Seraphon

Before the Mortal Realms were born (before, some whisper, anything now living drew breath), the god-like Old Ones charted a design for all existence called the Great Plan, and shaped cold-blooded servants to carry it out. When the world that held their first temple-cities was devoured, the slann mage-priests fled into the deeps of the heavens aboard ziggurat-ships, bearing their spawn-kin, their star-charts, and their unfinished orders. The realms condensed out of raw magic; civilisations rose and learned to write; and all the while the Seraphon were already there, waiting between the stars, older than the ground the new gods stood on.

Most Seraphon descend to battle as the Starborne: creatures of celestial magic wearing scaled and fanged shapes, summoned from the memory of the slann rather than born. Their hosts blaze into being wherever the Great Plan requires them, a jungle of azure light erupting in a heartbeat, and when a Starborne warrior falls it leaves no corpse, only a drift of fading starlight for the slann to dream anew. They are daemons in every sense but allegiance: entities of pure purpose, as tireless and unbargainable as the mathematics they serve.

But stars can fall and take root. The Coalesced are Seraphon whose long ages within the realms have thickened starlight into flesh, blood, and appetite. Their temple-cities rise from the deepest jungles: pyramids of gold and worked stone tended by generation after spawned generation of saurus and skinks, ringed by wilderness that obeys them like a trained beast. The Coalesced are hotter-tempered and hungrier than their celestial kin: order expressed not as geometry but as ecosystem, where everything has its place and everything out of place is prey.

Above them all drift the slann, toad-like mage-priests of stupendous power who sleep for centuries and reorder battlefields between heartbeats. It is their burden that the Old Ones are gone and left no complete copy of the Great Plan; each slann remembers a different fragment, dreamed and re-dreamed across the ages until memory and hope grow hard to tell apart. So the Seraphon wage their patient, star-guided war carrying the terrible question at its heart: whether they still execute their masters' design, or are lovingly reconstructing it from grief, and whether, after so long, there is any difference.