This is the story as I heard it told, may Zekhira aid me in telling it true. I heard this story from Do, who heard it from Do’s dam, and Do’s dam heard it from a Firstborn herself; and we know that the Firstborn did not lie, for of all the sins that ever a Cadoran indulged in, they were free of only that one.
In the beginning of history, there were the Firstborn.
This is not to say that there was nothing before them. They were brought into the world perfect and perfected, in a land bounteous beyond any plausible need; the first of these must have required practice, and the second prior effort. Too, something must have made them; but the memory of the Firstborn goes in its perfection to that moment of their creation and back no farther.
Why that creator has never returned, none can tell. Not even the Firstborn, and they were perfection walking the world.
Perfect in body, perfect in mind, they were immortals even through death; killed, they would return to the world through birth. And what is nine months in the womb to someone who will never see a tomb? What is twenty five years to return to full capacity and full memory, for someone who will see the passing of millenia?
What were, to the Firstborn, the other children? The ones for whom there was no Firstborn soul waiting to return to life?
Nothing, all of these.
They say the Iron Wars raged for ten thousand years. The Firstborn knew the truth, and those spirits who grew to wakefulness in those earliest days, and those sed who were made long enough ago and through mischance or grace found themselves or their stories preserved. Ten thousand years is a saying; that you might have your ten thousand years is to say that you might live until the end of the world, for the Firstborn ended the world more than once.
The Ironfolk were nothing to the Firstborn, but they were everything to each other and themselves. False immortals, the Firstborn called them; unaging and clear of memory they were, but they could be killed, and did not return. Fodder, too, the Firstborn called them; in their moment of death, something liminal would happen with their souls, energetic in proportion to their power and practice of magic.
And so the Ironfolk were that unluckiest and luckiest type of slave; the one whose value grows until harvested. Too, they were fodder in another way; the vast array of children born to the Ironfolk were the true mortals, humans and nephil and gamahad, gotz and vavoc and orcs and tazi, but a Firstborn soul could reside as easily in any body.
Ironfolk and mortals alike grew to recognize the signs. Uncanny health, uncanny growth of mind as a child; they showed by the sixth year of life, and strengthened from there. Some raised these children with extra care, lavishing love on them in the hopes of gaining comfort and security from the Firstborn whom the child would become. Others killed these children before their puberty hit, before the memories of their past lives started to reintegrate.
Before their child started to become a monster.
The first of the Iron Wars birthed the Cullings. Magical arrays the size of cities, fed by a generation of Ironfolk, turned to fertilizer generations of mortals and Ironfolk alike. But there were always rivals amongst the Firstborn who would sabotage a working so as to rise in the place of power, for the twenty five years it takes a Firstborn reborn to recover their memory in full and grasp once more the totality of the power that is their birthright is twenty five years in which all that they built or ruled could be usurped; and there was always the hope that twenty five would be fifty five, if the Ironfolk or mortals who birthed the child chose death.
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And so the Cullings birthed the rest of the Iron Wars; a desperate struggle to retain enough memory to remember the need for them, to gather defenses and have more survive this time than last time when the rituals and invocations struck. It was in these days that the donun were born beneath the seas, and the Wind and Rue grew to wakefulness, those spirits bound and unbound alike; those tens of thousands of years in which across all of Cador, even far beyond Iavshet’s shores, the Firstborn strove to maintain a rule of the mad.
For they truly were mad. Those who remembered themselves cursed their perfection even as they slipped further into their madness, but even these were few; and of all of them, it was the maddest who most continued to grow in might and brilliance even as the world shifted beneath them. It was the maddest of them who razed Freeholds and scourged alike the great Mibtzarai fortress cities and the Irinthi mercantile nations, for though they were nearly all of them mad beyond what mortals might consider reason, most retained enough care to allow the peaceable to thrive and the defensive to fester, save for the great Cullings.
It was the maddest who struck at those few Firstborn who maintained the Freeholds and defied them, raising up the Ironfolk and mortals below them as best they could; in the name of their compact of madness, they rent those souls asunder who stood in their way.
And it was the maddest who, in their hubris, created servants more to their liking.
This is the story as told to me by Do, who heard it from Do’s dam, who was created by an alchemist in the Court and service of Prince-In-Three-Cities Everburning, known also as Ishesh Twiceborn, for having died only the once in all the years of Cador; and Prince Everburning was in this time on the continent of Cador, which was then not afflicted by the Shieldstorm. The Prince and his alchemist twisted mortals and animals together, and studied the mind and how it is kin to the body, and the soul’s relationship to both; and from these studies the Prince and his alchemist created the sed.
Hard, dedicated workers; heats controlled by magics that rested in the hands of the Firstborn rather than being uncontrollable; possessed of either strength or insight and never both, so that those who might rise could not sufficiently strive. They would breed no great legions of mortals in the seeming blink of an eye who would then try to usurp the rightful place and power of their masters, they would find it their truest mission to maintain themselves and all around them in a state of joy and perfection, and they would so crave touch and closeness that they could never risk running and being left alone so far from home. They constrained the magics of the sed such that there would be no magics of the blood or of the mind, and such that there would be such small capacity for mana that no number of sed could ever power a working that could threaten them.
To these the Firstborn added that which they felt must elevate the sed over all other mortal ilks, and over the Ironfolk, and over the spirits who were then waking.
They made of the sed an ilk that could not, would not lie; which could not, would not break faith, or violate their sworn word.
It was this, more than anything else, which was the death of the Firstborn. The sed that they had thought they could keep divided, for they themselves would have so easily been kept divided in those circumstances, bonded in the darkness and in secret, swearing oaths of fealty and silence and companionship. The mages of the sed built something new, in the darkness, guarded by the strength of their kin; something which would bind the mortals and Ironfolk of the world together, along with the spirits and now the sed in all their manifold forms.
It was the research which went into the sed’s creation which taught the Firstborn how to rend a soul, and these spells they wielded first against their own; but it was the sed who took these spells and turned them into an art form. It was the sed, pathologically driven to please and to serve as they were, who saw in the Firstborn people for whom the truest service would be to end their suffering, and so they built this new, grand, glorious, empowering thing.
It was the sed who forged alliances with those spirits that had by then started to wake and accrue power, those spirits who were now Wind and Rue and even those who transcended those bounds to become the first gods. It was the sed who honed the magics of the soul, for such magics are inherent to all wielders of magic and could not be denied, to such a degree that rather than requiring the death of a city to tear a soul apart, it could be done by a few millennial Ironfolk. And it was the sed who found those Ironfolk, and told them of their designs, and recruited their aid, and held their hands whether steady or shaking to guide the knife that poured their living heartsblood into the great rune-rooms where they were creating something new. Something that they fed Firstborn soul after Firstborn soul into, in the War of Chains.
They called it the System.