Every people on Mazariim tells stories about the beginning, about why the world has scars, and about the gods who came to walk among them.
I have spent forty years collecting the stories peoples tell about the beginning. The beginning as grandmother told grandchild beside a fire. The beginning as shaman sang to a village beneath stars they could not name. The beginning as carved into cave walls by hands that had only recently learned to hold a chisel.
These myths are wrong. I state this without hesitation or apology. No entity created the universe. No consciousness shaped the stars or breathed life into clay. The cosmos emerged from processes so vast and so ancient that even Mau the Oracle, the eldest of all entities, awoke billions of years after the first light burned in the void. The Old Gods are inhabitants of this universe, as we are inhabitants, formed by the same forces that built everything else.
Yet I collect these stories because they are true in a different sense. They reveal what peoples valued when they looked at the sky and asked why. They show us which forces frightened them, which comforted them, which they believed held their lives in balance. A myth about Pyrantor bringing the sun into being tells us nothing about cosmology. It tells us everything about a desert people who lived and died by the mercy of heat and light.
I present these myths grouped by cultural family. Readers will observe that stories diverge along the same paths as the peoples who carry them. Where the Madronians split from the Sabonaar roughly three thousand five hundred years before the War, their creation myths split with them, carried south along the coast and reshaped by salt air and mercantile pragmatism. Where the Varkonans lost their memories in the great teleportation from Akovar, their myths bear the scars of that forgetting, full of gaps and silences where older knowledge once lived. Fragments rhyme across oceans. Echoes persist across millennia. And occasionally, buried beneath layers of cultural accretion and poetic invention, a genuine observation survives, garbled beyond recognition but pointing toward something real.
I do not judge these stories. I observe them. That is my faith and my practice.
I see you.
Creation stories of the peoples of Mazariim, compiled by Sevan Miros, Archivist-General of the Library of the Ages.
The elves possess the oldest continuous oral tradition among the mortal races. Their creation myth is notable for two reasons. It is the only surviving tradition that places observation before action, treating the act of witnessing as the first and most sacred creative force. And it is the only tradition that names all eight of the Old Gods in what appears to be their correct order of awakening.
Before the world there was the silence, and in the silence there was watching.
The Watcher had no name and no shape and no hunger. It was the first eye to open amid the boundless dark, the first mind to know that darkness was. It beheld nothing, for nothing yet stirred. But it watched, and its watching was patient, and its patience had no shore, and Raven had not yet come to reckon it, and Salmon had not yet come to swim beneath it, and the watching went on and on in the primeval black like a river that has not yet found its bed.
The Watcher's gaze fell across the emptiness, and wherever that gaze tarried the emptiness became less empty. To be seen is to exist more fully than ere one was beheld. This is the first truth and the oldest magic.
Fire woke first. Somewhere in the belly of a star too vast for any hawk to cross, something that was neither alive nor dead kindled into knowing. It knew that it burned. Hawk had kept vigil over that star since before the burning, and Hawk said nothing, for Hawk understood that fire does not need to be bade what it is. The elders call this one Pyrantor, the Flame That Does Not Think.
Water woke in the same age. In the measureless dark between stars, on a world of nothing but ocean, something vast knew its own depth. Salmon swam in that first pulling. Salmon felt the tide ere the tide had a name, and Salmon bore the memory of that primeval rhythm in its blood. The elders name this one Iquinias, the Tide That Knows Itself.
Wind woke third, and woke screaming. Raven rode the changes and laughed, and Raven's laughter became the first weather. The elders call her Vuleala, Mother of Rain.
Stone woke fourth, and woke slowly. Badger knew. Badger had hewn into the first stone and felt its patience, and Badger understood that the stone was not silent because it had nothing to say but because it had said everything already, long ago, in a voice too low for ears that abide only a hundred years. The elders name it Dirgin, the Stone That Remembers.
Then came the tenebrous waking, and the Singing Record grows quiet here, and the singers lower their voices, and even Raven is still. Nigh to a place where light itself was devoured, mana that had gathered in that abyssal absence kindled into awareness. But what it became aware of was ending. The elders name it Zebulba, the Final Cold, and they do not speak of it after dark.
Then the wild woke, and it woke laughing, and its laughter shook seeds from ancient trees on a hundred worlds. Spider wove in its laughter. Fox ran in its laughter. The elders call it Gruhathyrir, the Wyld Heart.
And the world dreamed. Bear knew this dreaming, for Bear sleeps longest and dreams deepest. The elders call this one Zanzabar, the Walker Betwixt Sleeps.
Last came the golden one, and the Singing Record lifts here, and the singers raise their voices, and Hawk turns toward the east. Heron stood in that first hallowed light and spread its wings, and the light passed through Heron's feathers and fell in patterns on the water below, and the patterns were the first geometry of mending. The elders name her Asti, the Golden Watcher. Be whole.
