...Luminary Oedon is, from the erudite perspective, the most intriguing of his 'fellows'. He remains the only Sibling to exist in the state that is referred to as 'formlessness'... in essence, existing on an even higher plane of consciousness, fully removed from any physical body, form or vessel, (though this does not prevent his creation of limited vessels)...

...Juxtaposed is Luminary Apophel, who is known to possess the vastest body of any Sibling, to retain most of his cosmic presence within it, and to frequently traverse the mortal-physical plane with vessels (this is likely due to practicality; his sheer size makes interaction with the mortal-physical plane challenging). His demeanour towards the mortal-physical plane, however, is comparably unsympathetic as Oedon's, and he has famously never attempted or shown care to take Progeny of his own...

...Oedon was likely involved in, or at least bore witness to Apophel's ascension. This is considering his involvement in a human settlement on the mortal-physical plane that Apophel is known to have ascended from. This particular plane is likely also tied to the disappearance of Ebrietas, as well as Meduellum's remains, though this is impossible to prove - Apophel has forbidden the investigation of the point of his ascension, and his is not a wrath to test…

...curiously, Oedon and Apophel, for all that they are diametrically opposed, spend the most time together of any Luminaries. Indeed, while most isolate themselves and consolidate wisdom for the pursuit of personal ventures, Oedon and Apophel are often on the move, and active within the mortal plane; where one can be found, often, so can the other…

...though there is often a certain disunity between them, likely due to whatever past they share, the two have never engaged in combat. Perhaps this is due to the impossibility of such a thing. Oedon, formless, fights his wars through proxies and metaphysical warping, whereas Apophel has only ever fought by himself; considering his individual might, this comes as little surprise. Still, it is strange, considering Apophel's obviously brutal tendencies, and his… nature as a Sibling, and considering Oedon's clearly evident antipathy...

-Interpreted Excerpts from 'Examination of the Esteemed Luminaries', Brenestien.

Translated for the unenlightened mind by the College of the Tower of Babel.

Note: the excerpt is a paraphrasal rather than a direct translation, for the sake of clarity. Certain passages were also cut, deemed either irrelevant or too complex for the purpose of this excerpt.

Salem has not left her study in two weeks.

Cinder remembers the exact moment. It is seared into her brain. Salem is all-powerful and all-seeing, not a god but the closest thing to it. It is intoxicating to sit next to her, to breathe her air; she suffuses the world with a primeval hate, like the most furious thunderstorm or the most violent hurricane.

They had been at the long table; enormous Hazel and snickering Tyrian and stiff-backed Watts, all gathered. Salem at the head, of course, reposed upon her throne, her dress sleek and black and her hair stiff and pale.

Watts had stood, and begun to tell them - Salem, really - of the recent events in Atlas. An attack of Faunus extremists upon the rich of Atlas, and then a mysterious vanishing of the terrorists, and no follow-up claims, or threats, or ransom demands, or even sightings. As if abducted by aliens. (Watts, of course, wanted to use the unrest to erase the Schnees. Scarcer and more expensive Dust for the Huntsmen, he said.)

And then-

A quiver in the air.

A breath. A curled finger of thought, sliding deep into her consciousness, squirming deeper into her deepest thoughts and her deepest desires and striking her, suddenly, with the image of something old and insidious and formless, stretching over Remnant to swallow it like a cloud swallowing the sky.

She was stiff in her chair. Her fingers twitched but her body was frozen and entombed beyond her will. She was a corpse, dry and cold and still-hearted. Watts staggered and leant against the table, and Hazel hunched over himself.

A curious hum, a laugh, a whisper, and then the finger was gone.

A moment. Less than a second.

An eternity.

She knew, suddenly, a name; a name like a promise, like a vow. A prophetic word. Oedon.

A God.

Salem had been, throughout all Cinder's life, the closest thing to divinity. Immortal and ancient.

