Chaos

The Primordial Chaos or Void before/outside Creation was a chaotic stage in the history of Reality and the known Realms which existed before rules and logic were imposed, and which still exists at the edges of things.

Remnants

Primevals are unspeakably ancient and powerful survivors of this age, having escaped definition by man, god or spirit.<ref name="8.1e1">The powers I tap originate from an age of primordial chaos.  When light, land, sea, and sky mingled freely.  As those things settled into layers, animals and other forces took form from the chaos.  Gods gave it structure.  The powers I tap don’t necessarily know I’m drawing on them.  The trick is tapping the right place in the right way, and the result is a flood of whatever it is I’m reaching for.  If I can successfully heal, it’s rarely pretty.  You may get some of that chaos in you, a bit of scale, fur, or wood where you once had flesh. [...] …and in fact, the Abyssal may be related to the same kinds of primordial chaos I tap into, simply refined by time.  The effects are very similar. - excerpt from Vanishing Points 8.1</ref><ref name="PrimevalDoc">Primeval Beasts (Primevals from here on out) are beasts from a time or place where spirit, god, and man were not in a position to identify or clarify them.  They are older than time and since mankind claimed the world for themselves, the Primevals have been driven to the fringes of reality and to the less habitable places of earth, with their existence in these places being secured with wards and countermeasures. [...] Having been around since the dawn of man, the routine and manner of a Primeval has become entrenched enough to become a ritual unto itself, and that ritual has its benefits. - Primeval Beasts doc</ref> They resent humanity for having overrun and destroyed their world.<ref name=":0">They prefer humans as prey, as humans are enemies to the Primeval, and the destroyers of the world the Primeval once knew - a world that was small fires in vast nighttime darkness, and numerous predators that could easily dispatch the primate intelligences.  Because of this stance, they will make humans their target wherever possible. - PRIMEVAL BEASTS PactDice doc</ref>

Demons of the Second Choir, the Choir of Chaos, symbolically oppose this creation of distinctions and seek to return the Realms to a chaotic, uninhabitable state. They are concieved of as opposing the Second Day of Genesis, when the sea and sky were seperated.<ref name="wog">Just double checked something in the story and I did get a 'chaos' and 'madness' transposed at one point.
Each of the choirs are a reflection of the days the world was fashioned, according to the Christian creation story. Light <-> Dark.
Chaos is the second choir. You could call them demons of the void, but that gets confusing with common perception of 'void' and proximity to the choir of darkness. In the Pact cosmology, the 'void' is the world without form. Water and sky are separated into discrete things. In these demons you have the evocative element of things that swirl and storm.
Demons of chaos disturb and throw into disarray. They aren't focused on singular targets, but on areas. They are the Leviathans of demons, wrecking places, not just for humans, mind, but for Others and their realms. They disrupt natural cycles and create others, turning places into traps or hazards of the body or mind. - Reddit comment</ref>

Finders, also known as Chaos Mages (generally to their enemies), work with The Paths - spaces outside and between the known Realms with a limited, dream-like logic to them, filled with the remnants of things that have completely lost connection to conventional reality and clump together with other Lost things and whatever half-formed rules they can find.<ref>Finders work with lost and forgotten things, unpinned from the realms of the physical and even of the spirit.  They tend to interact with the abyss in some form, but only in a tertiary sense - where the Abyss is where things settle when they fall through the cracks in the world, the Finder explores the spaces between realms, and the unformed void that lies beyond them.  In practice, they stray from and explore places beyond the defined paths and spaces, and interact with desperate, nameless, and forgotten things.
[...]
Practitioners who delve into the realms beyond the established are known as Finders, often among one another or to friends, or as Chaos Mages, to enemies and the ill-educated.
Finders were originally known as Dreamers, working under the assumption that the realms they explored were dreamscapes or the dreams of now dead gods.  Many aspects of dreams run through the places and routes a Finder travels; time doesn’t necessarily have the same meaning, continuity is questionable, and areas and denizens of the far-flung realms can be sublime and fantastic in a way reality rarely matches. - FINDERS PactDice doc</ref>

