From "The Fighting of the Osh Ornim" -

The red wave and their porcelain warriors crashed like a longshore along the crag where we met them in battle. They sang to their swords and slew us in great heaps. The current pulled them back to their ships and we counted our dead and made perforations in time with our tusks to slide the bodies through. Then again the red wave and their porcelain warriors crashed like a longshore along the crag where we met them in battle. They sang to their swords and slew us in great heaps, their war cries fading as the current pulled them back. We counted our dead and made perforations in time with our tusks to slide the new bodies through. Red waves, the dead, the bodies. For one thousand hours we battled them like this. The porcelain warriors were new to this land and did not understand the way we did the fighting.

When the hour hit the thousandth, we tusked each other along the perforations, giving each other luck in death. On the last of the red waves, the porcelain warriors crashed like a longshore along the crag but could not find us. The swords they had just sung to had no one to kill so became too hot and they were dropped. When the current pulled the porcelain warriors back to their ships, they found us on the decks waiting for them. All of us.

Our god Sep lives between the times of men. When we are slid to him, the great snake gulps us down, for all he is is made of hunger. But he cannot eat so much as a thousand hours of us, so he gags and heaves and throws us up. We are thrown back into time wherever we have decided we would be, and we never miss the mark. Because we have passed through the realm of the dead, so by its laws we must return alive, for the great snake is also a cycle, one we've learned to ride.

When the current pulled the porcelain warriors back to their ships, they found us on the decks waiting for them. All of us. They had no swords for they had dropped them. We have never needed anything but our tusks.

As they screamed and called us cheaters, we ate them. All of them.

"Our forebears could not be stopped when we were led by the HoonDing. All others had to Make Way. But we could be tricked and beaten. The Osh Ornim showed us that when they Went Around."

-- Saint of Swords Samadaraj, Order of Diagna

"In those days, the Malooc walked the earth. They had been made a fool of in the east and so fled far away from there. They walked west and west, ending up in another pantheon, ours, and we did not want them either. The Malooc found friends only with the Seppy snakes, for both their kind had been born of previous things. Many were their co-minglings and from them came the god called Malakzar the Many-Headed, who went up to the heavens to be raised by his uncle. Some say that Malakzar ate his uncle to take on a new and more powerful shape, but by then he had vanished from our lands so we no longer gave a big shit."

-- Bisukele, the Porcelain Gentleman of Kardesh

"Before he left to eat his uncle, Malakzar came to the Craglords and lived with them for a span. He taught us many curses and how to etch oaths into our tusks. Some of his Seppy Court came with him, but they stayed when he went Up. Truth be told, the Seppy snakes taught our many tribes much more than Malakzar did, and when they asked that they be worshipped for it, we agreed. When we became one big tribe, the Osh Ornim, we rolled all the snakes in the Seppy Court into a big ball, to more easily keep track of them all, and we named the ball Sep."

-- Ulagub gra-Shub the Would-Be Welwa

Malakzar is an entity created by two outcast powers, Sep and Malacath. Both of those powers were the transformative results of previous powers-- Malacath came from a destroyed Trinimac, mightiest of the long-gone gods who tore out Lorkhan's Heart, and Sep came from the detritus of many, many dead worlds. Both of those powers were also mythic-scale outcasts.

Malakzar held within itself a kind of "super outcast"-- a concentration of pushed away not-want energy so repellent that it kept threatening to slide entirely outside of the aetherius cluster. When Malakzar went into the Hidden Heaven to find its uncle, the Hungry Void, a hunger so vast and powerful that it could eat all existence, the meeting of the two formed an anomalous ophidian superposition, like so:

[everything that can be eaten, which is all things / those things that are pushed out of all things, which cannot be eaten]

Out of the ophidian superposition, the wave pattern called the Scaled Blanket formed. It resembles a rippling snakeskin when drawn not-astronomically. Like all wave patterns, it gained sentience. It was not a kind one.

Sometimes "not a kind one" is rendered more like "it was a grumpy one," as in this passage from gra-Kele's Seppy Wheel Reductions:

"Now before it was a fool, Malakzar was a proper kingly snake with many seppy followers, called the Seppy Court, and it appointed three of them to watch over its portion of the Scaled Blanket. They were set to warn Malakzar if any trickery was afoot. But when a ripple would happen, the Seppy Court got hungry and ate Malakzar and then themselves, for they were silly and didn't always take their jobs seriously. When the ripple happened again, everyone would forget everything, and the Malakzar-- a proper foolish snake now-- would grumble and appoint three new followers as its Seppy Court. And on and on as the slap-happy seppy wheel has been now forever."

The sentience of the ophidian wave pattern would sometimes attract other outcast spirits. The weak ones would just disappear inside it. ("And the Seppy Court ate them up.") Others, like the stone of the Void Ghost, would lay inside it for many ages, the Scaled Blanket wrapping up and over to house it like a cosmic placenta.

When the stone of the Void Ghost suddenly shifted in mythic weight, it pulled a portion of the Blanket downward until it was frozen in place by the god-children of Morrowind.

"One day a rogue star called Baar Dau (who also had a very complicated upbringing) was running from a crazy man with an axe. Soon it found a hiding spot in the Scaled Blanket and caused slight flickers in the wave pattern but the Seppy Court didn't think much of it. After an eon or two, Baar Dau decided it could have its revenge on the crazy man and launched from the Hidden Heaven towards him, back on what would be Morrowind. All the snakes and ghosts of the Scaled Blanket were dragged down with it, and though it was slowed for a little bit, Baar Dau could not be denied."

The god-children disappeared one day. The stone regained its mythic weight. And now everything is a mess.

Post-Crossing Revision Notes for OPHIDION FIRMAMENTUM

The skin of the pattern was pulled too taut. The scales splitting apart from one another and fungus left to grow in the seams. Malakzar was screaming in fractal, ripping off from a hunger that was being eaten by even-more starving things. They were wrapped around a red moment whose phase was never set. Inside that moment is a dying star. Inside that star is another. And another and another until they number 3333. The snake void had grown to a monstrous proportion and the rotary tusks of its mandala maw shaved apart all time and frequency into motes that spawned new vectors of pain and negation, like so:

[nothing that can be nothing, which is nothing / that nothing can house nothing, which cannot be nothing]