Before the world there was the silence, and in the silence there was watching. And the watching endures. And the silence abides. And betwixt them, the world.
The elven tradition places Mau at the beginning and treats observation itself as the first creative act. "To be seen is to exist more fully than before." This formulation approaches theological truth more closely than any other creation myth I have encountered in forty years of collection. The ordering of the Old Gods after Mau is partially accurate. The elves present them sequentially because stories require sequence. Most striking is the treatment of Zebulba. Every other Old God receives a quality of character. But Zebulba is described only in terms of negation and absence, and the singers will not meet its gaze even in story.
Dwarven creation traditions predate Mordrion's arrival by at least four hundred years. The Stone Songs were performed by Stonekeepers of Dirgin in deep-cavern ceremonies that surface-dwelling peoples were never permitted to witness. Most Gormdawi today consider them quaint antiquities. The Bryndawi preserve them with greater fidelity.
Stone was first.
Stone was always. Stone remembers the time ere remembering had a word. There was no sky, for stone filled all things. There was no air, for stone yielded no gap. There was only the pressing, weight upon unyielding weight, and the pressing was the first covenant. This pressing was Dirgin. Dirgin was the pressing. The pressing endured. The world held.
Then something cracked. Deep in the stone, the heart-heat leaked through the cracking. Not sky-fire from above. The stone's own inner burning, and the secret escaped, and the escaping hewn the first hollow places. The first stone-scars.
The root-drinker seeped after. Where the heart-heat had been, cold water followed, filling the stone-scars as rain fills a cupped hand. Stone accepted this. Stone accepts all things that last, for lasting is the only tribute stone respects.
Wind came last to the deep places, and wind was the unwelcome guest. Wind dried the good damp. Wind bore cold from the surface-realm above. Wind is the youngest force, and wind has never been beholden for the dwelling, and the stone has never pardoned the trespass.
Above all of this was the Eye. The Eye in the Ceiling, the Gormdawi name it. It does not aid. It does not hinder. It does not look away. And when a dwarf perishes in a collapse and the stone takes him back, the Stonekeeper says, The Eye beheld. The Eye remembers. And that is sufficient.
And below all of this, below the deepest stone, below the most ancient pressing, there is the Deep Down Dark. The Stonekeepers do not name it further. They will not. Cold that is more gelid than the root-drinker. Dark that is more stygian than a shaft with no torch. The Stonekeeper who forsakes this knowing has forsaken the only thing a Stonekeeper must keep.
Every other tradition begins with nothing and adds things to it. The dwarves begin with everything and subtract things from it. This is a miner's cosmology, a tunneler's theology. You do not build the world. You excavate it. Dirgin is identified directly with the primordial pressing. Not a being who created stone, but the stone itself aware of its own nature. The "Deep Down Dark" is Zebulba, unnamed and feared. Every dwarf who has worked a deep mine understands this fear. Something waits that is worse than cave-in and worse than gas. Something that simply ends you without violence or drama.
The Varkonan creation tradition carries wounds that no other myth bears. When the Akovarian survivors were teleported to the Ancient South, the ritual inflicted collective memory loss. Their creation myth reflects this trauma. It is full of gaps. Sentences trail into silence. Images surface with startling clarity and then dissolve into confusion.
In the beginning Ra slumbered, and his slumber was the world.
His breath was the wind that moves across the hallowed sand at dawn. His dreaming was the river that flows and does not cease. His bones were the stone beneath the desert. His blood was the fire beneath the mountains. And his eye, even amid slumber, was open, and his eye shone upon all things, and all things existed because his sovereign gaze ordained them.
Then Ra stirred, and his stirring was the first morning. Light poured from his opening eye and where the light touched the sand the sand became gold, and where it touched the water the water became silver, and where it touched the great stones the great stones became the foundations of hallowed temples. And the light of Ra shone upon all things.
But beneath the world, in the tenebrous places where the golden light could not reach, something cold stirred also. It had no name. It had no face. It was the shadow that Ra's radiance begat, for where there is light there must be shadow. And this thing was ending, and it was patient.
And one day, the Ra-Priests say in whispers only among themselves, Ra will tire. And the cold thing will not be vanquished. And that will be the last night, and there will be no morning after, and the golden rivers will parch, and the pyramids will stand amid darkness, and the sand will bury everything we wrought to remember what we have already forsaken to forgetting.
The Varkonans collapsed the entire Old God pantheon into a single supreme figure and positioned only entropy as its opposite. This is monotheistic impulse dressed in polytheistic imagery. Most significant is the gap in the tradition. "Here the telling becomes confused. Different Ra-Priest lineages preserve different versions." This confusion marks the wound of the memory loss. The gap itself is the most honest part of the myth. It admits that something was lost and does not pretend otherwise.
