the Mythologia Elyden - part 6

Part 5 

“It is a dichotomous time, where legends and avatars battle in epic confrontations, even as the first untarnished empires of mortalkind dwindle, their ruins spawning countless inferior simulacra. The sphere of the Demiurge wanes as that of the Scion and the Otherworlder waxes, and between them, the mortals leave their ever-changing mark. Nations rise and splinter, to rise again and fragment yet more, yet with each never rising to the heights of its predecessors - the unending slow wane of a distant dream of perfection tarnished by hubris and bitterness.”

The Canticle of Ages

The Shaper had known immediately upon the premature germination of the Two-and-Twenty seeds and their eventual growth into the mortal tribes that they were not ready for Elyden, and that Elyden was not yet ready for them.

The Shaper took the lands the mortals had been born into and separated them from the rest of Elyden, creating an Island in a Sea of Chaos - the Island of Creation. In doing so, The Shaper was able to preserve the rest of Elyden in its present form until the envisioned time of perfection arrived when the mortals would rightfully inherit Elyden. Only then should the mortals be able to perceive and move into the rest of their world - through The Shaper’s own actions and not those of the fallen Demiurges and their misbegotten spawn.

The magickal backlash unleashed by the destruction of the Bridge of Eternities forged a link between the Island of Creation and the rest of Elyden, allowing the mortals to spread into once-virgin lands, bringing corruption and mortality to the whole of Material Plane.

The Two-and-Twenty and their mortal progeny were industrious, intelligent, and capable of great deeds; as only their great cities, wondrous inventions, and skills with the Firmament and Atramenta could bear witness to. The Shaper knew that if the mortals were left to propagate unfettered they would come to challenge its desires in ever greater ways than even the Bridge of Eternities. To allow such events to occur would destroy Elyden before her perfect state could be attained.

The change in the mortal tongues had been the work of The Shaper, designed to sow discord amongst the mortals – never again would the mortals hold the power to work together and defy The Shaper’s will. The change in the mortal’s appearance was also the work of The Shaper, designed to cause distrust – never again would the mortals look upon each other and see themselves. The change in mortal customs has also been the work of The Shaper, designed to cause disparity amongst mortals – never again would mortals see another tribe’s rituals and understand them.

Not in harmony and unity would the future of Elyden be determined, but in disparity and corruption. Never again until the creation of the Perfect Realm would the Two-and-Twenty tribes have as great a union as they had when they had challenged the natural order of things with the construction of the Bridge of Eternities.

And so were the necessary evils of confusion, difference and disparity sown amongst the mortals, to distract them from the challenging the goal of perfection. Amplified by the wicked and the Æhari, or nullified by the good and the Illithamé, this disparity would be the force all future mortals would be measured against.

Time passed in Elyden and as the Demiurges continued to live in the shadow of their creator, their divinity all but stripped by their past mistakes, they came to realise that they were truly mortal. By the letter of the decree that The Shaper itself had issued epochs before, all those of mortal blood were to have spirits which would upon death travel to the Otherworld, eventually to become angels or demons. This fate, it is believed, also awaited the Demiurges, who would, with their deaths and lingering in the Otherworld, one day become the greatest of Illshaé and Dhæmae.

The Shaper was pleased with this; though in life the Demiurges had not pursued The Shaper’s will, they would do so in death as the greatest of his messengers.

Most of the Demiurges lost interest in their charges, the mortals, upon the discovery of their mortality, and abandoned them in pursuit of esoteric studies intended to prolong their lives, or somehow bring them closer to The Shaper. Of course, the Demiurges still drew strength from their worshippers but much had changed in their time on Elyden. No longer did the Demiurges feed solely on adulation, but rather they drew a modicum of strength from the mortals’ emotions. So mortals who thought certain thoughts or did certain things were, in effect, paying tribute to particular Demiurges, whether conscious or not. Though this latent form of sustenance was of less value to the Demiurges, it was enough to keep those who forsook their children alive to pursue their new selfish goals.

The Demiurges may have left the mortals, but the Legacy of the Two-and-Twenty was far from gone. In these lessened forms, the Demiurges continued to have unions with their mortals and worshippers, creating powerful scions whose blood teemed with the power of the Demiurges, diluted with the ephemera nature of the mortals. This blood thinned with each passing generation, but the signs remained – not necessarily in physical disparity, but rather an innate power of sorcery. Though the Demiurges had been stripped of their direct connection to the Firmament and the Atramenta, their progeny was not in such a way cursed, though their weakened blood meant that the feats of scions were in no way comparable to those of the early Demiurges.

In the absence of the guiding hand of the Demiurges these scions became leaders, champions, spiritual figures and legends, holding together what they could of their tribes. Many are remembered today, their stories adulterated by the passage of time and ignorance, where they are cultural legends and figures of myth. But still, they were inferior to the Demiurges, and had not the mythic charisma of their sires, and in time the tribes would fragment, no longer remaining Two-and-Twenty.

The golden age of mortals had come to an end with their abandonment by the Demiurges, and the nations Two-and-Twenty dissolved, shattering slowly in time to the vagaries of fate and chance. Some merged, others separated, becoming nations great and small, many and few, and the memory of the Two-and-Twenty tribes fell into myth and fable, eventually to be remembered only in the minds of the wisest of sages and those Demiurges and scions still alive who cared to remember such things.

Like the tribes, memory of the Two-and-Twenty Demiurges themselves passed from memory into legend, legend into obscurity, and obscurity into oblivion. And as the number and size of tribes continued to flux, the Demiurges were all but forgotten. In some ancient woods statues remained dedicated to unknown powers, but those who came upon them knew not to whom they had been consecrated. Around Elyden temples and records made by once-loyal mortal hands millennia past decayed until nothing was left but rubble. Eventually, all that remained were the vast cyclopean monuments and wonders that the Demiurges themselves had once crafted - monolithic fortresses of hitherto-unknown substances, minarets and obelisks that pierced the sky mysteriously, complexes and necropolises that sprawled from horizon to horizon without recorded purpose or meaning. The mortals that rediscovered these great inscrutable structures looked upon them and were forced to manufacture tales with characters grand enough to attribute their construction to - eschewing their true craftsmen, instead giving birth to mythologies and legends that many of their ancestors believe to this day.

Others maintained half-true memories of the Demiurges and came to worship them as a pantheon of distant deities, similar in little but effect, with different names and guises in different nations.

The progeny of the Demiurges - the bloodlines of the scions - continued to be diluted by pairings with mortals, becoming no more than kings and lords, with only the faintest echo of their sorcerous roots remaining. Knowledge of the Firmament and the Atramenta corrupted through time, and people came to revere the spirits of the fallen. Others forsook all notion of a higher power and worshipped little more than life itself. Still others, voracious to discover the hidden truths that lay buried in soil and time, became servants to lore and uncovered scattered details of the Demiurges and the tribes of old.

And so returned Sorcery and Atramentism to Elyden, and the seed of the Demiurges was carried on in the form of their offspring. With the abandonment of the final Demiurge ended the Age of wonders, where the spawn of deities walked the world.