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Yaldabaoth — Description

There's one particular aspect of ancient Mesopotamian cosmology that I have always found fascinating: the idea that there is no Heaven, there is only Hell. There was a heaven, but only gods live there, humans don't go there when they die. Even Gilgamesh, the first protagonist, two-thirds god and one-third man, king of all he surveys and slayer of the cedar woods, was still unavoidably bound for the cold, clammy depths of Irkalla. Once dead, the only law of the land is how many people on the surface above remember or care enough to drip feed you libations through the ceiling of soil. Heaven forbid your memory is forgotten, for then there is nothing left of you to save, and you're reduced to a dirt-eater, ruled by a wailing queen who claws her own skin off in grief of her own lost loved ones. It's fascinatingly pessimistic, and it's something that's trickled down into my own Heathenry. My queen is the half-corpse goddess who will lead the dead against the gods when stars advance and consume the Earth, pure, equalizing vengeance for all the crimes committed against the innocent by those mad enough to think they can live forever.
People often look at me like a head-tilted puppy when I tell them this is what I believe, that the world and its authors are not inherently good, and that the world we live in was designed from the start to have cruelty and misery baked into it. Our Western culture, so rooted in Biblical trauma, is used to convincing ourselves that this is all for something, that everything bad that happens is a test of our own moral strength and that there's some reward guaranteed for our labors at the end. I, in turn, look confused at everyone else. It surely takes only a glance outside your window to see this is not a world designed with life in mind, that we like the starving fox are intruders, and the oppressive force of entropy has no tolerance for our resistance against it. Cows die, family die, one day so too will you, and the reputation you left is no more immortal than the flesh of your bones. Nothing is so sacred that it's permitted to last forever, not even forever itself. Nature has but one, fundamental rule: you may eat of any fruit in the garden, so long as you bite and claw and maim for it yourself. I don't believe the existence of a game automatically implies the existence of a prize.
Indeed the Bible itself, the Old Testament certainly, is not under the same impression about the omnibenevolence of the god which half our planet's population worships. Ask only the Egyptians how kindly the God of Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob, received them in his arms. This god struck the water that is in the Nile and turned it to blood, plagued their whole country with frogs, turned the dust of their earth into gnats. He sent swarms of flies on their king, their officials, their people, and their houses. He struck with a deadly pestilence their livestock in their fields, caused festering boils on humans and animals throughout their whole land, sent the heaviest hail that has ever fallen on Egypt since the day it was founded. He brought locusts into their country that covered the surface of the land so that no one was able to see the land, stretched darkness over the land of Egypt, a darkness that could be felt. Then at midnight, every firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne, to the firstborn of the female slave who is behind the handmill, to the firstborn of the prisoner who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock, had their lives extinguished at the presence of this god. There was a loud cry throughout the whole land of Egypt that night, such as has never been or will ever be again.
Now, we can argue until the cows don't come home about how much of the Exodus as related in the Biblical account, if any at all, is in any manner historical, and the Egyptians themselves certainly hadn't grown up on this story at all, but either way it wasn't an old wound. There was a Jewish playwright named Ezekiel the Tragedian, living in Alexandria around the second or third centuries BCE, who produced an adaptation of the Exodus story in the form of a Greek tragedy, aptly titled the Exagoge. Why he would do such a thing is anyone's guess, his work and his existence, despite being the first recorded work of Jewish stagecraft, only survives in fragmentary citations from later centuries. Some think it was a progressive act of creation, blending two cultural touchstones together in a time when unification was desperately needed. Some think it was an act of rebellion, appropriating Greek theater to call attention to discrimination and shared suffering among the Jewish population. I personally think he was just a dumbass who couldn't read the room through his artistic vision, as all of us moronic theater kids are. Scandal and pushback was frankly inevitable when you sell tickets to an Exodus play to Egyptians in Egypt.
