The Timeless Before
Before time, there was what the Ancients called The Universe.
It was vast and infinite, and all that is of the Mortal realm here was once a part of it. Within a thing so vast it boggles the mind and is too great to comprehend, there was a place, and upon that place there were people much like us, and we call them the Ancients.
This then, is not only our story – it is also theirs.
Lost Age
There was, once, the skies above and the earth below and the Dragons flew and the Salathens roamed, and the world was quiet.
No birds gave their song, no beetles built their nests, no squirrels stored nuts, and no ants delved their labyrinths. The world was a quiet and alien place, unrecognizable as the oceans were different and the lands were different.
To all of this, the Ancients came, and upon it they spread ten thousand blessings in a rain of steel and fire that lasted three hundred and sixty days. This is known, this is true, and this is what once was. They gave those blessings the ability to take root and take hold and take space and take on the world that lay around each. And so it was that those blessings grew, and upon them no man walked, no woman sighed, no themon waited to be seen.
And then, for a thousand years, it was quiet once more.
The Fae like to speak as if the world was once theirs, and that they used it much as we do, and that the Lost Age was when they retreated to the Fairywilde.
This does not fit with the knowledge that the Powers created the Planes, but there are things that are very strange, that no one has explanations for, that are sometimes found in ruins and other remainders of this Age, and it hints that there was a time before the Powers created the Planes.
Before they created the Fae.
Before they came to this small bauble in the woven felt of the night sky.
The Powers and even Chicory speak of surveys and expeditions and plans. They do it with puzzled expressions, as if it is barely known to them.
But they say it was done, and that at last, in the fievazwon, The Ancients began The First Journey.
