Editing Acrozatarim/Appendix 2 (section)

==Ancient Dreams - The Elder Gods==

The Elder Gods are dead, gone, dust on the wind and whispers on the breeze.  In the modern day, they are demons who lurk at the edge of reality, mutter subversions into the ears of cultists and prey on the weak-minded - but they are defeated, bitter and hateful at their loss under the sword of the righteous Younger Gods.

This, of course, ignores a great deal of the complexities behind who and what the Elders were, and what has befallen them now.  As dreams of the Great Elementals, dreams so powerful that they gained form and consciousness, the Elders are driven by what theologians term the Divine Urge - that is to say, the urge to create True Life.  In this way, they were initially holy in intention, obsessive half-real beings on a mission from the creators.  There is some concern that their defeat would, in fact, be seen as an insult or crime by the Great Elementals were they to awaken.

Under the initial effects of the Divine Urge, the Elder Gods focused entirely on reworking the world to be hospitable to True Life, then with the creation of said life.  This first involved reworking fundamental elements of reality and introducing new concepts, using languages of divine power, metaphysical tools and woven idea-nets threaded through creation.   Following this period of construction and preparation came the explosion of True Life.  They also created a number of Servitor species during this time, creatures forged and fused to aid the Elder Gods in their efforts.  Servitors are not a result of the Divine Urge but rather the Elder Gods' own desires, and hence are considered different and separate from True Life.

However, as time continued and the bulk of the Divine Urge satisfied, the Elder Gods began to create more Servitors and to engage in stranger and more labyrinthine behaviour, often working according to concepts or patterns incomprehensible to the mortal species that now dwelt on the world.  Their work done, the Elders seemed to care increasingly little for the True Life that they had made, often simply using such creatures and beings as pawns, raw resources or for even weirder purposes.  It is theorised that once the Divine Urge faded, the Elder Gods simply lacked any remaining purpose, and this is what caused their descent into insanity - they were adrift, lacking a reason to exist.

One notable feature of the Elder Gods' rise and rule was that they were not, originally, as powerful as they eventually became.  Rather, the earliest Elders bootstrapped themselves up with divine foci, immanence-weaving engines, augmentative world-rites and other methods, both large and small in scale.  This proved critical during the Dawn War, as these enhancements were vulnerable to attack and sabotage by the Younger Gods, allowing them to reduce the mightiest Elders in power before bringing them low.

The Elder Gods can be divided into roughly two categories - greater and lesser.  The greaters were the four original dreams of the Great Elementals - Shauku of Water, Ephras of Air, Gilam of Fire and Hashrukk of Earth.  Below each of these were a myriad of lesser Elders, minor dreams and whimsical notions born of the sleeping Elementals and given form by their sheer reality-warping presence.  The lessers were themselves powerful beings, especially once enhanced by the immanence-focusing infrastructure that the Elders had created - beings such as Hammasztu and the vile Kurgathim.  Many lesser Elders were the patrons or creators of specific True and Servitor species, although they suffered the same descent into madness as the greaters.