The Unnamed Planet.

History and Ancestry. (This will cover how the Slithen came to be, their world, and their pack-like mentality. This is another realm entirely.)
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===Before the coming of the great heat===

The planet was unnamed, and dying. It was a time of change, an arctic hell. Jungles froze, animals died in piles, an entire ocean lay silent and unmoving.

Yet creatures survive. Users of magic of all sorts, tall, dark-skinned and fair. Science had never been found. Long before the coming of the ice had they built into the earth a mind-boggling expanse of tunnels, rooms, and great stacked lengths dedicated to growing as far as the eye could see. They lived on, using magic to heat the earth around, feed the plants their light, and exist merely to continue existing. The magic came with a toll, every person taxing their own body to serve the greater good.

Slowly the magic of Good and Grey began to elude their grasp. Hundreds of years passed. The creatures had become pale... thin and gauntly, a hollow and unforgiving reminder of the challenge they faced. They dreamed of things they had never seen. Plants that fed off of a massive light in the sky that none had to devote their own energy to. Warmth that cradled them from the very earth around. Wind, caressing them, a heated sea that was filled with something called fish that tasted of something called honey... all but bedtime stories.

Finally the ice ebbed away. The ocean flowed. The creatures had not won yet...for as they found the surface, they found it desolate. No creature survived the great ice, and none would return for an untold and endless time. The creatures that knew nothing but artistry and tales of the past had to bring it back to life... using Chaotic, Dark magic. A mix of necromancy upon the bones and dead seeds, a touch of chaos to aid... or horribly fault a nearly impossible task. A half of their numbers died attempting to bring back the world they had so craved, so needed as one needs the air.

Victory! The planet had come restored, through the tireless struggles of a race unwilling to fade. The victory would last but a hundred years... a beautifull time of utopia, surrounded by the very things they had called back from death itself. Fish spawned freely in countless numbers. Bats signaled the rising moon and birds awoke them to its waning. The final gasp of life in a doomed place.

===The Horrid Heat!===

Then came the heat. Icecaps melted, flooding much of the lands. Small patches of sand became endless expanses of merciless heat. The shift of the planet went from one extreme to the other. Some claimed the gods would destroy them for returning the creatures they killed to life. Others believed it to be caused by a demon. Neither where true. It simply was. As the flowers bloom and die, so would the planet. So would the very sun some day.

The jungles had not completely vanished. Animals became crumbled bones, unable to find what few places still remained. The magic users faught a great war upon the deserts, one believing the other to be the cause, the other believing it to be 'Gods Will'. Twenty years passed. Only one jungle remained, sheltered between two massive mountains, hidden in partial shade for those few hours of the day, yet still given enough light to live on. It too, was beginning to wither and die.

The last hundreds gathered for one final strike. After using magic for so long, after surviving so much... one last ditch effort plan would call upon them all. A massive spell, weaved by the desires and longings in the hearts of all. They only knew of Chaotic-Dark magic now, and chaos would finally doom them all.

A great festival before the end, as some knew it to be, and others blissfully dreamed of a fresh start. The planet did not stop spinning. There was no earth-shattering boom. Not a sound was to be heard but the birds chirping at the sun. The center of the jungle collapsed into an endless abyss, falling the length of a moon into pure nothingness: what had once been the tunnels and just moments before the place of the spells summoning. Maybe they went to another place... finally found a way out...


That concludes the forming of the 'deep abyss'.

The forming of the Slithen. (Time operates differently under the hand of a force of pure magic. Keep this in mind.)
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Those that needed a hidden place away from the sun, those feral, scared creatures left to wither with the plants and bugs above, cradled with each other along the rim of the massive hole. Bats. Any that ventured into the darkness found only more darkness, and more still.

A magic beyond any conceivable magnitude lay in the endless abyss. Whatever the creatures had done, whatever foul chaos they summoned or attempted to control, embedded but a small portion of itself into the walls of the moon-sized 'cave'. That mere nibble of chaos, of the /true/ power of chaos, breathed life. Massive spires shot from the walls and the skies and the ground somewhere so far below. In but a months time, just as the jungle above had baked in the sun and the only animals left huddled within the cool embrace of the Abyss, the empty space became filled. Forests of wild spires twisted and shrank, grew and branched off without rhyme nor reason, feeding off of the energy. Smooth, like crystal and glass. Glowing in unmeasureable number as subtle blue or green.