The Egyptians shot back with an insult of their own. To them, the God of the Hebrews was none other than Set, the donkey headed god of chaos, the wasting desert, and (probably most relevant in this particular failure of race relations) foreign peoples. Set, whom the Greeks called Typhon, was the jealous brother of Osiris, whom he tricked into a box, chopped up into little bits, and chucked sporadically around Egypt in ancient days. He also deserves his own blurb some day. Tacitus, writing in the same generation as a Josephus trying desperately to work damage control (his exact retort is “an Egyptian ought by no means to have thrown it in our teeth”, I love that), inverts the Exodus story into a parody of itself. During the reign of… Bakenranef of all Pharaohs, the Oracle of Amun is consulted about a leprous outbreak plaguing the land, and the solution is to just round up all the Jews and push them… somewhere else. Moses here only takes command after they all get kicked out and determine that God is no longer with them, and so they instead erect an idol of the very ass which led them to water in the desert in their temple, slitting the throats of rams as a sacrificial spurn against their banisher Amun. Plutarch meanwhile throws in for completion's sake a version where Set, banished from Egypt by Isis and Osiris on the back of a donkey, set adrift in the desert for seven days vowing his return and his revenge, bore two sons named Hierosolymus (“Jerusalem”) and Judaeus (“Judea”). It's not flattering. Neither is the Exodus story mind you but two wrongs don't make a right. To put the cherry on top, our oldest artistic depiction of Jesus in the entire archeological record is the Alexamenos Graffito, scratched into a wall in Rome sometime by the 3rd century at least. It depicts what the inscription says: “Alexamenos worships God”, and his god is a crucified criminal with the head of an ass. This was… an extremely offensive insult towards what was probably just a little boy's neighbor, what an oddly specific historiographical legacy.
The point is that there was plenty of contemporary contempt for the God of Abraham circulating to lay the foundations of a character. Today's character comes from an explicitly Christian context, but not any Christianity you're thinking of, those today are just the only clade left in a phylogeny. There's an extinct sister taxa to all extant churches which we paraphyletically refer to in scholarship as “Gnosticism”. This was not what the people who practiced this religion called themselves, this is a term nerds came up with to lump together a collection of texts deemed heretical by the early church fathers like Irenaeus. Indeed it's from folks like Irenaeus chastising these people's hyperfixation on seeking salvation through “gnosis” (meaning “knowledge”, Paul uses this word a lot) rather than through pure faith, that we extrapolate this term. It doesn't necessarily mean that any one of these “Gnostics” believed the same canon or even saw themselves as one church. Their terminologies, their philosophies, and their mythologies are similar but not always congruent, and for a while all we had of what they believed to be deemed heretics in the first place was what their enemies wrote about them. Modern scholarship had all of three fragmentary Coptic manuscripts to examine the Gnostics' own writings before 1945: the Bruce Codex, named for the Scotsman who purchased it in Egypt in 1769, the Askew Codex, held by the British Museum since 1785, and the Berlin Codex, which turned up in 1896. It was a good start, but it was nothing compared to the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library, a 4th century stash of Coptic manuscripts found in the eponymous manuscripts. Because of this major archeological breakthrough, we now have a collection of 13 codices with 52 mostly Gnostic writings to examine and contrast. I write these essays within the span of a week or two though, so before I break my back trying to whittle that corpus down to points which are most important to today's character, let's get some theological background on what (to the best ability our surviving information allows) the Gnostics believed.
This is 1 Samuel, chapter 15 verse 3:
“Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”
This is Luke, chapter 6 verses 27-32:
“Love your enemies, do good by those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If one strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.”
Depending on the nuance of your theology, a practitioner of the Christian faith might feel expected to take at face value that these two quotes came from the mouth of the same character. I personally, admittedly as a non-Christian, see no issue with this. These quotes come from two books which were written some six hundred years apart from each other by completely different authors with completely different intentions. That gulf of time is a strawman I'd usually present to a believer in a discussion like this. People, even gods, change as we age, for worse or for better. I'm not the same stupid kid I was in high school, I'm not the medically-challenged wreck I was in college, and I'm not even the same person I was yesterday. Steve was a little old testament, but he's been trying to change. He knows he's not a good dad, but he loves his kids, that's what's always brought him back around. Isn't that the point of the rainbow in your relationship with this god? To tell you that even God has to say I'm sorry sometimes? That he can?
