Beyond the outskirts of the Empire, where the land turns wretched and barren, the winds that scream across the ashen dunes may from time to time reveal the bones of long dead, nameless predators. There are places where these bones have softened into sludge, black pitch that bubbles and smolders in vast pits. The uncountable souls of these primordial dead beasts here converge, and rise again as a being of endless and rapacious hunger. When a predator is slain wantonly by the hand of man, its restless spirit is drawn, inexorably to these pits, to be consumed and added to the gestalt mass known as The Beast. In the shadows of ancient forests and beneath the crumbling ruins of forgotten civilizations, its presence lingers, a creeping miasma that taints all it touches. The skies darken and the very earth trembles as it exerts its unholy dominion, warping reality to mirror its vile essence. Rivers turn to blood, and once-thriving fields rot into desolate wastelands. As its insatiable hunger festers, so too does its wrath. It thrusts its malevolent will deeper into the natural world, seizing man and beast alike. Those who stumble near its abyssal, chthonic maw are consumed and remade. Reborn into the waking world as grotesque, corrupted mockeries of their former selves, the beast's victims become avatars of its primal aspects, spreading its desolation across the lands. To face those sworn to the beast is to know hope is a fleeting illusion, and the line between life and death is a fragile thread, easily severed by the beast's insatiable hunger for dominion and destruction.