The Infernum was not designed. It was not a punishment forged by an angry creator. It formed naturally — the way water finds the lowest valley — because balance demanded a floor for what could not rise. When the rot of the first souls pooled at the lowest place creation had to offer and stayed there, Hell was what stayed.
For its floor to hold, one of the thirteen Gods had to descend with it. Varythos did. He was not exiled. He was not corrupted. He embodied the darker arithmetic of a living universe, and his rule of the Infernum is, in the long account, the lid on the well. Without him Hell would be uncontrolled. Without Hell, Hell would be everywhere.
Below him, in slow ranks, the demonkind move. Mindless husks. Semi-conscious wraiths. Beasts that fight and cannot speak. Generals that command. Ascended demons, rare and powerful, that come up out of the lower vaults only when something old has called them.
Krozar, Archangel of Destruction, dwells here now as Varythos's strangest weapon — a brother to the Light who emptied his own world end to end and was blessed a second time at the bottom of the well. He has not, in this chronicle, yet moved. He is no longer uninterested.