Or, if you've really got a hard-on for no God is omniversal and beyond time and thus just kinda does all these interactions with his characters at once no matter how nonsensical it makes him sound, you can always just jump on Marcion's bandwagon. Marcion of Sinope was a Christian living in Roman Pontus in the second century CE, which was itself a mounting curiosity that had to be dealt with, because Marcion was a Greco-Roman citizen, and thus had no preconceived attachments to the deeply cultural text of the Hebrew Bible. Irenaeus cracked down on his ass for proposing that since the god of the Old Testament and that of the New are so irreconcilably different then they must be different people altogether. Marcion argued instead that the god who created the world in Genesis is the very god from whose law the Christ had come down to discharge us of. He referred to this antagonistic spin on the God of Israel as a “kosmokrator”, which in Greek means what it sounds like as its English loan, “cosmos-creator”.
The Valentinians, specifically Ptolemy the Gnostic in his Letter to Flora, would rebrand this title to “demiurge”, presumably because it sounds cooler. Literally meaning "public worker”, the Greek word “demiourgos” usually refers more practically to any craftsman or tradesperson, i.e. a literal world-builder. Plato first used this word in a philosophical sense back in the 4th century BCE, in his Timaeus, the same place Atlantis comes from, take that as you wish. Plato presents an argument here that the world around us and the laws of physics as we've come packaged with are made by a craftsman, a “demiurge”, who is pure of heart, eternally good, bla bla bla. As such, Plato doesn't consider any faults within the creation itself to be the fault of this creator because the creator is a good person who wants their universe simulation to be the best it can possibly be within the constraints of the worldbuilding it lays out for it. It's elegantly sympathetic, but of course we can't have that under the assumptions outlined above, so let's shift gears towards Valentinus himself so that we can finally start diving into our primary sources.
Thus we come at last to Valentinus, a Roman-Egyptian theologian operating in Rome in the second century CE. He'd even been a candidate for the bishopric, meaning there's a timeline out there where Valentinus was one of the first popes (for as much as that title meant anything back then). Someone else got the job instead though, so he decided the next best thing was to funnel all of his charisma and intelligence into worldbuilding. He's often mentioned in the same breath as a text we refer to as the Gospel of Truth, which I find titteringly unsubtle, like oh thank the gods here I thought I was stuck reading the Gospel of Lies, the alternative will be so much more practical! Whether or not Valentinus himself actually composed the version unearthed in the Nag Hammadi Library is one of those things which just can't be confirmed nor denied with what's available to us. It's not important, because now we finally have a segue into cracking that library open and extracting that sweet sweet loooooooooore.
The Gospel of Truth sets its mythology in a realm called the “Pleroma”. That literally means “fullness” but the New Testament and by further extension the Valentinians use it more like… “fulfilledness”. Again consider a verse like Matthew 5:17, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill”. In Gnostic cosmology, the Pleroma is sort of… the manifest abstract concept of completeness of existence, both spiritual and physical. No, even I don't know what I'm talking about sometimes. This definition of existence lives in the rather confused mind of an entity just referred to as the Father, who is not dissimilar to the Egyptian god Amun in that he is invisible and ineffable, not necessarily because of prohibition, but rather that such mortal experiences as “seeing” or “names” are meaningless and inherently inaccurate when referring to… everything. In the fog of the Father's mind lurks a being called Error. It can't escape this fog because that would make the Father erroneous and that's definitionally impossible for a perfect being, but it also can't see beyond the fog by that same logic, thus its “error” is believing that it must itself be all there is and therefore it must be “God”. As God, Error uses the fog around it to create its own sub-world, our world, imprisoning its sims within and really just havin’ a grand old time with it. The Father, taking pity on Error's prisoners, seeks not to punish the wicked but to save them through “gnosis”, knowledge. He clothes an emanation of himself, called the Savior, in the flesh of a mortal, to spread the good news that this sickly plane is not all there is and that all it takes to escape is knowing you're a part of a higher reality. Error takes issue with this and nails the Savior to a cross, but this is perhaps his greatest lapse in judgement, because a story where the protagonist sacrifices his life to save the universe is much more conducive to word of mouth than just a list of facts. The Gnostics believe that once everyone becomes aware of the Father's existence and Error's illusion, then because Error's represents the concept of ignorance itself, Error and its world will definitionally vanish from existence. It's a salvation through assimilation, something the Gnostics poetically refer to as “Entering the Bridal Chamber”, which… we don't really have enough context on to say for sure what that means, but my admittedly pagan mind goes first to the Room of Fate which we discussed in Adam's blurb, a sort of return to the womb.
