The Empty

"The good souls here, the bad souls there... The immortals are mine."

- Pralaya

Tehom, also known as The Empty, is the primordial void that existed before God created Ein Sof and the Celestial Princes. It is the afterlife of immortal beings, such as gods, angels, fallen angels, and demons.

Summary
Tehom is the primordial world of silence and nothingness, where the cosmic entity known simply as the Void or Pralaya resides and rules over the souls sent there as the viceroy in the name of God. There is no information about the realm, as no angels or fallen angels or gods want to talk about the place in fear of bad omens.

It is popular belief that Tehom predated God and have existed for eternity before He appeared and created Ein Sof and the Celestial Princes. Many used this as an excuse by those who are against the Three Factions, especially against Heaven and mainly the Christian Faction, to claim that there exists a greater, more powerful and more ancient being than God who had created Tehom before Him.

This, however, is wrong information, as while it did predated the birth of the primordial, it is not predated God or the Princes, with Pralaya claiming she and the realm she embodies is "the lonely and unknown middle-child", claiming that she came into existence moments after Genesis 1:4 ("And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.").

After the concept of death and mortality was unleashed into existence with the original sin, God assigned Pralaya the position as viceroy of Tehom in His name, guarding over the immortals and celestial creatures who died and whose souls and essences are sent there to rest for eternity, or until they could recreate their physical form in the case of angels, fallen angels and demons.

Sometimes in 20XX, for unknown reasons, Pralaya left Tehom and entered the mortal world in search of something before returning with a piece of Lilith's flesh, which she used to create artificial Super Devils using the souls of the demons who died and are currently resting within Tehom as the template.

Purposes
Tehom was originally a giant silent void of darkness and nothingness, only existing as the black background of God's miracles and creations. In the Old Religion, it is known both as the cradle and the tomb, the beginning and the ending of everything and anything in existence, as "men were born from dust, and from dust men shall go". Followers of the Old Religion believe that in the end time, the Divine Presence will wipe existence clean of all sins and return everything back into the original state of nothingness before They create another newer and greater world.

It only transformed into the graveyard of the immortals, the afterlife of celestial beings after the original sin was committed. According to Uriel, when Adam and Eve created Sin, they also accidentally created the concepts of death and mortality due to a security system he had placed on the Tree of Knowledge, which had become the opposite and bane of immortal beings such as the angels.

To restablized the natural order and the cosmic balance, Azrael had taken these concepts as her own before modifying them to better suit her own views of the world, but was rejected by God when she proposed to make the angels and demons entirely deathless, taking away their concept of mortality entirely. God then created Pralaya, the primordial personification of Tehom - and subsequently, nothingness - before giving her the task of taking care of the souls of immortal beings when they are killed as their essences were reaped by the archreapers and transported back to Tehom where they would rest for all of eternity.

However, at Azrael and Gabriel's pleads, he agreed to allow angels, fallen angels and demons to have another chance at life and made it so that if their physical body is ever destroyed, their soul will only have to rest within Tehom until their physical body could reform, which could take them millions of years to do so with their own power.

Quotes
"I beseech you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed."

- 2 Maccabees 7:28

Trivia

 * While Celestial Princes aren't allowed to have power over Tehom, Pralaya claims it's actually how its supposed to work but is actually a "sweet lie".
 * Pralaya considers Tehom as even worse than the Underworld, saying that "at least Hell is something" - a contradiction as during her initial introduction, she said the souls within Tehom peacefully sleep.
 * Maalik claims that despite being called the Empty, the place is full with the sorrow and despair that comes from the fallen angels and demons sleeping there who dream about their greatest regrets. This is likelike what Pralaya means, that though they appear to sleep peacefully, they constantly dream of their greatest regrets.
 * Aside from dying, it's possible for an angel, fallen angel, or a demon to visit Tehom by entering a near-death state through the removal of most of their life-force. In effect, such a visit is comparable to a near-death experience for a human.