The Nine Choirs

The Nine Choirs are an ancient civilization that precedented The Hollowed and are considered their origin. The Nine Choirs are long gone, and very little of them survives intact. Most of what’s known is pieced together from ruin fragments, traditions, and word of mouth from The Hollowed’s ancestors.

Structure

They organized themselves into nine ranks, each called a Choir. How someone moved up these ranks, if at all, is not known.

This ranked structure is reflected throughout surviving Choir architecture, most notably in concentric ring formations. The higher ranked individuals are believed to live in the innermost circles (photo to be added upon construction), and vice versa. Advancement meant literally moving inward.

Dissent had its own word: a dissonant tone. Someone who did not conform to their presumably rigid and strict rules and standards are pushed out, both socially and physically, to the outermost (lowest) ranks.

Architecture

Their ruins have a centerpiece: nine rings, nested inside each other, all shrinking down to a single chamber in the center. There are two smaller circles set apart from the rest entirely, believed to belong to the two lowest ranks.

Beliefs and Religion

The Nine Choirs are believed to have worshipped one deity, referred to only from surviving fragments as Him. Getting closer to Him seems to have been the point of everything else they did, though what they actually meant to them isn’t well preserved.

The Final Work

As part of that goal, they’re believed to have tried building a perfect being. A combination of Warden physical power and the intelligence of some other, unknown being. How far they got and how they did it, however, have been lost to time.

It is known that the Hollowed are a part of the process. They were prototypes, deemed imperfect.

The Fall and Their Legacy

Nobody knows exactly what happened. No full account exists. What is generally accepted is that something had wiped them out quickly, and left nothing to chance. There had been no mercy, whether the aggressor was war, plague, or something bigger. Whatever came of whatever they were building is unknown.

It is assumed that the Choirs pursued an ambition beyond their capacity to achieve. The imperfect beings the Nine Choirs had made outlived them.