Second God

"We cannot blame it, the purpose of all life is to survive": Noritë

The Second God is the primary antagonist of this world. It is not just a being of evil motivations or similar, but a being fundamentally opposed to other lifeforms on the basis of its own search for survival. The Second God goes by many names. Among them are Corruption, Damat, The Outsider, the Old One.

Origins

The Second God is older than this current world. It is a remnant from a previous world. In an endless cycle of death and rebirth, worlds are born and decline until they meet their end. This all-devouring cycle knows no mercy nor can it be stopped. It is the eternal struggle between the absolute void and the absolute chaos, the existence of everything.
Born from this cycle is the Second God. It originated during the creation of this world, but it is a vestige of a previous world. It is not known how it survived, but it might be a splinter of sentience of a long gone era. It incorporates all the sadness, anger, hate and fear of the destruction of its own world. It keeps on a desperate grasp on life, an eternal will to survive. As such it is stranded in a hostile world, a new world, something totally foreign to where it came from. This being knows no evil nor good, but only survival. This survival is always at the cost of the current world.

Sentience

The Second God isn't a single being in itself. It is a painful amalgamation of the conciousness of a previous world. It definitely sentient and sapient in nature, but it is hard to describe it as an individual or collective being. It has no real personality besides its most basic goal of survival. The Second God, as strategy of survival can however mimic existing lifeforms and communicate with them. As such it can appear as individual beings, copies of people or other lifeforms. It can however also appear as fungal or plant-like organism or simply as smoke or aura.
The beings which are created to mimic existing life appear to have personality almost. They are considered Children of the Second God. It is however unclear whether these children are independent individuals or not and whether they are identical to the collective conciousness or just subserviant parts of it.

Appearances

The Second God

The name Second God was given to this being by ancient Elves. In the elven belief the world is pantheistic. Every being is part of the divine. God is the sum of all beings. All magic and all that is is summed up in this divine equation. Yet barely understanding the mystery at hand, they found something else. Something which was alien and entirely different to everything they had known.
They could not think of something comparable, so they put it in opposition to everything they knew and called it the Second God. Elves also discovered that the Second God radiated magic unlike they had known so far. Some of them tried to harness these powers. It was different from other magic in that it didn't exhaust its user. It was easier and seemingly more powerful. But there was another price to pay. It made them dependent on the powers of the Second God. Soon they were influenced by this being they could not explain. The elves discovered its true nature. A foul abomination, an infection growing on the world itself. Some wanted to eradicate it, but others saw only good in it and allied with it.
This lead to a large schism and a war among elves. Those who favored the destruction of the Second God as they feared it would overtake and consume every other lifeform and those who embraced it and wanted to become part of it.

Damat

The name given to the Second God by the Dwarves is Damat, a term simply meaning "Destruction" in their language. The elves waged a war against the Second God and against each other. The nation of Shatun hat in their entirety begun to embrace the Second God and became those monstrous creatures known as Dark-Elves. It is unknown whether any of the ancient dwarves did embrace the Second God. If asked, every will deny this, so strong is the terror the Damat had done to them.
Damat is the event of near-extinction to the dwarves, at least the northern groups. Southern Dwarves remained likely untouched by the Second God entirely, although this is only a hypothesis and not attested history. The Damat slaughtered most dwarves and erased their cities. It erased their history and identity forever. In the Tonad-Qhoor they stood their last stand and survived. Only a few thousand of them made it, while the rest perished. In the following centuries of recovery they had to reestablish their own society and reconstruct their past. They searched for ruins and tried to piece together what was left. They found walls of texts in some ruins, but were unable to read them. For this reason there is only one dwarven language, Classical Emat, from which all other modern dwarven languages descend.

Corruption

Humans of the late first and the Second Age, the Age of Dauler, refer to the Second God simply as Corruption. It refers to the effects it has on other lifeforms and their percieved status as corrupted and changed from their original being. Dauler made it part of his mission to save humanity to defeat the forces of Corruption. He defeated the remaining Shatun, which had plagues humanity over centuries. Similarly he wanted to drive out any other "corrupted" beings. Amongst them Half-Humans, which were the result of the Second God's powers on humans.

Birthplace

The World born from the Void

Gender

None