The Abyss in Mythology
Almost universally, the myths of the world begin not with light but with a dark, formless void. The Greeks called it Khaos — not disorder, in the original sense, but a “yawning void,” a gaping emptiness and abyss out of which the first things emerged; from Khaos came Erebos (darkness) and Nyx (night). The Hebrew scriptures open upon the tohu wa-bohu — the formless and empty earth, with “darkness over the face of the deep” — the unformed state before the first word of creation. This is the abyss in its oldest sense: the dark that precedes, surrounds, and underlies the made world, the ground of pure potential and pure formlessness alike.
Nun, the Formless Waters
Among the names Pandemonius bears is Nun, drawn from the Egyptian personification of the primordial waters — the dark, formless abyss that existed before creation. In Egyptian cosmology Nun was the boundless ocean of chaos: a realm of complete darkness, absolute silence, and pure formlessness that reigned before time, space, or matter. It was, in the words of the ancient texts, “the opposite of order, light and life” — a threatening expanse into which the ordered world could relapse at any moment.
What makes Nun the precise counterpart to Ptah — the name borne by Aetherius — is the relationship between them. Ptah is the maker, who conceives and speaks the world into being; Nun is the formless dark out of which, and against which, that making must be done. The Egyptians imagined the waters of Nun as surrounding the bubble of creation on every side, both without and within — the abyss beyond the world, and the chaos still present at its heart. It is an image that maps with striking exactness onto the two forms the dark is said to take.
The Kingdom of Darkness
Where light and dark are made co-eternal principles, the dark becomes not merely a void but an active and opposing power. This is the vision of the dualist religions. In Zoroastrianism, the spirit of darkness and chaos, Angra Mainyu, stands eternally against Ahura Mazda, the lord of light and order — the two locked in a struggle that defines the history of the cosmos. In Manichaeism, the dark is given a realm of its own: the Kingdom of Darkness, co-eternal with the Kingdom of Light, a domain of disorder and matter set in perpetual opposition to the light it seeks to entangle and consume.
In these traditions the dark is no longer the gentle, generative void of the Greek Khaos, from which creation peacefully springs. It is an adversary — a principle that does not give rise to order but resists and corrupts it. This is the conception of the dark that stands closest to Pandemonius: not chaos as raw material, but chaos as will, a power whose nature is to oppose the making of things and to drag the formed back towards the formless.
Pandemonius in Aethereal Stories — the dark dimensions
In-universe lore. Contains worldbuilding for the Aethereal Stories universe.
In the cosmology of the Aethereal Stories universe, Pandemonius is the sum of the dark dimensions — living dimensions completely devoid of any kind of light, and the source of destructive magic. They exist in a permanent stasis, seeking neither to evolve nor to change. Where its counterpart Aetherius is creative and seeks to unite with the dark, Pandemonius is its mirror in every respect: it is destructive, and set as strongly against change of any kind as the light is for it. It represents the masculine aspects of life — destruction, chaos, formlessness, and disarray.
The dark magic of Pandemonius can be harnessed, but only rarely, with limited success, and always at great cost: those who attempt it are corrupted as a result. It is not a power that can be wielded cleanly, because its nature is not to build but to unmake.
Creation and the Two Forms
For all that it opposes creation, creation can only take place within Pandemonius — because it is the only place where light and dark will ever meet. The dark is the necessary ground of the encounter: without it there is nothing for the light to reach into, and no union to be made. This is the central paradox of the cosmology — that the adversary of creation is also its indispensable condition.
Within a created universe, Pandemonius exists in two forms:
| Form |
Nature |
| The Internal Dark |
The internal and limited dark matter within the universe, of which little is known |
| The External Abyss |
The boundless abyss lying beyond the universe, outside all created things |
The Keeper
Pandemonius is so set against creation that, like the light, it manifests its own power into an avatar — but where Aetherius produces a pair, the dark produces one. Creation requires both male and female, which is why the Creators are always paired; destruction needs no pairing, because destruction is whole. Its avatar is Kaos — the keeper.
Where the goal of the Creators is to create, the goal of Kaos is to preserve the status quo. It is anti-creation: manifested by Pandemonius for a single purpose, to defend the dark against the Creators and to prevent the union they exist to bring about. The full nature of the keeper is recorded in its own entry.
Related Entries
Pandemonius is one pole of the cosmology of creation. For its counterpart, see Aetherius, the principle of Light; for the avatar through which it acts, Kaos; for the avatars it opposes, the Creators; and for the wider structure of the convergence, the Cosmology archive.
Appearances
| Title |
Role |
Notes |
The Divine Library
Aethereal Stories |
Cosmological Foundation |
The principle of Dark, the adversary of creation, and the source of destructive magic. |
