Editing LeviathanTempest:ChapterOne (section)

== ''Bereshit'' - The Tribe ==
A Leviathan is a man or woman born into a bloodline mixed with the blood of a Progenitor, who comes into that power and changes into an inhuman being, a divine essence limited and warped by the confines of flesh. Together, the Leviathans form the Tribe. United in blood and by circumstance, they are, for good or ill, the remnant of an aborted stage of creation. For the excesses of their ancestors and the riotous hunger encoded into their blood, Leviathans are immortalized in the myths and residual memory of mankind as the Wicked Tribe - the aboriginal Other, from whom all horrors descend. 

Members of the Tribe do not have the luxury of dismissing this negative portrayal of their lineage. Their existence is unequivocally something horrific, something wrong - the world distorts around them. Their instincts guide them inevitably towards the pursuit of sin and excess, towards the abuse of others, the destruction and perversion of minds. The blood of the Progenitors cries out for the destruction of this new, diluted creation cast in the image of mankind and not their own. A Leviathan cannot plead necessity or make excuses for themselves - they ''should not be.'' The expression of their Strain, as the point at which they become something entirely other than human, thrusts them solidly into an untenable position, a point from which they must ''become'' something else. The crucible of change is not kind to a Leviathan, instinctively cleaving to their human life while simultaneously urged to run rampant and indulge in the most unrestrained depths of sin and cruelty. Most never progress, endlessly recapitulating periods of growth, stability, and eventual collapse. Some simply stop, becoming the monstrosity that their lineage directs them to become. They become Typhons, creatures of pure appetite, whose outrages reproduce the worst horrors of the lost age of Progenitor supremacy.

=== Before ===
What little information that the Tribe has about the world of the Progenitors mirrors numerous creation myths. They envision a world of formless chaos called the Primordial Waters. At the heart of the Seas, the deepest depths, rested the source of all things : Tiamat, the Mother. All things emerged from Tiamat - land, sea, and stars, and among them the Progenitors, immeasurable beings who in turn gave birth to lesser beings, and from them still lesser beings. From the mingling of the blood of the Progenitors and mankind, the Tribe was born and ruled over nations as demigods and heroes. As time passed, a member of the Tribe would evolve and grow, maturing into something new or possibly even into a Progenitor. Mankind lived in rough harmony with the world, subservient to the lineage of Tiamat, and the world was whole and ripe with possibility. 

Or maybe not. The fact is, the Tribe's creation myth is just that - a myth. They have no idea how much should be taken as metaphorical and which parts are pipe dreams amended to the structure of the tale by later generations. Tiamat could be an entity or an ideal or even just another term for the primordial ooze. Progenitors could be literal beings or lines of evolution. Foremost among these concerns is the concept of the Leviathan stage as one of transition onto something better, more whole and complete - a state that no Leviathan has achieved, at least according to what can be divined from unreliable records. A stage that might not even exist. The Tribe professes a great and majestic history that was lost because the alternative is that they are detritus, a monstrous hybrid of two forms of life that has no possibility of future developement. The Tribe ''cannot'' accept that what they are is all that they will ever be. To do so would be to surrender to the fact that they are between states, that there is no exalted state to which they are returning. That there is nowhere to go but down.

=== Marduk ===
Myth or not, the world brought forth by Tiamat did not last. Mankind, not content to serve, began to harness the forces of nature. Humans built gods to supplant the idols of the Progenitors and formed communities that observed their own rules, resisting the edicts of the Tribe. Marduk - a man, perhaps, or group of men, or perhaps simply a movement - rose up in battle against the Tribe, and defeated them, casting down Tiamat and imposing a new order on creation. The Primordial Waters were parted and land and sky forged out of the bodies of the Progenitors. The Tribe, formerly deified, became reviled and hunted, their ancestral springs drying up and the Progenitors severed from their spawn. The towering spires and chapels of the Tribe were torn down or lost in the parting of the seas, and their history stricken from the record. The civilization of Man was built on the bones and guts of the Progenitors and the relics of the Tribe.

Or maybe not. Maybe Marduk was the first human to overthrow the tyranny of monsters and destroy their blasphemous idols. The Tribe refers to the Primordial Waters as a place of tranquility and harmony, and while this may be true for the Tribe it's hardly a leap of logic to think that the progenitors of a bloodline that thrives in the exploitation and wholesale degradation of mankind might not have been the pillars of a sustainable community, much less a world that one might want to return to. In fact, there's no real reason beyond a profound sense of the Tribe ''not belonging'' to this world that one must accept that some greater, more suiting world ever existed. The sundering of the world might be another of the convenient, self-forgiving myths that the Tribe use to justify their behavior and the way they treat humanity.