Mal creo
The Mal creo were the creo who refused to be tamed by the Alphites and went to war with them. They are the other side of the Prime Wars, and the side that won the ground it fought over.
The name was not their own. The King of the Alphites gave it to them after he had banished them, and everything recorded about them since has been recorded by the people they fought.
The break
In 3002 homes in the Alphite village were damaged and crops destroyed, and the villagers blamed the creo. The King confronted the accused, and they answered him plainly: they saw the taming as slavery, and they wanted to be free. He banished them into the wilds, never to return.
That exchange is the closest the records come to letting the Mal speak for themselves. Everything after it is written from the other side of a war.
The name
In 3014 the banished creo began attacking Evokers at the edge of the kingdom, and the King labelled them the Mal creo. The name is a label applied from outside. Nothing in the record says what the Mal called themselves, or whether they used a name at all.
The Prime Wars
Attacks grew more frequent and more intense through 3051, and the numbers of the Mal kept rising. The King saw war coming and the Alphites began to prepare for it. What followed became known as the Prime Wars, and 3113 was its worst year to that point, with heavy losses on both sides.
The Mal had by then found a leader. Alphite scouts caught sight of it in 3117 and could speak only of the fear they felt near it. Two years later it was described in full: eyes like the embers of a dying flame, streaks burning across its body as it moved, larger and stronger than any creo before it. In 3122 the Alphites learned that its army was far better organized than they had assumed, and that the leader gave orders without words, its followers obeying as though they were puppets. In 3123 they gave it a name, Nebu, and called it the first of the Nebulous creo.
The turn came in 3127, when creo that had once come from far and wide to accept the King's rule began joining the Mal instead. They held the Alphites responsible for the war and for disturbing the peace they had lived in before.
From there the kingdom fell quickly. By 3135 many Alphites had been killed and more displaced. By 3137 there was fire and smoke in the distance and the Mal at the door. In 3139 the Alphites decided to leave the world altogether, built a portal in the heart of the fortress, and the King rode out against the Mal to buy the time needed to charge it. He did not come back. The scribe Qa'yeh's last inscription, in 3140, describes creo and Alphites crossing through the portal while he waited for his King's return or his own death.
The full year-by-year account is on the Alphites page.
Leadership
The records name Nebu as one of the leaders of the Mal and do not name the others. It is described less as a commander than as a single will the rest of the Mal moved inside of, giving orders without speaking and being obeyed without question.
Lesser Nebu belongs to the same Alphite legend and is credited with the same effect on the creo around it, which are said to have fought beyond anything they were capable of when it was present. No surviving account places it with the Mal, and the sources do not agree on whether it was ever a separate animal from Nebu at all.
The creo who stayed loyal
Not every creo joined. Mizan stayed with the Alphites through the Prime Wars and in the end gave its life to buy them the time they needed to escape the Prime Dimension. Ultimus, the first creo the King ever tamed, fought on the Alphite side as well.
Whether the Alphites are fairly called masters of a creo like Mizan is an argument that has never been settled. The two are as easily understood as beings of similar intelligence and power who chose to stand together.
After the war
The Alphites left and the Mal held the field. The war did not end so much as run out of opponents.
Nebu did not treat the matter as closed. In EvoCreo, the prime creo Dracoad was sent by Nebu against the Alphites sheltering in the refugee camp King Tias had set up, a measure of how aggressive the Nebu had become in the years since.
The Alphites returned in the EvoCreo 2 DLC, crossing back through a portal built by their ancestors. Nebu met them as they arrived and tried to drive them out of what he now held as his domain, and Tias died holding him off so the rest could escape. The group awakened the Ultimus, and while it fought Nebu they found the source of his strength: a crystal that had been feeding him. The Ultimus faded when its summon ran out, but Nebu was left badly weakened, and the group defeated him and freed the Alphite lands.
Legacy
The creo of Zenith are not descended from the Mal. They descend from the creo that crossed with the Alphites and bred with the animals of the new world, while the Mal stayed behind in the dimension they had fought to keep.
The Mal Lands of the Prime Dimension carry the name.