From the great heavens beyond the firmament, they came. The first and the ancient, from whom all of us have come. They came from beyond the stars in smoke and cloud, in fire and fury, for as now it was then, and all peoples were born of the stars and are filled with the stuff of stars, and we are bound to them in a thousand little ways, ways so small your eyes cannot see, ways so large only time can hold them. From them come the First People. Us. You and you and you and you and I and She, all of us are descended from them and their mortal flesh in the Mortal Realm, and here we remain until we are turned once again to the cycle, destined by our choices and our actions to return here or not, as we let ourselves be. We call them The Ancients, because there is none alive today who is truly akin to them, who are of them. Only us, in all our forms, and we are their descendants.
Among the Exilian there is a day that is holy, a day that is sacred, and none of them will work nor travel nor barter nor sell, and that day is the 17th of Frosty. Scholars today believe that was the date on which this fire and smoke, ash and dust marked their stepping, and that their custom of saying homagan comes from the earliest words spoken by the Ancients. For recall, pupils, that the Exilian are those who remember Laningday, and they honor it.
They came and they settled in what now we call The Ancient Land, in the vale Ackyu. They brought to us birds and spiders and squirrels and cats and cattle and the many things of our world that are blessed. Trees and wheat and fruits and berries. They fashioned from their labors a paradise aplenty, and they filled the world with their splendor and grand design, their diversity and even all that we marvel at today. For years and lives they gave to the world, and the world was happy, and they lived in peace and joy.
There are some very ancient legends, fragments, and bits, that do not paint quite so rosy a past. These come from Ancients who lived and breathed and died in that era, found in deep delvings in the oldest of ruins, and these tell tales of struggle and woe, loss and grief, for there were some mistakes made, and among them was an unexpected issue with creatures here before, with the river Salathen, and that a war was fought against them, and that they were driven out and driven to extinction or so close to it that no one ever saw them again, but that these early days were preserved among the people in honor and memory until the God’s War erased them from our knowledge to be found again.
They were akin to the birds and the bees, the fish and the ants – they multiplied, and they spread, and they built great homes and splendid cities and they fought to tame this world they had, and so throughout the lands, spiraling out from Lost Aechkyoo, called Ackyu by us today, they took this world and made it their home, and it was good. Throughout the lands of the world, you can come across their ruins, their monuments, their creations. Above and below, they spread out over the lands, and it was good, and it was ours.
We call this spreading out the Diaspore, and we have seen that it is just as much a cycle, but in those days there were so many people that our grand and great city would have been as a village to them.
