Crushing Depths
There are many tales of Creation’s deep oceans, past the point where the light of the Most High can reach, tales of divers and even the grand submersible vessels of the Golden Age feeling the weight of water upon them grow to such intensity that they crack and are lost. Laypersons, even sailors, oft attribute such things to the deeps themselves, but some savants know the truth.
Once, there were gods of these ocean depths, their days spent carefully monitoring the pressures of the deep, the strange denizens of those depths. The Celestial Bureaucracy had little consideration for these spirits, as their place was far from light and attention of the Unconquered Sun and prayer and the great city of Meru, but they found favour with others: the occasional brave Lintha or member of the undersea races who dove deeper than most, but most importantly the two great beings who would move through those depths, one to indulge the heart of the seas the other to embrace their darkness: the great Primordials known as Kimberry and the Ebon Dragon.
Unlike the gods above, who balked at the disruption caused in the wake of their Primordial masters, the gods of these deeps reveled in them, for they broke the monotonous repetition of their duties, rippling their courts with new questions and new opportunities.
When the gods rose in rebellion and the Primordial War broke out, these deep gods did not join the Most High who had never deigned pay them heed before, but stood by the old ways and the Primordials they knew. Distant from the rest of Creation, they participated little in the War, continuing to fulfill their duties in expectation the far-away dispute would be quickly resolved.
When Sol Invictus emerged victorious, the Celestial Bureaucracy was remade, and those who had not followed his rebellion were purged without mercy. The gods of the depths were declared forbidden, their names and departments wiped from the ledgers of Heaven, the Most High swearing to obliterate any who dared come into his light.
Thus were born the Crushing Depths.
These broken spirits still exist, much as the chittering things condemned to the caverns deep below Creation’s soil, dwelling only in the deepest, blackest depths of the Western Oceans where sunlight cannot reach. It is these spirits that a diver must fear should she descend to the deepest ocean floor, for the Crushing Depths roam their domain filled with seething, bitter rage for all things from the surface. When they come upon an interloper, their wrath is visited immediately and directly, with a crushing force that can shatter bones and (should enough of them come together) break armoured hulls.
