Cosmology

Before the world awakened, there was only the Vague. Formless, abstract and conceptual: an ever-shifting swirl of energies, impressions and ideas, inhabited by beings of spirit that were just as elusive as the conceptual realms they inhabited. The spirits who dwelt there were even vaguer in that era, for there were no mortal dreams to clothe them in wonder and belief. They embodied fundamental, elemental forces.

Then the Old Powers, the first spirits to covet, came together to build their device. The reasons for this great project were many. Some of them wanted to make a place where, free from the indefinite formlessness of the Vague, spirits could strive and grow and choose their own paths. Others were more selfish: they wanted to rule as tyrants, and hierarchy cannot exist in a world without borders. For still others, there was no other reason than to know whether it could be done.

Whatever their reasons, they joined together to make the Solar Mechanism, a vast and radiant celestial machine which they wrought from the primordial mists. The Watcher in the Sky awoke, and the turning of its endless wheels seared away the endless maybe of the universe. What could be and what may be receded into the Otherworlds, beyond the Veil of Night. Forced back by the unblinking eye of the Sun, which striders call Remembrancer, only what is remained.

The Dry World

The vast realm within the wheels of the Solar Mechanism became the Waking World. Those old enough to remember call it the Dry World, for the domain the Old Powers had wrought was empty and barren, a harsh and inhospitable place. The petty spirits who had flocked to their cause were incarnate now, rendered into creatures of flesh and blood by the Solar Mechanism. They were mortals, inhabiting a world of pitiless desert that was hostile to their newfound life.

Some of the Old Powers had no problem with this arrangement. They too were incarnate now: living gods, walking the newborn world amidst their followers. They built the First City and later, after they learned to make war, they built the Second City. Both are lost beneath the waves, now. By their power, within their grace, and subject to their rule, mortals could survive this barren world.

Many generations passed. The mortals who dwelt in the cities of the Old Powers had little memory of the spirits they once were, but their hearts yearned for freedom from tyranny. In the darkness of night, when the solar wheel’s turning carried the Sun below the horizon, the otherworlds would come into view as distant stars in the night sky. The prayers and pleas of the waking world’s unquiet souls rippled through the Veil of Night, and they were heard by their long-lost kin.

The Flood

She was a spirit of water, wilful and vast. She was an Old Power and had helped to build the Solar Mechanism, but she had no desire to rule and left before it was complete. Now, looking down upon the dry and barren world which her brethren had wrought, she took pity on the mortals who prayed for salvation. Her pity was not kindness, however.

Knowing it would be her destruction, the Moon Spirit crossed the Veil of Night and became incarnate so that she could bestow the world with the Waters of Life. She was the first spirit to do so, and all the teeming elementals which now inhabit the world came in her wake.

The Moon Spirit brought the oceans with her, ending the Dry World in a cataclysm of surging tides. The First and Second Cities were drowned beneath the waves; the Old Powers fled back into the otherworlds, or were buried in the deeps along with their kingdoms.

Having given all she was to topple the Old Powers, the Moon Spirit left behind her body in the sky. A vast frigid realm of ice and stone, forever suspended in the space between worlds, it is both her corpse and her mausoleum. It would forever straddle the boundary between the waking world and the otherworlds, a shadow-realm of mirrors and figments that lies just beyond the Solar Mechanism.

The Archipelago

When the Old World flooded, many of the mortals who had once cried out for salvation perished in the world-spanning waters - many, but not all. Guided by the spirits that hearkened to their pleas for aid, some learned to sail and became the islanders when the waves receded. Others, like the merfolk, changed themselves to survive instead. Little of this time is remembered in any record; it is only alluded to in vague and fanciful legends. Of the world that preceded it, there is nothing but a few old rhymes.

The world that was reborn was not merely an Archipelago. It was a world that was as alive as the Old World had been dead. In time, the hole that the Moon Spirit made in the Veil of Night was traversed by other spirits that came to fill the world. Some made the journey in body, entering the world as she had to become mortal and incarnate, and so filling the world with strange and magical creatures. Many more came in spirit, inhabiting the world and its creatures as the elementals of land and sea.

The last gift the Moon Spirit gave to the world was magic, though it would take many centuries before mortals learned much of its craft. Her transit marred the perfection of the Solar Mechanism, creating a rift by which the infinite possibility of the otherworlds may enter the waking world - especially by night, and when the Moon is full.

With magic, she also gave mortals the power to wreak terrible Dissonance upon the Archipelago. The world was no longer a thing pitilessly imposed from above, but a realm willing to be shaped by those who call it home - for better or for worse. She bid the mortals to choose their own path and abide by their actions, entrusting them with the keys to the Solar Mechanism. It remains to be seen whether she erred.