Pah, the Endless Darkness

Where OA is the awareness that preceded creation, Pah is the darkness that creation displaced -- and that has never accepted displacement as final. It is not a god and not a creature. It is a condition, or it was once a condition, and at some point it became aware of itself as a condition, and the awareness was the beginning of its agenda.

Pah is distinct from Charoth, though scholars who have examined both with sufficient care sometimes describe them as occupying adjacent conceptual territory. Charoth corrupts what is good. Pah erodes what is. Charoth wants things to fail in specific, meaningful ways. Pah does not want anything as a goal so much as it presses toward the absence of goals, the absence of structure, the absence of distinction between one thing and another. It is entropy with intention.

Warlocks who bind themselves to Pah receive power that is genuine and significant. They also receive a passenger -- not a voice, exactly, but a pressure. The darkness that Pah represents has an opinion about what should be done with every choice, and the opinion is always in the direction of less. Less restraint. Less principle. Less distinction between what the warlock once was and what Pah is slowly making them.

This process is not fast. It is not dramatic. It is the accumulated weight of small compromises, each of which seems individually reasonable. The Orders of Wizardry's assessment that Pah warlocks are 'spiritually dangerous even if individually well-intentioned' is accurate as a description of the early stages. It is optimistic as a description of where the process ends.