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The Malfeans

The Malfeans are the mad, dead gods of the Underworld. Their twisted nightmares form the black stone of the Labyrinth and whisper to their servants in those moments between sleep and wakefulness, on the razor’s edge of sanity. When they move, the shadowed land beneath the skin of the world is shaken to the roots. Their silence echoes out from the dusty porticoes and balconies of their temple-tombs, to reverberate across the Well of the Void and draw all life and all light one step closer to the stillness they so crave. They are the hatred that inert matter reserves for that strange, chemical reaction that gives rise to movement and thought. They are the gaps between the stars and the shadows beneath the stones. They are the hostile, hateful, vicious world that has no room for humanity’s silly dreams of compassion and justice.

They are dead, and yet they are that which cannot die. It is this paradox that formed the Underworld and all the dark things that followed and sprang from it. Their life was too vast to extinguish, at least within the confines of the great machine that they themselves built, and so they sank below, to rest. But they do not rest. They rot and hate and sleep but fitfully.

They are not similar to their living siblings, the Demon Princes. The Yozis retain much of their cleverness, much of their perception of things. They are able to form contingencies and nested plans and various other mental abstracts in their bids for freedom. But the Malfeans are dead. Their chorus of souls has fallen silent, reduced to pitiful scraps and whispers. Whatever remains of their minds is wrapped in blinding swathes of nightmare and shadow. Their plots are simple and mindless, their intrigues pathetically transparent and this is the reason they must work through their pawns, the Deathlords; they are unable to do any more than blindly claw at the framework of their Creation, dragging the occasional scrap of tapestry down the gullet of the Void.

It is inefficient, to be a dead thing.

On the Countenance of These Mad, Dead Gods

To see a Malfean, in its tomb or in those rare dreams that you dream on moonless nights when all is still and you can barely draw your breath, is to see an archetype. Unlike the Yozi, who are still rigidly defined by their myriad souls and souls-of-souls, the Neverborn are dissolute and hard to pin down. Their appearance alters, depending on who sees them and so, they appear in the way they were killed.

The Mad, Dead Gods Themselves

Him What Waits