There is a start point to existence. A moment zero, from which time can be measured. Physicists on this realm, which the locals call Earth, and the enlightened seem to call St. James, call that event the Big Bang. The moment when the Universe began.
The enlightened know a little more than that. They know that moment zero happened when Cornelius created the Logrus of Thelbane. Reality sprang into being. A Realm grew up and surrounded the Logrus. Chaotic shadows of that Realm swirled into being and congregated around the the Realm. And a Great Big Black Hole sat at the heart of that Realm, leading back into the Abyss. Note that I said back into the Abyss. Cornelius didn’t make that. It was already there.
It’s beginning to be accepted in certain enlightened circles, that existence as we know it is not an original concept. The current running theory is that existence as we know it is on its tenth cycle. This means that there have been nine previous creation stories, and nine previous ends of the world. Cataclysmic, everybody dies, everything gets destroyed, ends of the world.
Except that not everything gets destroyed. Not everybody dies. Because, ever since the first time, there has been the Abyss. The remnants ended up in there. The particularly Powerful, the particularly Resilliant, the particularly Nasty. Those that either wanted to badly enough, or were too big to die, or in some cases, just didn’t notice everything falling apart around them, those people ended up in the Abyss.
Pretty much, as far as I can tell, it’s all Apothicon’s fault. You might know of him as YHWH. It’s always spelled with capitals for him – his ego is that big. He made his wonderful world, with Adam and Eve and the angels and the Garden of Eden, but somehow, things ended up going a different way to what he wanted, and he decided to scrub it all and start over again. Thing is, by then it wasn’t just a man’s world. In order to do it all again, he needed the First Woman to help him, and she couldn’t bring herself to just let it all die. So like it has always been ever since, she helped him do what he wanted, but something else happened too. That something else was the Abyss. The Abyss was formed as a result of the death of the first cycle of existence.
Since then, every cycle of existence has floated in the Abyss. As the cycles have got bigger and more ambitious, the Abyss has grown too, from the ashes of the cycles that went before. The original Abyss is pretty much unreachable from anywhere in existence. There are layers of newer Abyss in between that gave to be gotten through first.
And there is the Waters. The Abyssal Waters are the means by which the first cycle died. Noah’s flood. Apothicon got with the First Mother, and they had a daughter called Maré, and her job was to drown every living thing and cover the land with water, except for the people riding in Noah’s big boat. But there were some pretty major living things by then. The Grigori had been fucking their way through the human populace creating Nephelim by the bucket load, and when those things started getting drowned, there was more death energy than Apothicon wanted to use in his second Creation, so Maré begged her mother for some help with this extra energy, and the Abyssal Waters were formed. From that point on, whenever a creation story talks about deep waters from which things were pulled out, or born out of, or crawled out of – well now you know what they are talking about. Fall down far enough, and you end up in the Abyssal Waters. And there you stay, trapped, drowning in that moment between life and death, for all eternities. There’s no escape. Release has to be in the gift of someone else.
It is worth mentioning, at this point, that the Abyss is a totally matriarchal environment. Being as it was, founded by effectively three women, a mother and two daughters, only women can rule there. Men are regularly sacrificed in rituals to preserve and perpetuate life, and the most potent such sacrifices come from red-headed men.