for her former-brother, the death god Síorladh. With the final pieces now in place, Mora could begin her terrible work to reconstitute Ellastrophel and exact her revenge on Nimagos.
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