Lore: The Birth of the Abyss

In the earliest days of creation, even before the gods and primordials began their terrible war, one god was not content with sharing power—he wanted absolute control over the nascent universe. This god, whose name is spoken only in panicked whispers, sought a source of power he could use to gain total dominion over the unfolding realms of creation. Somewhere in the infinite expanse of space, he found the weapon he sought in the form of a tiny shard of utter evil.

The touch of the shard drove this god to madness, corrupting him so completely that he was no longer recognizable as his former self. Never the less, he carried the crystalline fragment into the depths of the universe—into the lowest reaches of the primordial vastness that would one day become the Elemental Chaos—and planted it there.

Evil took root like a foul seed of corruption, burrowing deep into the unshaped matter of the Elemental Chaos and spreading unholy tendrils far and wide. A yawning chasm of infinite gloom and despair opened up at the lowest pit of creation, swallowing all matter and light, defiling anything that drew near.

The Abyss was born...

The evil of the Abyss corrupted even some of the mighty primordials— Demogorgon, Baphomet, Orcus—and reshaped them into the likeness of pure destructive evil. The mad god hoped to wield these demonic princes as weapons in his war of conquest, but they would not bend to his will or any but their own.

So he left the Abyss and marshaled other elemental forces in his bid for domination, but the other gods overcame him, chaining him forever in a secret place known only to them. Now he is called the Chained God, or by his demented followers, the Elder Elemental Eye. His only desire is to escape his prison, and he rarely spares a thought for the realm he inadvertently created.

But the Abyss remains, a festering cyst beneath the Elemental Chaos. Within its lightless depths, demons erupt into birth, live out their short and violent lives, and are reabsorbed into the darkness. Demon princes rule their petty Abyssal domains, scheming to destroy the gods and all their works. The god Lolth hides in the Demonweb Pits, corrupted and perhaps driven mad by the same power that shattered the Chained God and made the first demon princes.

And somewhere far beneath all imagining, the crystalline Heart of the Abyss still beats its unceasing cadence of evil.