Many believe (although it is difficult to know for certain) the Abyss to be this primordial, chaotic void outside creation, having aquired some degree of form and logic from the things that fell down there, such as lost Demesnes and Gods (and even, to a small degree, individual humans.)<ref name="8.1e1"/><ref>I don’t know everything.  I would venture a guess, fellow practitioner, that it was a demesne once, and it was attached to some vital process of our reality.  Through this vital process, it came to devour other demesnes and objects, and it swelled in size.  It connected to other such areas, and formed the backbone for what might otherwise have been the original void. [...] In the earliest creation myths, void was not nothing, but raw chaos.  Nothing was not a concept.  Void was an endless storm of everything under the sun, a great elemental grinder to churn up all which fell into its reach.  But over time, this place became more civilized.  Gods, you see, fall through the cracks as well, without worshiper or memories to hold them in place.  They sleep inside the walls, and bring a kind of logic to this place.  Demesnes bring memories of their masters.  Every visitor shapes this place in little ways.  The drains are but one manifestation of this essential need the universe has, for healthy entropy. - [excerpt https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/2014/08/02/] from Null 9.3</ref><ref name="11.11e1">“Andy said it’s hard, being a bogeyman.  You spend a while in the Abyss, or Limbo, or whatever name you want to slap onto the ground level of reality, and it chews you up and spits a monster out, right?”
“Something like that.  Haven’t heard it called the ground level before.  Doesn’t seem much like reality.”
“Yeah, I bet,” she said.  “You want Andy for that explanation.  Mayans or someone thinking that all reality was basically chaos and void before the first gods set it straight.  Humans following after, smoothing off the rough edges.  I’m getting bits wrong already.”
“Sure,” I said.  The entire world was essentially like the Drains, in another time? - [excerpt https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/2014/10/04/malfeasance-11-11/] from Malfeasance 11.11</ref>

The oldest Deities once imposed structure on the chaotic universe, creating things from it. Now, however, that task is largely complete and the imposition of logic has been left to humanity<ref name="11.11e1" /><ref>“Sure thing.  Right now, those of us who are canny enough are changing roles.  Used to be we provided definition and structure.  Now your species is doing that for itself.  We’re smaller, we keep more to our own selves and family branches, and we game the systems if we’re smart.”
“Structure, you said?” she asked.  “We put gods under the broad umbrella of structural practices.”
“Your call.  It works.”
“Why does it work?”
“Because we build, we create from raw clay, beams of light, and from ourselves.”
“Create what?” she asked.
“Life.  Weather.  Rules.  We don’t create-create, but you can cut a statue out of raw clay and say you made that, can’t you?  Creating from scratch is a dying art, left to other forces.”

- [excerpt https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/2021/01/09/] from Vanishing Points 8.1</ref> and the spirits.<ref name="PrimevalDoc" />

Description

During this period, the universe was extremely chaotic, but that chaos was relatively unchanging. Pre-sapient angels worked to create the universe from nothing, each a theme spelling things out on the broadest scales.<ref name="Faysal">Once, he had built.  He had been a theme, spelling out a thousand narratives simply by being, like so many pens touched to an endless scroll of paper.  He inked out paths and behaviors on the broadest scale.
When man had come about, he had been reflected in man’s thoughts and behavior.  As man became intelligent, so had the angel.  He had guided man and been guided in turn, a symbiotic relationship.
Man, however, created its own demons.  Some were obvious, while others stirred in the midst of the noise and chaos and took form. Sentiments became figures, fears took form, and in some cases, man abandoned his kind to join the storm of thoughts and ideas.  To become the monster.
The creating ended, and man took the center stage, bringing change to that steady, stable creation.  Born from chaos and noise like anything else, a chance configuration of molecules, man carried that change and chance with him.  Each movement brought change, like a stirring of dust swelling and spreading out from underfoot.

As man’s power waxed, the creators’ power waned. - Excerpt from 14.x (Histories: Faysal)</ref>

In time, the Chaos settled into rough "layers".<ref name="8.1e1" /> Animal life - including humans - naturally arose from chance combinations of molecules. However, the universe remained extremely chaotic and undefined.<ref name="8.1e1" /> Sky, sea, and land mingled freely,<ref name="Faysal" /> as did the different species of plants and animals at first.<ref>[Durocher] taps into primeval spirits, things so old they predate human language, or even the pre-human conception of animals having categories.  Beasts arguably older and more raw than any gods.  No form or boundaries. - Excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.4</ref><ref>They're a big fucking bear/wolf/bird/bramble, and they're always mad. - comment by Wildbow on Reddit</ref> The world was small points of light in boundless night, with intelligent primates easy prey for the beasts that would become the Primevals. <ref name=":0" />

Humans, born of chaos and random chance, brought with them change and ultimately the end of this age. They also brought intelligence, and the oldest sapient Others were born from them or began to reflect them.<ref name="Faysal" />

References

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