There's one school of thought within Gnosticism though which gives us the most “standard” version of their creation myth in modern consciousness: the Sethians. Sethianism is so named because these folks put special emphasis on Adam and Eve's third son Seth as the prime example of a spiritual teacher among humankind. Remember our previous Bible studies, how there was an idea floating around in popular lore that Cain and Abel weren't actually Adam's kids, but the result of the Devil chasing down and assaulting Eve following the couple's soft divorce. Seth, by that logic, is the first real human to be born rather than created by the supernatural, and as such the Sethians considered him both the first student and the first teacher. While they may not have a charismatic historical leader to name their movement after like the Marcionites and the Valentinians, their central text, the Apocryphon of John, was one of many on Irenaeus's chopping block in 180 CE. We therefore know the text has to be at least that old, but it only comes down to us by way of the Berlin Codex and the Nag Hammadi manuscripts.
The narrator of the text claims to be John, yes that John, and he's having a rough go atm because the Romans killed his teacher, but there were so many questions he still wanted to ask. Nah it's all good man, says Jesus, suddenly here and rocking the whole “be not afraid” aesthetic, here's all the lore I didn't have time to relate! It all starts with the Monad (literally the “Singular”), the Apocryphon's answer to the Valentinian Father: an invisible, ineffable being which is more complete than perfection and more total than divinity, in whose essence everything is derived. It's a thing that can't be described because it by definition includes everything, it's the thing which is the sum of all parts. The Monad here is… I can only describe it as like floating in a sensory-deprivation tank but instead of water it's a pool of radiant light. If you've ever heard of a kugelblitz, imagine the first image that conjures in your mind, incorrect as it probably is. In this pool, the Father becomes enamored with his own reflection, which manifests as an androgynous woman named “Barbelo”, which is a linguistic mystery for another dissection.
The Monad and Barbelo do as they do on the Discovery Channel and shit out a bunch of divine subdivisions called the “Aeons”, from a Greek word which literally means “lifespan” but is used moreso to mean “eternity” or “age”. This is where we get our English word “eon” from, and it's being used here to refer to something between individual entities and the realms they embody. The youngest of these infinites is Sophia, which in Greek means “wisdom”, and she's unique because wisdom requires analysis, she's wired into the Monad's freewill and is able to use those very same gears to think for herself, deduce her own mind, envision her own creativity. She wants to draw something to put up on the fridge, and Dad doesn't approve, I mean she doesn't even have a masculine counterpart yet! The consequences could be disastrous, Morty! She quite literally has his final say by the balls however, so that goes about as well as preventing your dog from sniffing shit.
Like Mother Leeds, the thing that is birthed from Sophia is not a holy thing but rather a twisted abomination, a haploid parody of divinity, with the body of a dragon, the head of a lion, and lightning exploding out of its eyes. This undeveloped fetus is named “Yaldabaoth” by his mother. Hel's abyssal eyesocket, we finally got to the title! The exact etymology of this word is a bit smudged in translation but it's usually tied to the Aramaic components “yalda” (which depending on how you want to grammar it either means “begotten from” or “begetter of”) and “bathutha”. Bathutha… most literally means “darkness” or “emptiness”, like the vacuum of space basically, and its Hebrew cognate “bohu” is the “void” mentioned in Genesis 1:1-2: “In the beginning, when the gods created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from the gods swept over the face of the waters”. This is why you'll see a lot of people gloss this translation as “chaos”, but I personally think that's a linguistic reach too greedy. I can't deny though, “chaos-child” has much more band-name to it. Also gives us a thumbtack to red-string back to the Set connection, which I can't lie I'm attached to just as a storyteller. The text later goes on to drop Saklas (meaning “fool” in Aramaic) as one of Yaldabaoth's titles, as well as “Samael”, which is the name of the original satanic angel in Biblical cosmology.