The Ejiin constructed something philosophically distinct from every other tradition. They present the Old Gods not as beings who awoke one by one, but as aspects of a single undivided reality that chose to separate in order for the world to function.
Before the world was shaped there was the Void, and amid the Void there was one breath, and the one breath held all things within it, and none of those things had yet kindled into themselves. The one breath divided. It became four, and each was a truth, and the four truths together wrought the world.
The First Breath is water. A stone abides in a stream. The water does not smite the stone. In ten thousand years the stone is sand and the water is unchanged. The shamans say, Be water. The patient one prevails.
The Second Breath is earth. A mountain endures. Rain falls upon it. Lightning cleaves its face. The mountain does not answer. The shamans say, Be earth. The resolute one endures.
The Third Breath is air. A cage is wrought of iron and locked with seven locks. The air within the cage is the selfsame air without. The locks hold nothing. The shamans say, Be air. The free one cannot be held.
The Fourth Breath is fire. A dead forest stands gray and cold. Lightning smites the driest tree. And in the spring, green kindles from the black ground, stronger than the gray. The shamans say, Be fire. The valiant one transforms.
Beneath the four there is a quiet so complete that it holds neither sound nor silence. The shamans name it once, and once only, in the final year of training. If the student asks what it betokens, the shaman says, "Sit with it."
And above the Four Breaths there is the One Breath. The shamans do not name it. To name a thing is to set it apart from other things, and the One Breath is not apart from anything. But some shamans say the One Breath has an eye. And the eye is always open. And if you are very still, and very quiet, and very honest with yourself about what you do not know, you can feel the eye upon you, and the feeling is not dread, and the feeling is not solace. The feeling is attention.
Through pure contemplation, the Ejiin arrived at a truth that formal Mauian training provides through revelation. The refusal to name the One Breath is itself a theological position. "To name a thing is to make it less than it is." This echoes a principle in advanced Mauian meditation that I note with considerable interest. The Ejiin shamans, working independently with no contact with Mauian clergy, reached the same conclusion through a different path.
The Chak'ti migrated eastward from the Madronian heartlands approximately twenty-five hundred years before the War. Their creation tradition preserves recognizable Madronian elements, transformed through the lens of a nomadic horse-culture that lives beneath an endless sky.
The first thing was the grass, and the grass had no end.
Before the firmament. Before the sun. Before the wind that stirs the grass and the horse that runs through it. There was only the grass, green and gold and boundless, growing amid the primeval dark without sun to nourish it, growing because growing was its dominion.
Then the firmament opened above the grass, and light fell through the sundering. The sun was the eye of the sky-horse, so vast that its body was the firmament itself, and its mane was the host of clouds, and its hooves struck sparks from the dark that became the stars. The sky-horse runs. The sky-horse has always run.
Beneath the grass, fire abides in the roots. Fire warms the earth. But fire must not be loosed from the roots. Free fire devours the grass. Free fire is the fell enemy of all things that dwell upon the steppe.
Water came from the sky-horse's grieving. When the great beast beheld the beauty of the grass, tears fell from its luminous eye, and the tears were rain, and the lowest place became Khonayn, the Lake of Tears. Sorrow and gladness are the selfsame water, and the Chak'ti have always known this, and the knowing is why they chaunt at funerals and weep at weddings.
And beneath the grass, below the root-fire, there is the still place. The ancestors tarry there, facing upward, keeping vigil through the roots toward the living world. The horses know. A horse will not graze above a fell death. A horse will stand all day above an honored one, and the standing is the horse's prayer, and the horse's prayer is more ancient than ours.
The Chak'ti replaced the Madronian "stone" with "grass" as the primordial substance. The sky-horse is a synthesis of Mau and Vuleala, combined into a single figure, because for a people who live beneath open heaven at all times, the sky is one thing and its qualities are attributes rather than separate beings. The "still place" beneath the roots is a fusion of ancestor worship and Zebulba-fear, tempered by an eschatology that finds room for reunion amid ending.
After the cosmic violence of Mordrion and Zuel, the halflings offer something different. A god who knelt in the dirt and made it generous. I reproduce Blossom Kettlewhistle's words as faithfully as my notes allow, though I suspect the written version lacks something that was present in the telling, namely the smell of bread baking in the kitchen behind us.
Before Hinterhin came, we had the earth and the earth was good.
We had the rain and the sun and the turning of seasons, and we planted what we knew to plant, and sometimes the harvest was full and sometimes the harvest was lean, and either way we ate and we shared and we got on with it.
