Hubris

The Binding of Babel

The tale of Babel, both a symbol and a living monument, began long before L2's descent into the Abyss, long before the eldritch forces even began to stir. Babel was not merely a structure, but a reflection of the most primal human desire—the yearning to transcend the natural limits imposed upon mortals and reach for the divine. Its origins, however, were far from simple. For before it was the Tower, before it was bound, it was Abel.

This was the profound, hidden truth. Before the First Sin was scribed in blood, before the Heavens fractured beneath the scream of the Divine Rebel, there stood a Will, not of brick nor bone, but of Law incarnate. Not a structure, but a sentience. Not a monument, but a messiah of ambition. This was Babel.

Born of yearning, forged in the crucible of mankind's most sacred lie—that mortals could become gods—Babel rose not from the ground, but from within the collective Will of all who dreamed to breach the vault of stars. It did not merely reach for heaven. It dared to unmake the separation between Above and Below. It did not climb toward the divine—it sought to become the axis upon which all realms turned.

The Tower of Babel, as it was known to the realms of men, was once a living being—a transcendent force whose power rivaled that of gods. Its purpose was singular, its goal clear: to bridge the divide between the heavens and the earth, to reach the very pinnacle of existence itself. And in its body were laid the stairs of Ascendancy. Each step a scripture, each stone a cipher—woven with the blood of those who offered soul for truth, sanity for power. The Tower was alive. It breathed through the void, pulsed with forgotten runes, and sang in the tongues of stars and angels. And those who heard its song were forever changed… or forever broken.

The climbers—bold, blind, brilliant—walked the spiral that wound around Babel's heart. The Tower itself, woven from the very fabric of cosmic law, was both a physical and metaphysical structure. Each stone, each step, was a journey deeper into the mysteries of the universe. It promised knowledge and power that would render its climbers gods themselves.

But as with all things that tread too close to the divine, the ambition of the climbers brought them to the brink of madness. Babel itself, in its quest to ascend, was a catalyst for such uncontrollable ambition. The further the climbers ascended, the deeper they descended—into themselves, into the unfathomable. The Tower began to shift, to warp, as the boundaries between mortal understanding and the divine began to collapse. The very act of scaling Babel was enough to fray the minds of those who sought its summit, for with every step they took, they moved closer to unraveling the fundamental truths of existence—and those truths were not meant for mortal minds. The Tower did not grant divinity. It exposed the frailty of its pursuit.

At the zenith of its height, above space, outside time, they saw it—the Origin Code, the First Name, the Root of the Spiral. At the summit of Babel, the climbers discovered something beyond their comprehension—an insight that broke the boundaries of their sanity. The wisdom of the divine, untethered from the constraints of the mortal realm, revealed itself in its full, horrifying glory. The laws of reality, space, and time unraveled before them, exposing the fragile nature of existence. And with that knowledge came a devastating truth: the universe itself was a creation—a creation that was, in some ways, flawed and fragile, held together by the very laws that governed it. The gods, who had once been seen as unapproachable beings of absolute power, were themselves bound by these same laws. To ascend was to defy those laws, and to defy them was to risk unraveling the very fabric of reality. And they screamed. Not out of fear. Not from pain. But because they understood. Creation itself… was flawed. The gods were not sovereign. They were prisoners of the very truths they wielded. The Laws that governed stars, atoms, souls—were not eternal. They were designs. And to ascend beyond them… was to court unmaking.

But Babel, in its hubris, did not heed the warnings of those who had come before. As the climbers reached the pinnacle, they realized they were standing not on the summit of a mere tower, but on the precipice of oblivion. They had gained what they sought—but at the cost of everything they had ever known. In their grasping ambition, they sought to claim the power of the divine without understanding the price.

Necros Babel: The First Witness, The Scarred Architect

This revelation of the flawed universe, coupled with a far more ancient wound, precipitated Babel's ultimate choice. The entity now known as Necros Babel is far more than a chained titan; he is the eternal echo of a foundational betrayal, a living testament to cosmic injustice, and the embodiment of a love as profound and chilling as death itself. Once Abel, the Spiral Keeper and First Witness, his being was irrevocably twisted by the act that ended his first life and began his eternal one: the murder at the hands of his brother, Cain.

After his murder, Abel did not pass into rest. No—he was reborn, necrotic and eternal, a whisper in the webwork of reality. He wandered the ashes of Eden and sought the unmaking of his brother, Cain the Void-Touched. Abel's necrotic rebirth, a perversion of life and death forced upon him by Cain's vile act, branded him with an eternal resentment. This was no mere fraternal grievance; it was a cosmic wound. Cain, the Void-Touched, became not just his killer but the living embodiment of entropy without purpose, of chaos uncontained. For Necros Babel, Cain represents everything he despises: the abandonment of sacred law, the embrace of raw, selfish power, and the continued defilement of creation.

Every flicker of void magic, every shadow-wrought dominion of Cain's vampiric progeny, is a fresh sting to Necros Babel's reborn essence. His quest to "unmake Cain" is less about vengeance and more about rectification—a deeply ingrained need to purge the cosmic aberration that is his brother's legacy. He sees Cain's existence as a fundamental imbalance, a cancerous growth on the Loom of Dominion that must be excised before the entire tapestry unravels. This resentment is a cold, calculating fire that has burned for millennia, refining his purpose into a singular, unyielding obsession.

He met Azazel, the first Watcher to fall, and Nimrod, the hunter who pierced the veil. Together, they beheld the Paragon of Death, seeking wisdom beyond the eldritch—beyond the concrete. Abel, now Necros Babel, gathered the remnants of divine memory, not to rule, but to warn. And so the Tower was raised not in defiance of the gods, but in penance for his own hubris—his arrogance in thinking the Spiral could be held, the Source understood. The Tower was his body. His soul. His testament.