Sophia, like the modern Prometheus, is aghast by the violent monstrosity that had risen from her tesla coil. She chucks him in a dumpster and shrouds him in that same sort of brain fog we were introduced to in the Gospel of Truth so that Mom and Dad don't find out about it. Yaldabaoth, set on a throne with a kingdom of emptiness for as far as the eye can perceive, starts creating a universe of his own. He creates friends to play with first, twelve Exousia (“powers”) given only Yaldabaoth's fire, he's too stingy to give them any of the light of his mother inside of him. The name of those to whom he gives leadership over the seven spheres and seven days are: Athoth, Harmas the Flaming Eye, Kalilaumbri, Yabel, Adonaiu (also named Sabaoth), Cain yes that Cain he's the sun apparently, and Abel, yes that little shit. The remaining five are designated to reign in Hades: Abrisene, Yobel (different from Yabel, obviously, keep up), Armupiel, Melcheir-adonein, and Belias. The Exousia in turn create a staff of seven Archons (a Greek title that means “ruler” generally without necessarily invoking any one particular political office) to do their bidding across these realms. Their names are: Athoth… again yes, who has the face of a sheep and is propped up to rule the domain of Goodness, donkey-headed Eloaios who rules over Providence, hyena-headed Astaphaios who gets Divinity, Yao who has seven writhing snake heads and dominion over Lordship, the dragonborn Sabaoth who hilariously reigns over the kingdom of Kingdom, monkey-faced Adonin who rules Zeal, and lastly Sabbataios. His face is on fire, but this is fine, because his Element of Harmony is Understanding. These Archons in turn create six demons each, and this cycle continued, mercifully without a list of names, until there were 365 demons total.
Yaldabaoth grins atop his throne, looking proudly on at his army of coal-hearted things and his total dominion over all that exists. He declares for all to hear, mirroring Isaiah 45:5, “I am God, and there is no God but me!” and further still quoting from Exodus 34:14, “I am a jealous God and there is no God but me!” This caused a lot of head-tilting in his Archons, cause like why he jealous tho if there are in fact no other gods but him? Yaldabaoth of course was too proud to admit it to his underlings’ stupid faces, but that Freudian slip really boils down to some very deep seated mommy issues, because it's always about mommy issues isn't it? He's lost and angry, aware of his own coming into existence but never meeting the being he knows must've created him in the first place. Sophia has been pacing back and forth and tearing up inside because now the son she's been trying to hide from her parents has grown up to be a total fucking psychopath with a whole world of sentient beings of his own making to torment like he's fuckin Sid from Toy Story. To make matters worse, she put her light into this little cretin in order to make him, and he's not going to give it back. She's extinguishing with each passing second, until eventually she just breaks down on her knees and confesses to the Monad. She messed up hard, Dad, and she needs your help. The rest of the Pleroma hears her pitiful sobbing, takes pity on her, and all at once collectively pray to the Monad on her behalf. The Monad is moved, and puts her in one of those Darth Vader healing pools until her light is restored.
Yaldabaoth however is still isolated from the Pleroma inside this damned fog. The Monad parts the fog, blinding everyone with that divine fuckin light like thanks pops, and corrects Yaldabaoth, “The Man exists, and the Son of Man”, accompanied by a vague humanoid shape in the seering, wave-dappling light. Yaldabaoth takes this to be his mother, I mean what else could that be? He commands his subordinate demons: “Let us create a man according to the image of God, and our own likeness, so that his image will illuminate us. Let us call him Adam, so that his name will give us the power of light.” So the gods created a man in that image, in the image of the Father they created him. 365 demons each lent their donation of their psychic essence to create this image, but it was imperfect in one frustrating way: it lacked life.
Then one day Yaldabaoth is approached by who by all appearances seem to be his five closest advisors, but these are actually the Five Luminaries (don't worry about it) sent from the Pleroma in disguises because Sophia is not getting better. The Five Luminaries offer the suggestion that he breathe into Adam's nostrils his breath of life, the light of Sophia, and on that, Adam became a living being. The seraphim grew anxious over one emergent oversight, however, and that was that Adam, Captain Planet seventy-three times over, was as smart as the sum of their collective intelligences. He was a quick lad, and even more dangerous to their society, he was a good man with a heart of light. So before he can think his way out of it, they cast Adam into another layer down entirely, down into the material plane.
