Nefilims

 

If anyone wishes to know, what can be found about the origin of the Nefilims is this: Before almost everything, rebellion and conflict generated losses and disasters. No victory, for the war still goes on. Many of the horrors created were creature conceived in chaotic and corrupted shapes. An accident created a place where to keep them, a prison for all that excess of wrong flesh. Once put there, they were forgotten because of reasons more immediate, greater and more dangerous. This place had no earth, air, fire or water, only creatures and its jailers.

 Hunger was inevitable, and the only thing in common among all the things inside. In a moment wrong in many levels, certain creatures eliminated the barriers between reproduction and cannibalism, eating each other and defecating stronger offspring. In this generation, the will to live and hunger matched each other and became one, exponentiating their hunger beyond the other prisoners. Thirty generations later, the competition was eliminated, partially without meaning to. Even so, they were imprisoned and fading, but the history of Creation is made of failing plans. When Genesis unlocked the gate from outside, he freed something that couldn't distinguish between hunger and gluttony. 

-Arms for Secrets: conversations with the Baba Yaga sisters, written by Valeria Afanasyev.

A group of diverse creatures and entities with following common characteristics:

• Their place of origin is the "Abyss", a dimension dominated by the Nefilims. Originally the greatest of the ephemeral zones, now it is a cursed realm with its own will and is also the closest the Nefilims have of a symbol valued by all.
• Parasitism. Nefilims require vital force (prana) to reproduce, harvesting it mostly from the souls of mortals and even from the essence of gods. Every type of nefilim infects its host in a different way: fluids, digestive processes and larval teeth are just some of them. What happens next depends on the host's spiritual strength. A weal one may form purple teratomas with consistence of a barely cooked egg, which grow until the victim dies of blood loss. Strong hosts eventually may turn into a giant egg of calcified flesh with a nefilim inside.
• Great physical variation. It is suspected that nefilims were once a single species, but it went through many changes due to the innate capabilities of flesh warping. It is also common that the following generations mutate significantly from their ancestors. Some nefilims are even capable of instantly transform and twist the flesh of their enemies.
• A feeling mixing "hunger" and "gluttony": they always need to eat, but they always eat more than they need.
• Omniphagia: nefilims consume any entity possessing traces of prana, be it the local fauna, mortals, ghosts or gods. Some also can consume the very elements which enable life, creating grey regions where there is no air to breathe nor water to drink.
• Nefilims are incapable of forming meaningful relationships with mortals due to lacking souls. However, some nefilims can turn mortals into "avatars" or "ambassadors". The better known examples are: the Baba Yaga sisters, servants of the biped huts which follow them; Ellequin, avatar of a Decarabia, a flying nefilim which stayed in Ghara after the Nefilim Invasion; and the Sack Man.
• They have much difficulty in cooperating or forming plans. Competition is common. This is their greatest weakness. If the Nefilim Invasion had been organized, Ghara might have not survived
• Immunity to scrying, oracles and similar. The lack of a soul or essence makes it impossible that they be detected or foreseen.

To learn what I wrote here, I had to talk with creatures so bad that I would be sorry for the venomous snake which bit them. This book means to transmit everything I know about the nefilims, so that no one else has to go through what I did when they came. And I find it fitting to start with the beings I was forced to live with: the Baba Yaga sisters.

-Arms for Secrets: conversations with the Baba Yaga sisters, written by Valeria Afanasyev.