With the spires came the small beasts, manifested through a touch of luck and a whole lot of disorder. Sometimes the bats would be forced in dire starvation to gather as one force, to take down strange beasts as big as trees. They would have died off, had it not been for the energy itself and its need to expend. Chaos gives way to order, and even as it threw itself upon them, that tiny bit of what had been summoned, it still had so much to use.

Fifty years passed. The bats grew in strange ways, forming close-knit groups to venture into the Endless. Organs shifted, eyesight dulled to allow something so much better. Almost humanoid by now, able to swiftly sail even in the chaos of the spires, twisting and turning to duck and dive as game wilst chasing small rats and bugs. The energy desired to be gone, to once more join the greater disorder that is the base for all existence. Portals opened and closed as quick as the blink of an eye and as long as a minute, spewing horrid beasts from a strange realm of fire and brimstone.

If the now-humanoid bats attacked the Demons, they would die in large number. But if they let the creatures to run free, then too many would gather... the end to small tribes. Weak demons came far many more then pure, simple creatures filled with the blood of hate. And so the early Slithen learned to use the fire of hate and pain against the very creatures that slaughtered them. In the packs, the Alpha was the Slithen that chose to use the most blood, to drive itself to utter madness for its underlings, its mated females.

The packs held tightly to an instinctual code built from the need to survive. Protect the young and the pregnant above all else. Keep the most powerful (the Demon Hunter) calm after the hunts. Challenge for an upper rank within the pack at great peril, and to interrupt it would mean near instant exile. Intelligence built into the creatures, formed within them to face the demons. Strategy, speed, and heightened senses became the most important things. Hunters died often, but not from the demons. Tainted blood lead to insanity, lead to charging into the very portals that birthed the fire-blooded creatures. None ever returned.

100 years passed, dancing between the brink of extinction and stubborn will to go on. The hundreds few that remained, the most skilled. The most deadly with and without the fire-blood. The most determined to see their loved ones live another day... love: Something that had snuck its way in as if by chance.

Newborns could instinctively use echo location and the eight vocal cords they possessed without thought. The very thing that took their 'early' ancestors a hundred years to master. A massive dip in the necessity for heat to power their bodies. An organ to allow the storage of demons blood, and a tolerance to its use. Females and males became one by the grace of the Chaos, as if it had some plan, yet always spawned more and more deadly demons: More often then not, pure. Horns grew upon their foreheads, eyes filled with black: A hint of the endless demon eating... yet it never seemed to distort them too far. Always on the brink of death, yet always becoming swifter, more precise, quicker of thought...

But not without weakness. Frail of body in favor of agility, the quick strike of many over the one strike of few. The numbers and the tactics to overpower and confuse the prey. Only twice did a Greater Demon wretch itself from a portal, not even yet of the Warrior cast. The light that burst from its body and the 20 foot long flames that it so easily manipulated took far too many. A traumatizing blow to their numbers, etching fire into their minds and instincts.

In this place, there is no grass. Nothing to be cultivated, nothing to be made into something else. Just a never ending forest of glowing crystaline tree. Only the screams of those that would kill you before you kill them, and the threat of something more foul behind it... in wait. The sun shows its face only once in great time, filtering through sandstorms from the hole in the dead planet. Cold, dark, and yet still so full of the struggle for life.

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===Most recently.===

The Dark Chaos turned into not but Chaos. Portals opened for beasts of all sorts to fall through. Cows, humanoids, creatures far stranger then even he Slithen. Still, if they could be eaten, they would be. If they became the hunters, the Slithen would mass to destroy the threat. Demons still spawned daily, but other things as well. Once in a great while a portal would appear to jump at one of them, as if yearning to be used... yet they knew... you enter the gates, you never come back. It was instinctual, a fear-based truth that etched into them from early ancestry.

In numbers they could hunt anything that used not magic, yet numbers mean so little when only a bare thousand remain: Scattered in the moon-sized abyss. The Slithen could encounter a plague any day, or a Warrior demon, or simply a creature not made of physical body to destroy them. Chaos remains the thing that dictates their survival... and so far it has been kind, shaping them into a new breed of beast.


Concluded. Post any questions,concerns,or just to tell me to stopstaying up so damn late. ^_~