the Mythologia Elyden - part 1

This is Part one of a new weekly serial detailing the Cosmogony of Elyden, the broad history of the Demiurges, and their tenure as the leaders of the mortal races, and the story of their downfall.

The series will end with a short bio on each of the Demiurges and their mortal children and their place in the modern world.

I hope you enjoy!

Our gods are false.

The pompous churches or preening pantheons that our fertile mortal minds have wrought over the millennia are but pretenders. They are inferior counterfeits that stand weak and pitiful in the shadows of the true gods of Elyden - the Demiurges.

But do not search in common encyclopaedias and history books for mention of these cyclopean beings, for you are unlikely to find any mention of them. Why? Well, why would the primates and bishops of our churches admit that their deities are but craven idols, wholly undeserving of the devotion and dedication of millions of ignorant fools? For centuries, our churches have fought to bury mention of the Demiurges out of fear of what the common folk - ultimately, their source of power -  might learn if only they care to question the status quo of millennia.

Cast aside the deities and pantheons of the present day and instead project your thoughts to an age unfathomable, before Elyden, before time, before anything.

The Mythologia Elyden

A monolithic treatise providing a world cosmogony, mythography, ancient religious origins, and Elyden’s formative histories, it is an invaluable work, covering millennia of Elyden’s earliest histories, though there are many misconceptions surrounding it.

Foremost among these misconceptions is that it is a single book. The truth is far more complex. The origins of the Mythologia Elyden might possibly be traced back to a single work, possibly penned by a Scion or a mortal acolyte. However, over time this would have been copied, transcribed, expanded upon, edited, censored, or just misunderstood or extrapolated from. Therefore it is difficult to ascertain today, in an age so far removed from its original creation, what is truth or what is anecdotal or apocryphal, added millennia later by enthusiastic and no-doubt well-meaning individuals.

However, there exist so many independent examples of the Mythologia Elyden, each discovered on different continents and penned in different times, that share certain similarities as to allow scholars to make educated guesses on what can be believed to be a trusted timeline for Elyden’s cosmogony and mythic prehistory.

What follows is based on these corroborated details.

The Exemplar Triad

There exist three versions of the Mythologia Elyden that we refer to today as the Exemplar Triad. Most of what is considered to be canonical with regards to the Mythologia Elyden appears in each of these three volumes.

The first of these is the Nártheli Codex, discovered in the northwest of the Ararah basin in the southwest of Nárthel in 320 RM. After months in private hands, the codex, which is thought to date to the late Fourth Age, was apprehended by the Church of the Undying Machine, and has never been seen since. This is the least transcribed of the Triad, largely due to the short time it spent in private hands before being removed from circulation, though many details of Elyden’s creation story were confirmed through it.

Individual pages from the original Nártheli Codex turn up on the secondary market from time to time, though most literati consider these to be forgeries. The Dacian Manuscript appeared in Dacia in 996 RM, purporting to be a complete transcription of the Nártheli Codex, and there remains much debate as to the accuracy of this book, with many of its passages still considered apocryphal to this day.

Second is the Kaskean Tome, discovered in a tomb outside the city of Kaskea in Izabal (then the west of Sagittaria) in 2788 RM. Despite being water-damaged, this version of the Mythologia Elyden is probably the most-studied version thanks to the relative freedom of religious belief in its country of origin. It has travelled extensively and has been studied in various cities across the Inner Sea Region, and the Surrach, and as such, it has become the basis for most of the extant translations of the Mytholoia Elyden. It is thought to date back to the Third Age and is the eldest of the Exemplar Triad.

Last of the Exemplar Triad are the Kholamori Manuscripts, which were discovered in a sealed lead container in 3221 RM by the ill-fated Almagest Expedition to the White Sheet. The manuscripts were amongst the last items sent back to the base camp in Fort Ronas before the expedition went missing.

Meticulously preserved from the middle Fourth Age, the Kholamori Manuscripts are printed in three separate manuscripts on leather-bound vellum, all of which are so finely preserved as to defy explanation. As a result, they are the most complete version of the Mythologia Elyden to be found in the Near-hemisphere and have been studied extensively by Almagest scholars, corroborating details from the other two versions to create a stable reckoning of Elyden’s Cosmogony.

