Cynosure

In the beginning, when stars were strange and man was prey for greater things, there was Thumeru. Man's first redoubt. The first civilisation. A hidden acropolis carved into the cliffs of the inland sea of Tash, sheltered from the primeval wilderness by the encircling mountains of Urun.

There alone man thrived in watchful peace. Great terraced fields tiered the mountainsides, and rich mines riddled the cliffs. Rude cavern-dwellings were sculpted over centuries into subterranean cities pillared with marble and gold. But as the stars changed and the eldritch faded into legend, so did that noble age. The warrior-kings that defended Thumeru of old became unchallenged tyrants. Dedicating themselves to decadent arts and profane learning they discovered the powers of sorcery, and ruled not over subjects but enthralled or terrified slaves. Mad liche-lords summoned alien spirits from the outer dark to raise the bodies of the dead, or even bound them into living vessels, spawning the first monsters. Cruel hierophants prophesied their reign would last forever, and claimed to speak for the gods. But their power and their knowledge was their own undoing. For they cast their eyes too high, and learnt too much.

In a great and terrible ritual that turned the Tash red with blood, the Thumerian sorcerers made man's first contact with the stars, and gleaned an inkling of the cosmic truth. From that day their reign was ended. For what they had thought their gods, the beings upon whose divinity their authority rested, were revealed as nothing but lesser demiurges. Insignificant fragments of a celestial hierarchy incomprehensibly vaster than the imaginings of human religion. And if man's creator gods were to the High Spheres as insects were to men, what was man in the great chain of being? Nothing. A plaything of playthings. As devoid of purpose as the scraps of meat animated by apprentice necromancers.




In the crazed, blood-soaked hours that followed, the hierophants were dragged from their obsidian palaces and slaughtered, their pretensions of divine authority revealed for what they were. Cataclysmic forces were unleashed as they fought to save themselves with all their sorcerous might, and Thumeru was annihilated, the works of centuries undone in a single night. The only survivors were those far beneath the collapsed cavern cities - the sorcery-twisted subhuman slaves the hierophants had bred to toil in their mines, the things that some call ghouls...

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The Descendants

Unknown eons passed, Thumeru faded into myth and man conquered the surface of the earth. But the star-touched abominations spawned by the sorcerer-kings still festered in the forgotten depths. Trapped under the rubble of their masters' ruin, the monstrous slave-things cannibalised and copulated for a thousand wretched years, burrowing out a vast nightmarish underworld undreamt of by the world above. Mercifully they had forgotten it, save for fearful legends of their ancient oppressors, and the great bright horrors that dwelled beyond the roof of the earth. But reunion was coming. One day the shovels and picks of man broke through into a tunnel system far vaster than their own-

And there are few sights more wretched and pitiful than what they beheld, yet nothing in existence less deserving of pity. They shone their lanterns onto cavern walls hanging with thousands of corpse-haggard things, like roosting bats twisted into a mockery of man, twitching and writhing as they clawed and gnawed at their red-raw, mange-ridden skin. Blind, lidless eyes stared with pain-maddened hate from a thousand misshapen snouts, gurgling and rasping as they struggled to draw each shallow breath, and when they rose their inhuman voices in a hideous cry it echoed through the mine like an army being put to death.

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Psyche and Society

In the wretched, teeming tunnels of the Thumerian underworld, everything is perennially scarce: food, water, light, even space itself. There have been countless hoardlords that have carved out petty tyrannies under the earth by dominating these resources, as many as there are fallen kingdoms and empires in the annals of men. But they are always short-lived, betrayed by their henchlings, for the legacy of their slavish origins is that these subhuman ghouls chafe under any who calls themselves master.

Paradoxically, this resistance was conditioned into them by their sorcerous creators so that they could never rebel. Every one of their kind secretly harbours an ingrained sense of inferiority and worthlessness, which manifests in an unshakeable, paranoid hatred for anyone they suspect thinks themselves their better. Of course they suspect this of everyone. By so mutilating their psyche it was ensured they could never unite in uprising. But the sorcerer lords are long dead, and in the long masterless ages since their downfall this twisted compulsion has formed a culture defined by an obsessive hunger for equity and respect. Ghouls perceive contempt in every interaction, hidden insults behind every word, unfairness in every dealing - and of course the only way to shore up their wounded pride is to lash out just the same. It is unbearable to a ghoul for another to have what he does not, or to achieve what he cannot, and so they exist in a constant state of envy and affront, eagerly tearing each other's petty achievements down. This renders stable leadership effectively impossible, only an endless succession of rabble-rousing demagogues who incite mass rage to topple their predecessor.

Over the claustrophobic centuries a vast body of customs has evolved, allowing the masterless masses to enforce their spiteful judgement on any shirkers or breed-traitors that dare raise themselves above their brethren, even between the fleeting despotisms of the hoardlords. Generation by generation these common ways have diffused throughout the entire underworld, so that now, when the signs are right, millions throng from all the wretched pits of the earth to let their rancour be heard. All matters which the surface world entrusts to Kings and Ministers, the ghouls settle by which side can rally more thousands and make the greater clamour. In principle every voice is heard. In practice none are. Only the Clamour speaks - a snapping, biting, snarling mass of individually powerless Ghouls who bind together to drown out their enemies. It has superseded all other units of society, for outside it one is nothing. All its members fester with secret rage that they - and they alone - are being ignored.