But Cinder knew, then, deep in her intestine; she got the great, cosmic gist; Salem was an afterthought. A footnote, at best, or more likely, not even on the page.

There was silence in the room. Sharp silence, drawn so tightly across the air that Cinder expected it to burst. But it didn't; Watts was leaning over the table, his forehead slick with sweat, and Hazel had cupped his skull, and Tyrian was shuddering and grimacing. None of them dared to make a sound, as if there was a predator looming over their tiny bodies, and they were babes in the nest, trembling and mute.

It was deafening.

Her eyes slid, slowly, across the table and past the immense and dark windows, to Salem.

Salem's eyes were wide. Her lip trembled beneath the weight of her breath. Her chest heaved, and her clawed fingers dug grooves into her throne.

Cinder stared at her.

Cinder knew fear well. It was an old lover. Dozens of times, she had leant close to a man or woman, close enough to taste the heat of their breath and the tang of their sweat, close enough to pick out each eyelash that swathed their wide and white eyes, close enough to understand every little intricacy that made up a man or a woman, and to find herself disappointed. Close enough to become their fear.

Dozens of times, she had stood naked and exposed before a mirror, and seen that same fear in herself.

Scared. Salem was scared. Terrified.

For the first time in - she didn't know how long, she realized - Cinder didn't know what to do. She felt, suddenly, deliriously, like a child that had lost a parent. It was an abrupt realization; that the world was much, much bigger than she had ever dreamed, and far less caring. It would always move onwards. She might die, and the world's crooked spin would not stop for her.

"Leave," whispered Salem.

There was no complaint. They stood, slowly, averting their eyes from each other, and shuffled from the room.

Cinder, then, afterwards, had gone to her room, and bolted the door, and had sobbed and moaned beneath a cold, biting shower.

That was the last time Cinder had seen Salem. She had ferreted herself away in her study. Not the library, filled with treatises and academic texts and histories and essays that Salem had saved one by one from scorching by mobs. She locked herself in the real study, the one she kept locked off, the one with the black door that glimmered like oil and the one that gave the air the texture of slick, greasy sweat.

Her followers - Cinder and Tyrian and Watts and Hazel- who had previously found themselves invulnerable and almighty and with knowledge foreign to Remnant and the favour of a Goddess, became dull and listless. They trailed down the hallways of the palace like ghosts; awkward, mawkish ghosts, with shuffling feet, as if manacled, and faintly vacant eyes, as if made of rain-foggy glass.

They ate, they slept, they relieved themselves. Occasionally, they practised their weaponry and their Aura. More often, they lay on their beds, and their brains whirled about that presence. They tested that name and its implications with their tongues, and they found it bitter and startling.

Cinder, once, after she had masturbated for the first time in years - anything, anything at all to relieve her mind of the weight - had lain back on her bed, waist-down undressed and crying. And she had screamed, long and hard, and cursed and wept and smashed her hands again and again against the wall. She felt weak. She felt a child in a cage, or a foetus on a chain. And then she went to eat dinner, and had a shower, and had gone to bed curled beneath the covers, her door locked and her windows drawn tightly shut.

She found herself, again and again, at the door of the study. Its faces leered at her, tongues lolling and eyes glinting, and the air felt hot and heavy and her eyes felt squeezed in their sockets. She would run her tongue along her teeth, and find them slimy.

Each time, she would reach, reach out and press her knuckles against the door. Tell us what to do. Help us. And she would raise her first, but she would never knock. Her fear would churn and burble in her gut, like boiling mud, and she would turn and walk away.

Then, in the late hours of the night - to the extent that there was a night, in Salem's domain, where the sky is purple like a bruise and the sun is a memory - there was a murmuring at her door.

Cinder rose from her bed. If she had caught a glance of herself in the mirror, which she did not, she would have been struck mute at the paperiness of her skin and the oiliness of her hair. She opened the door, firmly drawing her nightgown across her body. A seer floated at head-height, its spherical glass eye churning with black magic.

