“I am glad you have come at last. This generation of challengers will not be able to stand against us. After all this time you have developed your consciousness with perhaps just enough time for something to be done. We shall see if we can close this age properly. Xan warned me about them. He knew they had the star. This is why he lit his beacon and poisoned the land to prepare it for a trial. All who bear the star must be tested against the Aryn. Listen, my child, to the story written into these stones. It is the story of this star.
Sultan Risaud had a tree that it was said germinated from one of 144 seeds of the world tree. This single seed which made the tree came from a single stolen fruit. This single fruit was the last ovum of that tree and this land, the Aryn, was made to grow it.”
Tension dissipated from the air with a gust of cold, magically charged wind. The man also sighed, though his lungs were long since rotted away.
“This tree belonging to Risaud was something lesser and different than its progenitor. It was, in fact, half mortal. Ages before ages before Risaud lived, not at the beginning of the beginning, but in the second age, a man existed who also had 144 wives. They lived as nomads across the land. And for this man and his wives, it was the end of the world.
The Aryn was once home to the World Tree. The world tree nourished the Titans, and the titans were beings who tended planets and stars as we tend flocks and grains. The how and why of their existence does not matter other than that. They were here because our planet had a tree.
As expected of a tree, it grew upon the land and drank in the air. It put forth fruit, but also exhaled magic. Every part of the tree had a different use for mortal and titan alike. The mortal creatures who lived near it developed pneuma—mortal souls as a result of the tree’s magical nature and rose above their animal brethren. My race was among them.
The titans were gluttonous entities and were as fond of souls as of the fruit. All beasts who developed souls were herded, tended, hunted and domesticated for consumption.
This man was one of a race preferred for consumption. He was a hominid. Many thousands of his kind had long ago fled the continent to avoid being eaten. His tribe remained here, sacrificing his kin simply to remain next to the tree.
The titans, on the other hand, built mighty works of all kinds and competed the titans of other worlds. They did not care for cleaning up after themselves. Great magical middens piled up all over the world. Only the Aryn remained a verdant and deadly sanctuary. The tree was the only thing that mattered to the titans.
Eons passed. Empires grew and fell made of mortal life dependent on the waste outside the Aryn. The Titans paid no heed. They didn’t consider any mortal life to be sapient or even sentient. Mortals with pneuma were senseless to them in the same way a sea sponge is senseless to us. They could not make themselves operate the way we do any more than you could make a human into a two dimensional line.
It was perhaps inevitable that with so much magical waste accumulating in the world a diety should be born. This goddess was our planet's creation given Ego just as you are the Ego of the Aryn. When she awoke, then, with nothing to guide her but rage, hurt, and illness born of the state of her body; her presence on the world meant madness incarnate. She was the first to breach the rim and enter into paradise from beyond it.
The goddess shook the world tree and this alarmed the titans. For the first time, something of this world had been born which could get their attention.
The titans suddenly knew their planet had become self-aware. They learned that she had developed of the magical waste. They lied to her and told her that the things living in the middens were responsible. They commanded her to clean up the middens and go back to sleep.
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The goddess didn’t know any better. She was born of magical waste, but she was also the anima of the planet. She did not know that cleaning the magic and killing the living would also disperse her ego and return her to the land. She set about cleansing the middens and restoring the lands, expending her focus in rage and pain. Everywhere she cleansed, she eradicated sentient life until she came to realize that these creatures were trying to get her attention.
It was the wyrms who first learned to speak to her. They needed the middens to survive but they also loved the clean air and water she left in her wake. The Ego began to attend the sentients. Being made of the planet, unlike the titans, she could learn to understand them, love them and nurture them. Soon she was being worshipped. She learned to take physical shapes that looked like her worshippers. In return for their worship, she tried to hurt the titans as she had been hurt. She climbed once again over the rim of the Aryn and ate every fruit on the tree while the titans were off playing their game.
The power concentrated in those fruits made the goddess the equal of the titans. They returned and found her glutted with that power and no fruit left for them to eat. The titans, jealous and wrathful, attacked.
The battle to kill her raged for so long and so much was destroyed that no written record exists, only the results and the mythology. All the world was ruined. The goddess was destroyed. The final body she made for herself shattered. Her death forced wild magic on the world.
The titans were also nearly destroyed. She inflicted a terrible curse on them; infecting them with shards of her being in the wake of her destruction. They became part of this world and could no longer participate in their incomprehensible game. Conn alone survived as an immortal Titan. He alone bore no shard.
The planet returned to stasis. The wild magic pooled and flowed through the world, and where it was most powerful the first natural spirits appeared. Because they were fragments of the goddess’s focus, they inherited the land and because their essence was keyed directly to the planet, they had no choice but to tend it or perish.
Where a fragment of the goddess existed in the land however, a spawning point for magical aberrations formed. The shards that cursed the titans also loosed every manner of undead thing that ever has risen. They called angels and demons from other planes. They loosed terrible horrors that should not be able to exist. Every plague imaginable, magical and physical, came from those shards. They even twisted space and time. Other animals got pulled here from elsewhere. Humans were one such creature, for example. Camels, cows, barnfowl, dogs, cats, giant lizards; you name it. Imagine a whirlwind of magic appearing out of nowhere and a school of sharks appearing inside it. Imagine that in the next event, a flood of demons. Or an entire longhouse filled with gods in the middle of a feast. These were the sorts of things that would form out of chaos.
Wyrms, who alone of the mortal races could speak to these fragments and kindle their essence into awareness, began to amass treasure and to guard them against lesser mortals which would be drawn to the power those fragments put out. The hope was that the lesser races would sate themselves on lesser treasure or stick around and become food.
Dragons, the highest order of wyrms, used their magic to bring their fragments to consciousness. They discovered that harnessed to consciousness, a fragment was no longer an open box of chaos. The dragons taught these thought constructs to protect their hordes even as they used their power to remake the land around themselves. These were the first dungeons.
Dungeons set about cleansing the world of all the works of the titan war. Dungeons cleaned the wastes. Dungeons eradicated lesser sentient species—those non-draconic species which had pneuma. They took out domesticated animals that titans were breeding. Native hominids died in their billions like all the rest. The titans, cursed with their shards, also either died and became crystal fragments or they became undead.
The second age passed in ignorance as the world healed. My race was a dying genus but hominids of all the lesser sentients are a tenacious lot no matter on which fragment of reality they develop. They delved into dungeons and fought the spirits, hungry for power. The loot from dungeons allowed them to form civilization again. Despite their tenacity, though, Dungeons and their dragons still ruled the world.
The indigo light surrounding the desiccated man dimmed. He paused and stroked his chin; flakes of dried flesh sloughed off.
“Patience little one. A story of ages cannot be brief. Yes, yes, I promised to tell you about this star. You are at last aware enough to know more than what is necessary to maintain your awareness. But you needed to know about the man and his ancestor to know about this star and you needed to know why this man was so important. Remember what you have learned from this tale. Mortals are tenacious. Gods can die. And you, ego of the Aryn, are a god.”