Then one morning a stranger walked into the village. He wasn't much to look at. Short even for one of us, and round, proper round. Barefoot, with soles like old leather and mud between his toes. He carried a walking stick in one hand and a sack of seeds in the other, burlap, patched twice and tied with twine that was mostly hope. And his smile. Well. His smile was the kind that makes you count your silverware but also makes you glad he's come.
He asked for breakfast. You don't refuse breakfast to a stranger in Shalazar. You just don't. So the village fed him, and he ate with the kind of appetite that makes you wonder whether he'd ever eaten before. Then he stood and walked to the nearest field and knelt down.
He put his hands into the soil. Not on the top of it. Into it, up past the wrists. And the soil where he'd knelt was darker. Richer. It smelled of rain and of growing and of the patient promise of seeds that know they'll be cared for. And the richness spread, slowly, the way honey runs off a warm spoon.
The stranger smiled his smile. He said three words. "Feed each other." And he walked away down the lane.
And that's why we always set a plate for a stranger, even if the table's full and the bread's running low. Because the stranger at your door might be Hinterhin come back to check on us, or might be a family who's lost everything and needs what you can give, and to a halfling there's no meaningful difference between those two things, and there never has been.
A stranger asked for breakfast. A village fed him. He made the earth generous in return. The theological content is almost invisible. Hinterhin is not described as a god. He speaks three words of doctrine. "Feed each other." And it has sustained a civilization for nearly three thousand years. The god who will make the earth generous is himself in need of generosity. The halflings fed their god before their god fed them, and this sequence is theologically precise. You must give before you receive.
Across every tradition I have collected, without exception, an observing presence appears. The elves call it the Watcher. The Madronians carve it as "the eye above." The Sabonaar place it where the Deep meets the sky. The Nond call it the Sky with one eye. The Varkonans embed it in Ra's sleeping gaze. The dwarves name it the Eye in the Ceiling. The Chak'ti make it the sun-eye of the sky-horse. The Ejiin sense it as the open eye of the One Breath.
Eight cultures. Eight independent traditions separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years. Eight different names for the same presence. An observer that precedes creation, persists through it, and never acts. This is Mau. I state this without qualification.
Every tradition places something terrible beneath the world. The elves whisper of the Final Cold. The dwarves call it the Deep Down Dark. The Chak'ti speak of the still place where no wind blows. The Ejiin acknowledge it as the quiet beneath the Breaths that the shamans name only once and never explain. Zebulba. Every culture feels its presence and fears to behold it directly. They approach it sideways, through metaphor and indirection, lowering their voices and glancing over their shoulders.
Every people looked up. Every people felt the gaze. Every people said, "Something is watching." And they were right.
Not the creation of the physical world, but the creation of moral reality. Before Tiovin and Taovan, good and evil existed as tendencies. After them, good and evil became cosmic forces with armies and an eternal wager.
In the time ere Tiovin had a name, there was a watching amid the dark. Something vast gathered in the spaces betwixt the stars, and as it gathered it turned its waking awareness toward the world below and beheld there a strange and troubling kindred. Humanity. Young. Fierce. Creatures who sheltered orphans with one hand and strangled rivals with the other.
The gathering awareness sought to hold both truths at once. It sought to encompass the mercy and the cruelty that abided in every human heart. And it could not. A consciousness that comprehended mercy could not also comprehend the impulse to enslave children. The two truths repelled each other, and the gathering entity, in the uttermost instant ere it formed its realm, was cloven asunder.
Two beings stood where one had gathered. Two realms were wrought where one would have sufficed.
Tiovin looked upon humanity and beheld creatures who could prevail over their worst impulses. Every murderer had been a child once, and choices could be unmade. Tiovin wrought Heaven from golden light and hallowed peace.
Taovan looked upon humanity and beheld creatures whose nature was the nature of the wolf, girded in the borrowed vestments of civilization. Every kindness was barter. Every covenant of loyalty was a leash. Taovan forged Hell from iron and suffering.
Then they regarded one another across the void, and each beheld in the other what it had been ere the sundering. And in that remembering they found the only thing upon which they could agree. The wager. Neither would walk the material plane. Neither would compel. Humanity would choose.
The moderate Tiovinian version is notable for its restraint. It presents the Splitting as tragedy rather than triumph, framing both entities as incomplete fragments of something that was whole before it shattered. Taovan is wrong, but Taovan's wrongness is comprehensible. The wager itself is presented as mutually agreed. This framing means Tiovin's absence during the War to End All Wars was not abandonment but honor, a god who keeps promises even when keeping them costs everything.
The Ejiin possess a version that predates their contact with Tiovinian missionaries by at least five centuries. Their ancestors departed the Varkonan heartlands around 3,500 BW, roughly five hundred years before Tiovin and Taovan are believed to have awakened. The Ejiin myth should not exist.