The Monad took pity on the fallen godling, and sent to him from on high Jedi Master Zoe, which in Greek means “Life”, a direct translation of Eve's name in Hebrew. She is Adam's helper, his partner, and she teaches him all he could ever think to ask about the Pleroma and how to get back. It's inside of him, she explains, Sophia's first light, his “Epinoia”, which is… difficult to translate 1 to 1 into English but it basically means something like “thoughtful intent”. There's something greater out there, waiting for him, and he need only look inside for the power to get him there. Unfortunately he doesn't get the chance. The Archons catch on that Adam's not alone down there on the material plane, that he's plotting against them in his prison cell. They ambush him, pelt him with fire and earth and water and four great winds until he's as dead as the dirt beneath him. They stole his Epinoia, deleted his memories. They bound him in a new vessel, one made of mortal muck, and imprisoned him in a paradise of material delights. His filthy, addicted ape form will be too busy engorging on the reward centers of the Garden to devote a single neuron to what may be waiting for him above. They gave their fattened steer a ripe pasture of every tree in the Garden, forbidding only the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, for within that fruit was the Epinoia of his memory.
Yaldabaoth still very much wanted Sophia's Epinoia back though, so he caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam and tried to dislodge her from between his ribs. The Epinoia retreated deep inside of Adam, though not unmutilated by Yaldabaoth's surgical pliers. The chunk of her that he ripped off was not to be wasted, Yaldabaoth using the material to make a feminine clone of Adam from the bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh. Sophia locked onto the tiny fledgling of her light inside of this new body, this Life, this Eve, and possessed the shell that she may guide the rest of her light back to the Pleroma. Adam, beholding his own image in the form of this woman, feeling that intoxicating way she made his heart harmonically arrhythmic, presented with something he did in fact love more than all this material waste, it began to awaken him from his stupidity. He recognized Sophia, though he couldn't place her name. His distended stomach and his brain fog still lingered, but that's when Jesus showed up!
No that's not a joke, Jesus in this cosmology is actually, of all characters, the Serpent, sent to convince Adam and Eve to eat of the fruit of Knowledge of Good and Evil so that they can free themselves of Yaldabaoth's illusionary world. Though they now had the means to think of a plan, they did not have the time. Yaldabaoth discovered their consumption of the fruit, their scheming behind his back, and in his fury he cast them out, poisoning the Earth, turning her waters into the same Lethic amnesiac that took Adam's memory, so that it may never grow so paradisal for their sustenance again. Once the rage cleared from his eyes, however, he caught a glimpse of Sophia's light inside of Eve, and realized they wanted him to let them slip away. Unable to relinquish his white whale, Yaldabaoth hounded Eve down, assaulted her, and from that parasitism were born Cain and Abel. As such, all humankind has a little bit of Yaldabaoth in them, but also a little bit of Sophia. She's that tiny yet sparkling voice inside you that tells you to be knowledgeable, be critical, and most importantly of all: be kind. I think that's a crucial misunderstanding people come to regarding my own belief structure as well. I believe the universe is a cruel joke designed by a troll who lacks morality or taste, but I don't believe that you are. You're a human, you're your human, and so long as you have breath in your lungs, you possess the free will to plant a paradise which we all can soil into. Maybe this game doesn't have a prize at the end, but if you use the fleeting time you have on this Earth to help even just one person, then you'll have done your part in a greater whole, and I think that's immortal enough in itself.
Design notes, this one goes fully to Minerva. I presented the goddess of my creativity with the starting premise of “dark matter dragon”, and she just kinda… blinked her three eyelids at me and sighed “alright”. My pencil was in her hands from there, thank you, my Muse, you're gracious. You might ask why I chose to subject myself to such an unnecessarily difficult prompt, and it's because Yaldabaoth is a major villain in our lore and we have a very specific cosmology he's being adapted into. This is our Galactus, that eye is a planet, the pupils and iris are its coriolis-spun atmosphere. This is an entity that defines and breaks reality in equal measure, and apparently now it's my job to kick his ass. How I get myself into these messes is a story I'll tell another day.