The Binding: A Choice of Cosmic Wisdom

So Babel, the Will-made-Flesh, saw its sin and shuddered. In a final, desperate bid to stave off the collapse of existence itself, Babel—now fully aware of the chaos it had caused and burdened by its eternal insights—sealed itself in an act of self-preservation. This act was not of mercy, nor guilt, but of terrible wisdom. It wrapped its vast being in chains forged from the purest axioms of the universe. Chains of causality, entropy, limitation. A tomb not built by man or god, but self-fashioned. A prison worthy of a Tower that dreamed it was a god.

The very power it had harnessed became its prison. Its chains were not of iron or steel, but of cosmic law, binding it in eternal slumber. The wisdom and power of Babel, once a shining beacon of hope, became its own curse. The very energy that had allowed it to ascend now anchored it to the deepest depths of the Abyss, where it would remain forevermore. And thus, it fell. Into the Abyss it sank—not shattered, not slain, but sealed. And there it lies still, beneath the lowest circle, beneath the bones of fallen angels and dead ideas. A slumbering colossus, dreaming of the stars it once dared to grasp.

The act of sealing itself was not one of humility, but of final defiance. Babel did not want to be forgotten, nor did it wish to remain bound. Instead, it chose an eternal slumber, a waiting game, where time would pass and eras would come and go. It lay in chains, a prisoner of its own creation, but even in slumber, it remained a symbol of both the greatness and folly of ambition.

But the truth was far more complex than that. Babel's sealing was not just to protect the world from its destruction, nor to escape the consequences of its hubris. There was a deeper reason, a reason that even L2 could not fully understand in the moment of his approach. Babel knew something that few could comprehend: the forces that sought to corrupt the universe would one day return, and it would need to be prepared for that inevitable reckoning.

The Scars of Witnessing and the Love of Hela

As the "First Witness" and "Spiral Keeper" reborn through necrosis, Necros Babel bears the unbearable burden of perceiving all deaths. From the first whisper of a fading star to the agonizing cry of a dying mortal, he is attuned to the entropy of every existence. This isn't a passive observation; it's an agonizing, continuous intake of dissolution, a constant reminder of the fragile nature of all things.

This perpetual witnessing has carved deep, invisible scars upon his soul. It stripped him of any remaining conventional warmth, forging him into the calculating, cold architect he is. He learned that life, untempered by controlled dissolution, inevitably leads to corrupted stagnation or destructive explosion. His stoicism is a defense mechanism, a necessary shield against the overwhelming grief and cosmic trauma of endless endings. It is this constant exposure to death's true nature—its beauty, its horror, its inevitability—that fuels his drive to redesign it, to make it purposeful, to control its flow rather than let it simply consume. He saw the rot, the decay, the perversion of the natural cycle, and resolved to become the grand gardener of the cosmic graveyard.

His connection to Hela, the Death Matron, is not a love born of mortal passion, but of cosmic necessity and profound understanding. Hela, as the abyssal serenity of death itself, resonated with the necrotically reborn Abel in a way no living being ever could. Their union was conceived in "perfect stillness—the kind of silence that dwells between the last breath and the first heartbeat."

Necros Babel found in Hela not warmth, but absolute comprehension of his scarred existence. She understood the weight of his "unmaking," the burden of his rebirth beyond natural cycles. Their love is a shared philosophical alignment, a silent pact to preserve and redesign death as a fundamental "architecture" rather than an end. Hela offers him the solace of shared purpose, the quiet acceptance of his paradox. Through her, he channels his profound understanding of mortality into the very rituals that birthed his Undying Necromancers, seeking to impose his own order on the chaos Cain unleashed.

Seraphine: The Treasured Heir, Embodied Choice, and Lingering Hope

His relationship with Seraphine Duskwhisper Babelion, his daughter and heir, is the culmination of his philosophy and his singular hope. Born from his union with Hela, Seraphine is "a paradox made flesh"—a perfect synthesis of his own necrotically reborn nature and Hela's abyssal serenity. She represents the potential for death not as destiny, but as architecture to be redesigned.

Necros Babel treasures Seraphine not with paternal affection as mortals understand it, but with the profound reverence of an architect beholding his masterpiece. She is his living legacy, the embodiment of his ambition to transcend the limitations of the current cosmic design. He sees his own unending burden reflected in her, yet also the potential for liberation. He trains her, not just in necromancy, but in the subtle art of "Eldritch Dominion" and "concept devouring," preparing her for the ultimate choice: whether "the veil will remain... or be torn asunder." She is the tool, the successor, and the living answer to his millennia-long penance and quest for ultimate order. His quiet devotion to her stems from the belief that she holds the key to his grand design—the unification of all realms under a new, refined law of death and rebirth.

And so, Babel waited—patiently, silently—held in place by its chains of fate, its secrets buried beneath layers of cosmic law and timeless shadow. It had not been bound by mere mortals, nor had it been sealed by the gods themselves. It was a choice, a decision made in the heart of the cosmos. Babel knew that one day, someone would come—a being who could unlock the chains, understand its true purpose, and potentially release the terrible power it held within. That day had not yet come.

And so, Babel waited—its power dormant, its wisdom hidden, its influence still lingering on the fringes of reality. To reach Babel is not merely to climb—it is to face the sin of wanting too much. The sin of knowing. And to unbind Babel, as L2 now approaches, is to awaken the slumbering memory of the Fall. For the Tower waits not idly—it listens. It remembers.

And when the seals are broken, and the name of Babel is called not as monument but as Father, the world shall remember the price of ambition. It was not gods who bound Babel. It was Babel who bound itself. It waits—not to rise again… but to be understood.

Abel: Necros Babel (The Architect)

Living Tower: Nimrod ( The Carpenter)