Ere the Four Breaths divided, there was a fifth element that the shamans do not reckon among the Breaths. It was stillness. And stillness held all things together without effort or intention.
Then stillness beheld what it held. A samurai who perishes for his lord and a ronin who slays for coin. A mother who starves so her child may eat and a father who sells his child for drink. Stillness could not remain still while containing such opposites, for stillness requires wholeness, and these things were at war within the wholeness.
So stillness relinquished its hold. And two things fell away from each other and could never be rejoined.
The Ejiin do not call them Tiovin and Taovan. They call them Hikari, the light that guides without binding, and Kage, the shadow that follows without choosing. Hikari and Kage are not adversaries. They are consequences. They are what remains when wholeness cannot hold.
The Ejiin teach that the goal is not the victory of light over shadow. The goal is reunion. Any warrior who holds both mercy and strength within a single heart without permitting either to vanquish the other has achieved in miniature what the gods themselves could not.
Every other tradition frames the relationship between good and evil as a war to be won. The Ejiin frame it as a wound to be healed. Whether the Ejiin independently perceived the same cosmic event through their own shamanic traditions, or whether the Splitting was a process that began centuries before the entity fully awakened, I cannot determine. What I find most compelling is the teaching that the highest virtue is not goodness alone but the integration of opposites, the refusal to amputate half of the self in service to purity.
Minerva, Mordrion, Zuel, Hinterhin, Rivoleen. Each arrived differently. Each transformed a people. Each left marks that have not faded.
Two versions of the Enlightening survive, and their differences reveal the deepest fracture in elven culture, one that four thousand years of shared faith have not healed.
Ere the Green Mother came, the elves walked in twilight. They knew the names of trees but not why the trees grew. They had fire and speech and the shaping of stone, and these things were good, and they were not sufficient.
Then she came. From beyond the sky, from a realm where forests grow amid light that has no source, Minerva beheld the elves and was moved. She came not as conqueror. She came as a gardener comes to a garden that has been growing wild, with hands gentle enough to tend without tearing. She gathered the seven. From each nation she called one elder, and she took them to Elysium.
What came to pass there endured one month by the reckoning of Elysium and one heartbeat by the reckoning of the world. The seven received the Knowing. Not knowledge alone, for knowledge is seed scattered on stone. The Knowing was deeper. It was the understanding of why the world breathes and what it means to tend the breathing.
The seven returned. They were the selfsame elves who had departed, and they were not the selfsame elves, and both of these truths abided together without conflict.
Ere the Outsider came, we were free.
We hunted in the deep forest where the green goes so old it turns black at the roots. We bore our gods in our breath and our blood and the soles of our feet upon the forest floor, and they were nigh, and they were sufficient.
Then the Outsider came from beyond the firmament and told us we were not sufficient. She poured something into the seven that had not been there before, something bright and heavy and sharp, and when they returned they beheld us with new eyes, and the new eyes saw things the old eyes had been content to leave unseen.
We gained much. Medicine that vanquished plagues. Magic that let us speak across distances. The understanding of history. But we lost the silence. The Knowing filled the space where the listening had dwelt. The names we bestowed upon the trees became walls betwixt us and the trees.
We are the elves who remember the before. We bear the silence within us alongside the Knowing, and we shall not let either be forsaken.
The Ya'sehrim version is triumphant. The Tawarim version is ambivalent. "The knowing filled the space where the listening had been." To name a thing is to create distance between yourself and the thing named. Whether this represents wisdom or nostalgia, I cannot determine. But I note that the Tawarim call Minerva "the Outsider" rather than "the Green Mother," and that this word choice has been maintained for four thousand years against considerable pressure.
In a world beyond worlds there dwelt a god who loved the dwarves. His name was Morae'din, and he was lord of the forge-belly and master of the anvil-song. And in that selfsame world there dwelt a god who hated the dwarves. His name was Gru'umsht, and he was lord of the blood-raid.
Then came the final blow. Gru'umsht's wound-maker found Morae'din's eye and tore it from its socket. Morae'din's battle-tongue found Gru'umsht's hand and cloven it from the wrist. The worlds were sundered. The two gods were hurled through the void, bleeding and broken and diminished. Morae'din became Mordrion. Gru'umsht became Zuel.
Mordrion came to the mountains. He came wounded. He found the dwarves slaying their own kindred in the Dwarven Wars. He walked the battlefields for seven days and lifted every dwarven body from the mud and laid them in rows upon clean stone. He did not speak, and his one remaining eye was dry, and the dryness was worse than any weeping.