It turned, and began to drift down the hall. Cinder, undressed and barefoot, followed. The Seer would have waited in the doorway as she dressed herself, usually, but Salem was demanding her presence, now.

The room the Seer led her to was not the main meeting hall. It was someplace she had never been before. The door was stiff and simple, and parted before her with a whispered greeting. She stepped forwards.

The room was shrouded. Reams of thick, pale cloth hung over angular objects, some tall and thin, some stout and round, all shoved lopsidedly against the walls of the room. Cinder's lips twitched, briefly, as she was struck by the thought; a parliament of cloaked furniture to battle the awful God.

There were no lights in the white room, and no windows. Only a fireplace and fire, dimly flickering against the gloom. Salem cut a sharp silhouette beside it, tall and still, eyes glimmering softly in the dark as she turned to examine Cinder.

Her gaze had once made Cinder feel like a worm. Now, comparatively, quite suddenly, it felt tepid.

Still, Cinder curtsied.

"Sit, Cinder," murmured Salem. Her voice was slightly scratchy, and sore. She had spent weeks in complete silence. What would a true God's voice sound like, Cinder wondered?

Cinder walked to a wooden chair; the other three seated her colleagues, each about as well dressed and attractive as she. As she sat, Salem exhaled lowly, and rubbed her hand along the mantlepiece. The firelight waltzed against the black of her dress, and cast her angular face in undulating colour.

"There was precious little of relevance," she said, slowly, enunciating each word with the care of a lecturer, "to be found on Oedon. I could only find the name mentioned briefly in the oldest scraps of writing."

She paused.

"My most important finding was a relieving one. Oedon is not God. Not how I know them."

Cinder paled. Her colleagues looked similarly disturbed.

Salem continued. Her gaze was distant, and focused on the fire. "The Gods are the beginning of everything. They are creators, and though they may adopt the guise of a human they may not become them, and I know them. Oedon and his race are not this. They did not create humanity; rather, they are derived from it. They are an evolution." She pursed her lips. "One text, of the two that I could find, referred to them as the next step of the linear progression of the consciousness. It told that a human may die, and pass, or it may continue, and become something greater. Something like Oedon."

Cinder shifted in her chair. Tyrian tittered, nervously. This felt… sacrilegious. Salem had felt Oedon's breadth, had trembled beneath his deathliness and his impalpable brain, and now declared him a false god.

"Nor is he immortal," she murmured. "The texts referenced the deaths of their brethren. They have vulnerability. So does Oedon. The texts referenced his desire to have Progeny. Children. We can exploit this."

"Salem," said Watts, hesitantly. She turned to examine him, and raised a sharp eyebrow.

"My queen," he amended, and averted his eyes to the floor. "I-and I believe I speak for my colleagues too, when I say this-I question the wisdom of this… this train of thought."

Salem was still. The glow of the fire shuddered against the bridge of her nose, and cast half her face into shadow. Watts bowed his head lower, his thin hands clasped around the arms of his chair. Tyrian chittered nervously.

"And what," she said very, very softly, "would that train of thought be?"

Watts swallowed, once. "Defiance of Oedon, my queen."

Salem didn't reply. The room was quiet, except for the snap-crackle of the fire, and the metronomic Tap, Tap, Tap of her pointed nail against the mantelpiece. Even Tyrian was quiet. The veiled objects loomed over Cinder in the darkness, and she shrunk into her chair; she was struck, suddenly, by the thought that they were all statues, weeping and screaming women, eternally still in stone.

"Do you share this sentiment, Cinder?"

She stiffened. She glanced away from Salem, and fisted her fingers in her gown, even as she hated herself for her fear, for her meekness, even as half of her raged and hissed and spat.

But then she remembered that single, immense moment, the weight of true God's attention, and she knew that whatever Salem might do to her; Oedon would be worse.

"Yes," she whispered. "My queen."

Salem hummed softly. The sound carried, like a low bell. "Hazel?"