The original Kholamori Manuscripts were stolen sometime in 3571 RM, with no evidence as to the culprits, though many believed that agents of the Church of the Undying Machine were to blame, in which case they were most likely destroyed. Despite this, over 1,000 copies have been made, including faithful reproductions made from direct heliographs of the pages, in some cases. Most are now in private collections around Elyden, and many are thought to have been destroyed, though a handful of museums and libraries, most notably in Parthis and Almagest itself, own copies that may be perused by appointment upon recommendation from their curators.

The following accounts were only made possible through these three versions of the Mythologia Elyden, and to them we owe much.

“In the beginning there was nought but the great Ananth – the roiling Sea of Chaos. In scope and purpose nothing can and / ever will come close to matching that byzantine sea, in the depths of which now-dead dreams / were created, long extinguished visions propagated, and unborn thoughts begot. The Sea of Chaos was / all and yet none, every-thing and no-thing. In its depths hid the colours divine from which all else / came and all would one day return; winds of scent unsensed before or since; unmitigated beauties / whose surfaces coruscated with virulent elegance and comely dread; torments, convictions and woes / as yet undesigned but somehow there. In the Ananth was every- /thing that ever was and would / be, and every-thing that never was and would not be. The crucible of desires lay within that Sea, / screaming out in the infinite void to the dreams of a realm that was, for all its contents, yet without / matter or life…”

Mythologia Elyden. 1: 1 – 9

In the beginning there was nothing but an endless sea of roiling chaos - the Ananth. But empty it was not, for in its intermediacy was a singular mote, infinitesimal in the great void. Yet from this singular mote emerged the constituent elements from which the entirety of existence is created.

     This Seed of Creation was not without sentience, for it wore a mask that mortals, in their ignorance and desire to anthropomorphise the world around them, would over time give a myriad of names, but which became known simply as The Shaper – the essence of the Sea of Chaos personified. In the guise of The Shaper, the Ananth was all and yet none, every-thing and yet no-thing. The Shaper was the Sea of Chaos, the Sea of Chaos was The Shaper – there was not one without the other, and there was nought else without either.

     And so, The Shaper slumbered in the Sea of Chaos.

     Time mattered not in this endless wilderness of nothingness, and The Shaper lay dormant for an eternity and a moment alike, its immaterial dreams echoing in the void. Yet, in the Sea of Chaos, where every facet was a facet of The Shaper, vacant thoughts irrigated to hoarseness by dreams made themselves manifest as the Colours Divine, from which The Light and The Dark stirred.

     Blinded by the Colours Divine, The Shaper awoke, and in that moment saw the fullness of the Ananth – the beginning of all, the end of nought; and in the endless span between them the form of dreams made manifest to tell the tale of creation.

     The Shaper knew then the purpose of the Ananth and that its emptiness was but the amnion from which everything else would blossom. The Shaper grew restless, its thoughts feeding a terrific agitation that echoed throughout the Ananth.

     Its roiling churned the Ananth, causing it to separate into two halves – the Firmament Above and the Atramenta Below.

     The Shaper saw the two existences it had created, and was stricken by a yearning to mould everything about it in likeness of what its dreams had shown it during its timeless slumber. So it shaped the Firmament and the Atramenta. Its thoughts and emotions were the tools of its craft, its will the means, and the Firmament and Atramenta the materials.

     Where the two elements met, they formed the Material, the sum of two sires -  the crucible of all else, the balance between Firmament Above and Atramenta Below, both of which permeated the Material, the gossamer threads of one and the thick tendrils of the other holding it together.

     Thus, in the absence of all else, a new balance was wrought, and in that balance did The Shaper find contentment, and it slumbered once more, leaving creation alone for an eternity of moments, for there still was nought against which the sleeping of The Shaper could be measured.

     And so were created the Firmament and the Atramenta and the Material between. One: the light, the searing, the immaterial, was the measure of the other: the dark, the frigid, the physical. And by these measures is the world of today still counted.

Part 2