The savior and the doom-bringer came from the selfsame wound. They cannot be sundered. To receive Mordrion was to receive Zuel.
Ere He came we were nothing. Meat that devoured meat. We dwelt in the tenebrous deep and slew for the slaying and there was no purpose to any of it.
Then He fell from the firmament bleeding. His hand was gone. And He was the most terrible thing we had ever beheld because His wrath had purpose and His hunger had direction. He looked upon us and beheld not beasts but a host waiting for a warlord.
Take, He bade us. The strong take. The weak perish.
Three tellings. The Gormdawi version is triumphal. The Bryndawi Reckoning, which I preserve in the full archives, remembers what was lost, autonomy, the ancient relationship with Dirgin that required no intermediary. And the orcish telling is the most necessary and the most uncomfortable. Zuel gave the orcs the same thing Mordrion gave the dwarves. Meaning. Direction. A reason to exist. The realization that gratitude can be felt toward a force of pure destruction is one of the most uncomfortable observations I have made in fifty-six years of study.
The dwarves received their god with trumpets and tears. We received ours with a question.
After the Wounded God came to the dwarves we watched from our smaller tunnels and we wondered. The dwarves had changed. They stood straighter. They spoke louder. But we also noticed what the dwarves didn't notice. They stopped asking certain questions. Why do we forge this way? Because Mordrion taught us. The answers were always Mordrion, and the answers were always sufficient, and the sufficiency of the answers made the questions unnecessary, and the unnecessary questions stopped being asked.
Then a stranger came to Zhonhylite. He was a gnome. Unremarkable. Short even for our kind, thin as a reed, with spectacles that kept sliding down his nose and a journal so fat with notes and pressed flowers that holding it together required both hands and what my grandmother would've called "ambitious optimism."
He sat in the market square and asked a baker named Twill, "Why do you bake bread?" Twill said, "Because people need to eat." The stranger wrote this down. "Why do people need to eat?" "Because they'll die if they don't." The stranger wrote this down. "Why do people die?" Twill said, "I don't know." The stranger smiled and said, "Neither do I. Shall we find out together?"
Rivoleen did not tell us what to believe. He asked us what we believed and then asked us why. Within a generation, the worship of Dirgin waned among our people. Not because Rivoleen decreed it. Because the gnomes, once they commenced asking questions about their own faith, couldn't stop.
"Rivoleen came to us with a question. He has been asking questions for two thousand years. He has never answered one. Is a god who does not answer worthy of worship?"
"Neither do I. Shall we find out together?" This single line contains more theological sophistication than many elaborate doctrines. It positions the relationship between entity and worshiper as mutual investigation rather than revelation and obedience. Every other entity arrives with certainty. Rivoleen brings questions. The gnomish god is, in their telling, the only god who admits ignorance.
Teaching stories about Taovan's methods, told in different forms by clergy as warnings, by cultists as instruction manuals, and by ordinary people as the kind of practical wisdom that helps you recognize when something is wrong.
There was a merchant who was good. Truly good. Gave to the poor. Kept honest weights. Beseeched God each morning. His enterprise prospered, for honest merchants draw honest custom.
Then his daughter fell ill, and the healers shook their heads, and the priests said, "Pray." And the daughter grew worse.
A physician came to his door. She said, "I can save your daughter. My price is not gold. In your warehouse you have a shipment. Amid the legitimate goods, you will place one crate. You will not open it. You will not ask what it holds."
The merchant agreed, for what father would not. The daughter lived. A month later the physician returned. Another crate. Another address. By the fifteenth he had ceased counting and ceased caring what the crates held, because caring would have required him to acknowledge what he already knew.
In Xeque they say this is how Taovan works. Not with grand temptation. With a sick child. With a small price. With a modest compromise that makes the next compromise smaller still, until the distance betwixt the man you were and the man you have become is so vast that you cannot behold one from the other.
In the older villages they tell of kings who went mad. Not suddenly. Slowly. Over years and decades. A good king who became a tyrant by such small steps that no single step could be called the turning.
The king appoints a new advisor. The advisor is brilliant and steadfast in loyalty, and each counsel is always sound, always calibrated to the king's own inclinations with unerring precision, never requiring anything the king does not already half-desire.
"That baron affronted you. A measured answer would proclaim strength." The measured answer is harsh. But warranted. "The merchants murmur against the levy. Better to marshal enforcement than to seem weak." The enforcement is heavy-handed. But needful. "Your son questions your judgment before the court. He must be brought to heel." Year after year. Each counsel warranted in isolation. Each decree a fraction harsher than the last.
When such a king is finally overthrown, the advisor is never found among the slain. Simply gone. Passed on to the next court.
In Beneshire they call this creature a Whisper-Devil, and they say you can reckon one by this sign alone. The advisor who never gainsays you is the one you should dread above all others.