He nodded slowly.

She frowned, and turned to Tyrian. Loyal, loyal Tyrian. She appeared greatly disappointed, her lips turned down and her brows heavy. "Even you?" She asked.

He didn't meet her eyes, but he didn't deny it, and that was confirmation enough.

She sighed, once, and turned back to the fire. Her finger Tap Tap Tapped, even and steady.

"My Queen," Watts attempted, head still bowed. She didn't bother facing him. Tap. "Oedon is gone. He left us."

Salem smirked into the flames.

"No. He remains. I can feel him, lurking on the edges of the world."

Watts stuttered. Cinder felt her heart stop.

"In truth," Salem said, "the texts were not particularly helpful. They were scraps from translated and simplified excerpts, and if my suspicions are correct, written by something similar to Oedon. They assume knowledge I lack. What I do know is this; he, like the Gods before him, is uncaring. Aloof. Why shouldn't he be? To him, we are like foetuses. The Potential for sentient and conscious life, but nothing more." She wagged her finger. "And he is here for a purpose, you may be sure of that. If all life on Remnant was between him and his goal, then that goal would be his in a second."

"Then why fight?"

Salem narrowed her eyes against the fire. Cinder licked her lips, swallowed, and began again. "If he is so powerful, and so beyond us, then we should ignore him and hope he ignores us, and if-"

Salem looked at Cinder. Her heart pounded and her breath skittered, but she met those red eyes with her own.

Salem smiled, like a parent telling their child not to jam their fingers inside a boiling kettle.

"What is to be had by ruling ash and dust, Cinder? And your motivation to be rid of him is more pressing, I'd imagine." Her lips twitched upwards, barely. "Unless you'd like to die?"

Cinder paled, and shook her head. A slight reminder of power, the little whisper of threat; Salem was an old hand at that, and rarely a day went by that she didn't remind Cinder of her place. She fell quiet, and was cowed.

So was Watts, and Hazel, and Tyrian. They sat with bowed heads and pinched throats. The robed figures towered in the gloom-heavy corners of the room, and the firelight flickered and giggled on their laps and shins.

Salem sighed.

"The texts mentioned, at great length, another being - one named Apophel. He is supposed to be a sort of companion-piece to Oedon, if one that is diametrically opposed." Her smirk was sour. "Like the old gods, perhaps. The text states that Apophel commonly takes human form."

Cinder stiffened. So did her colleagues. They knew, now, why she had summoned them. "M-my queen," she stammered, but Salem continued regardless.

"You will search for him," she said, "as I look into Oedon. We must know our field of battle. What stance Apophel will take-has taken, perhaps-and if he could be persuaded to battle against his brother." Her smirk was long and disdainful. "Approach this as you would a hunt for Ozma's new form."

She looked at them. Her eyes burned. Her hands were clasped; clawed fingertips against skull-white skin. She smiled. "Will there be problems?"

No one spoke. The fire hissed and barked.

"Good," she said. "Leave me."

Slowly, with shuffling feet - they did.

Cinder, before she shut the door behind herself, glanced over her shoulder. Salem, by the fireplace, was a long silhouette, blending like an ink-blot into the stooped and white figures that lined the wall. She was hunched against the fireplace, and she looked, suddenly, incredibly small; like Cinder had been, drawn vacant on her bed, or curled in the bathtub.

Then she glanced up at Cinder, raised an eyebrow, and it was gone; just like that.

Cinder shut the door, and walked back to her rooms.

Salem's motivation is twofold. She doesn't want to see the world die - it will leave her nothing to rule, and worse, will leave her utterly alone again on Remnant's corpse. Though Salem's character has not been explored much, beyond her backstory-she, interestingly, sits in a strange place between absolute villain and sympathetic villain-I imagine that possibility to be central to her deep fears. It would certainly be to mine.

With this interlude (End, then Beginning, hey?) the core of the story begins. The plot, if you will. Exciting times coming.

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