Timeline
Over four hundred years ago, an alchemist, Luco Demarcci, asked himself a question. Where Do souls come from?
A question he sought to answer through experiment and philosophy. He devoted his life to understanding the spirit and its source.
He would spend nearly two decades on his pursuit of the answer, leading him to his hypothesis of a substance he called, the shimmer. A magick river below the surface where souls are cleansed before reincarnation. But this didn't sit well with Luco.
He believed there must be a creator of sorts. A benevolent being who had a greater picture that was responsible for souls. So, he dug deeper.
In 1609, Luco was able to find the soul of the planet through ritual and science. Upon discovering this entity, a being he believed to be the face of a god, a deal was offered to the alchemist.
Luco would live forever and achieve knowledge beyond anything humanity had ever thought possible. And all he needed to do was give one hand to the entity.
Luco accepted this deal and so the alchemist was, all at once, given the secrets of the universe. So many secrets in fact, that his mind became overstimulated beyond the capacity to recover. Driven to the point of breaking, he was frozen in horror as his mind processed the infinite knowledge of the universe. Whispers of dark knowledge constantly flowed from his mouth.
The entity would use the hand of the alchemist immediately. The hand was placed upon the ground, and a force was exerted on the world by the entity and a web of fissures formed in the crust of the planet. These cracks were deep and led to a molten crimson substance, the Shimmer. And the boiling river releases a dark red smoke to this very day.
Now in the red gas humanity can hear the voices of dead loved ones telling them to fall down the fissures and join them in the boiling crimson down below. All the while the fissures spread.