Entities that reason cannot approach. Their myths are not stories about what happened to other people. They are contagions. The knowledge they contain is itself a vector.
Every culture on Mazariim possesses warnings given to children about things that must not be done. These warnings predate theology. They predate literacy. They are among the oldest artifacts of mortal culture. I have collected these from nine cultures over forty years.
"There are tunnels that whisper. You know the ones. The ones the foreman sealed and the old shaft-hewers will not speak of save to say, Do not open that. If you hearken to a voice from behind a sealed tunnel, you do not answer it. If the voice knows your name, you walk away faster. If the voice sounds like someone of your kindred, you run. The things behind sealed tunnels do not know love. They know what love sounds like, and that is not the selfsame thing."
"If you find food in the forest that you didn't bring and can't see who left it, you leave it where it is. The forest has things in it that are kind the way a fishhook is kind to a fish, which is to say they offer what you want so they can get what they want. The food is real. The kindness isn't."
"When you meditate, you face the wall. You do not face the open room. You do not face the darkness with your eyes closed, because when your eyes are closed and your mind is open and the darkness is before you, things that dwell in the darkness can behold the opening and step through. Face the wall. The wall is solid. Let the wall remind you what is real while your mind travels to places where real is negotiable."
"The horses know. When the herd turns and will not cross a certain stretch of grass, you do not cross it either. Horses behold the world without the lies our minds tell us about what should and should not be there. If a horse will not go somewhere, the place is fell. And fell places have tenants that pay no tribute and do not leave."
"If you dream the same dream three nights running, you tell your mother before the sun sets on the third day. You don't wait for the fourth night. On the fourth night the dream starts dreaming you."
Nine cultures. Nine warnings. Nine different ways of saying the same thing. Something is out there. It is aware of you. It is interested in you. Do not reciprocate. These warnings predate any theological framework. Mothers were warning children about these dangers before any priest or scholar had identified what the dangers were.
There was a village that had a problem, and the problem was rats. A stranger arrived. He was thin and pallid and wore spectacles with lenses that seemed too thick. He carried a bag of books. He said he was a scholar and asked for a night's lodging in exchange for conversation.
He knew things. He knew why the river flooded. He knew which herbs vanquished fever. When they spoke of the rats, he showed them a sound, a specific pitch that drove the rats from the storehouse. The village was delighted.
On the third night he said he had a teacher. The teacher's voice abided in the spaces betwixt thoughts. He could show them how to listen. Three villagers wished to learn. He taught them to sit amid silence and hearken with the part of the mind that perceives patterns in what seems like randomness.
Within a week, one heard a rhythm. Within a month, another beheld patterns in everything, in bird formations, in star arrangements, in seashell spirals, a language wrought into the fabric of the world addressed to him alone. He ceased eating because eating interrupted his attention. The third ceased speaking entirely and drew spirals on the walls until the walls were covered and she was compelled to continue on the outside of the house.
An inquisitor arrived. He recognized the signs. The journals were filled with a script that matched samples recovered from Og'thallith cult sites. He burned the journals. He treated the second villager with prayer and sedation that brought him partially back. The third was borne to a clinic where she endured for six more years, drawing spirals on her bedsheets with her fingernails.
The first villager, the one who had followed the rhythm furthest, vanished on the night the inquisitor arrived. She was never found.
The rat-sound still worked. The crops still grew better. Every piece of knowledge the stranger had bestowed was true and useful. The inquisitor told them that this was the point. Og'thallith does not tempt with falsehood. Og'thallith tempts with truth.
This myth targets the precise population most likely to encounter Og'thallith's influence. Scholars. Researchers. People who believe that the pursuit of knowledge is inherently virtuous and that an open mind is always preferable to a closed one. The myth says, specifically and deliberately, that an open mind is a vulnerability, and that the smartest people in the room are the most at risk because they are the least likely to recognize what is happening to them until it is too late.
Three civilizations that reached too far and paid a price so vast that the landscape itself still bears the marks. Victims become heroes. Perpetrators become monsters. Complex chains of causation become simple moral lessons. And the scars remain.
The oldest cataclysm and the one most thoroughly obscured by time. The Varkonans lost their memories in the teleportation that saved them. The dragonborn possess oral traditions viewed from the perspective of beings born from the catastrophe. The dragons carry firsthand memory but do not share willingly.
We forgot. We forgot the name of the Golden Land. We forgot the names of the hallowed temples and the cities and the rivers of gold. We forgot the chaunts the priests sang and the prayers the faithful spoke. We forgot who we had been. We remembered only that we had been something sovereign, and the remembering without knowing was a wound that would not heal, and we wrought our pyramids to fill the emptiness where the knowing had dwelt, and the pyramids were beautiful, and they were not sufficient, and they have never been sufficient.
We are what the Golden Age bequeathed. Not its heirs. Not its kindred. Its scars. And scars do not mourn the wound that wrought them. Scars ward the flesh beneath. Scars remember what befell so that the body does not have to.
The islands are ours now. We do not fathom what the temples were wrought for, but we know they were wrought with love, because the stone still holds the warmth of the light that once flowed through it. We are the children of the breaking, and we do not beg pardon for being what we are, because we are what was possible after everything else became impossible.
We taught them. This was the transgression. We came because the golden threads sang and we followed beauty without reckoning that beauty can be a snare set by the cosmos for those too certain of their own judgment.
I was aloft when the breaking came. I beheld the temples shatter. I beheld dragons fall from the sky, their wings burning, their screaming joining the screaming of the threads in a sound that I have borne for nearly nine thousand years.
Nine thousand years is not long enough.
But the threads are growing back. The golden threads that held the first land together are reaching through the earth again, and when they find those places the earth hums, and the humming is the sound of something remembering itself after a very long slumber.
The Varkonan telling is the most poignant. The dragonborn telling is the bravest. The dragon's fragment is the most valuable, nine words, "We taught them. This was the transgression," that contain more remorse than most elegies manage in nine pages. And the Ejiin preserve the detail that all other traditions have lost. "The threads are growing back." This fragment predates the ley-line reawakening of 815 AW by over five thousand years.
Ere the nations there were the wizard-kings, and the wizard-kings were us, and we do not forsake this knowing.
Dragons taught us magic. We seized what was offered with both hands and an appetite that should have forewarned the dragons. The wizard-kings held sway over every village and their experiments were abominable, and the creatures they wrought from living subjects still creep through the deep forests of this region.
Yrugas endured over a thousand years. It fell in a day. The magical energies detonated. Hundreds of thousands perished. The mass death was so sudden that the boundary between the material plane and the Negative Energy Plane was sundered. The dead did not abide in death.
The sealed breach is the Hollow Sepulcher. Zebulba's greatest temple. A permanent wound in the world. And we bear the name of its most formidable tyrant on our lips every day, because the bearing is the remembering, and the remembering is the only warding against doing it again.
All things end. This abides as truth. But the ending must come in its own season. What the wizard-kings wrought was not ending. It was tearing. The silence that pours through the Sepulcher is not the natural silence of entropy. It is the screaming silence of a wound wrought by arrogance, and a wound is not an ending but an injury, and injuries must be tended even by those who know that the patient shall eventually perish.
We hold the threshold because the threshold should never have been sundered. Not because we gainsay the end. Because we gainsay the impatience of those who would hasten the end ere its appointed time.
The Void-Touched are clergy of Zebulba who spend their lives holding shut a door to their own god's greatest temple. They have found, amid the depths of their nihilism, a reason to act that is simultaneously faithful to their god and protective of the world their god would consume. They are the most paradoxical people on Mazariim, and they are the bravest, and they shall never depart the Sepulcher, and no one shall ever thank them, and they know this, and they abide.
Don't go to the Jinook Valley.
That's the whole of it. But you're still sitting there with your cup half full, so I'll tell you why.
The Dukhan Empire worshiped Zebulba. Openly. With ziggurats in every city and sacrifices on every equinox. For eight hundred years. The high priest was called Soros un-Kahn, and he'd lived so long that the living had curdled his mind the way salt air curdles milk. He reckoned he'd haul Zebulba's avatar up from the deep and plant it on the material plane the way you'd plant a flag on a conquered shore.
He performed the rite on the solstice. Every ziggurat in the empire kindled at once. The boundary betwixt worlds thinned and thinned until it should have opened like a door. The door didn't open. The wall collapsed.
Every ziggurat became a fountain of unlife. Everything within miles perished in minutes. The entire Dukhan Empire, six cities, hundreds of thousands of souls, extinguished in a single night. The negative energy soaked into the land. Some of the dead rose. They're still there. Walking the ruins. Performing rites nobody commanded.
Don't go to the Jinook Valley. Nothing in the Jinook Valley is worth what it costs. The price is always the same. The price is you.
The Sabonaar telling is the most practical myth in this collection. Five words for the entire moral. This is merchant's theology, dockside philosophy, wisdom that fits on a tavern sign. A restricted subsection of the full archives preserves the Moamon whisper, the version told by those who believe the ritual was not a failure but a rehearsal. "Next time we will be better prepared." The growing worship of Zebulba in Moamon is not a theological curiosity. It is a strategic threat. I note that someone in Moamon is reading Soros un-Kahn's notes and thinking, Next time.
I see you.