* * Hello, how doo. It's been a while since I posted something here, but I have a few things in need of feedback. It's important for me to say that these are not stories, not at the moment...They're a sort of, fact file, about the world of 'Kismet' which I've been taking the time to flesh out before I begin writing its stories. With that in mind, these aren't the most...cohesive of pieces; they're written largely ad-hoc, and are probably full of spelling/grammatical errors the likes of which have never been seen before. Also, 'Kismet' is just a working title; I'm not sure how it sounds as a name, so feedback on that would be trés nice aussi.
TL;DR: Sorry for any mistakes, and that these aren't terribly interesting to read * * COPYPASTA
The History of the World:
In the Beginning:
In the Beginning, the world was nothing; there was only the great kingdom of Cestus, and its planar sister, The Pit. The two coexisted for a time; the Demons, denizens of the Pit, kept their distance from the Gods in the kingdom of Cestus. However; the Demons grew jealous of the wealth and beauty that the gods possessed.
Driven by envy, the King of the Demons, Tek’thulon, ordered his finest smiths to work with the most powerful Dark Sorcerers to create a set of chains strong enough to bind the two worlds together.
After thousands of years toiling in the great forges of the Pit, Tek’thulons smiths made the ‘World Binders’, a set of chains that the Demons could use to attach their world to Cestus, and destroy the gods once and for all.
So began the Great War.
The Creation of the Planes/The Great War:
The planes were created during the great war between the Demons and the Gods; the Gods, wanting to ensure that the Demons did not breach Cestus, their homeland, created a system of planes between Cestus and the Pit. Many of the features of the world were created during the war, and Mainland Europe, the worlds only body of land for much of its early history, is the body of a fallen God.
The war raged on for many, many hundreds of billions of years. The Gods realised that it would be impossible to defeat the demons; they were too numerous, and bred too fast to be wiped out completely; so the leader of the Gods, the great Graydir, ordered the Gods to drive the Demons back to the Pit, where they gathered all their power and sealed the entrance for eternity.
The Gods, greatly weakened, realised that if the Demons were ever to break free from their Prison, they would not have enough power to defeat them again. So, Graydir decided to sever the chains that bound the two worlds together; a feat that would drain him of his power completely, and kill him.
Graydir sacrificed himself in order to protect his people from the Demons, and broke the chains that bound Cestus to the material planes, and thusly to the Pit.
The remnants of the battles between the Gods and the Demons were evident all over the planes; most obvious was the massive magical cascade (known in our world as “The Cadence”) that burned in the sky, and provided the worlds with their magical energy.
The Birth of Life:
For many years, the world was barren; but life outs, in the end. The Cadence gave birth to the first races; little more than random collections of elements, fused together by magic. Over time, more complex beings began to emerge from the cadence.
The first sentient life forms were known as the Ancients; they grew from the corpses of the dead Gods and Demons that littered our world. Back in the beginning, there was no Good and Evil; Fey, the creatures that were born on the back of the fallen God, fought savagely with the Darklings, those born on the backs of the fallen Demons.
Over time, the creatures evolved, and became intelligent; they developed their own societies, their own cultures, beliefs and morals. They were as vicious enemies as ever.
The Fall of the Darklings:
The Fey, born as they were on the back of a god, were beautiful, powerful creatures. But they were no match for the Darklings, granted power and savagery by their Demonic heritage. The Darklings drove the Fey back into their walled cities and laid siege to them.
The Darkling forces were led by a strange and grotesque creature known to its brothers as Arnak’thanol, a being who grew from the inside of the Demon itself; a living part of the evil creature.
A young Darkling general named Vidrago, a hero of many battles, who had fallen in love with a Fey woman and become disillusioned with the war effort, defected to the other side.
With his knowledge of Darkling strategy and his excellent leadership, the Fey were able to force their enemies back. More and more Darklings began to defect, following their General, and the Darklings began to loose ground to the advancing Fey.
Fearing his own destruction, Arnak’thanol crawled back into the corpse of the Demon from which he spawned, and used his dark magic to attempt to reanimate the creature.
Vidrago, who noticed the absence of his old master, knew that the evil creature couldn’t be trusted; so he assembled a small force of the most powerful warriors, taken from the ranks of the Fey and the defected Darkling, and searched Arnak’thanol out.
Eventually they found him, deep within the carapace of the Demon and after an epic battle, Vidrago drove his sword into the Demon Spawn, destroying Arnak’thanol and causing a ripple of vast, magical energy that destroyed the fallen Demon from the inside out.
Vidrago, hailed as a hero by the Fey, died in the explosion. His final victory allowed the Fey to defeat and eradicate the remaining Darklings, and create a stable, peaceful world.
The Death of the Fey:
The Fey lived in peace and prosperity for a long time; but as all empires do, theirs eventually fell.
The Fey were astounded when, one day, out of the blue there came a great and powerful creature, made entirely out of Crystal, flying towards their capital city faster than anything they’d ever seen.
Shar’ti, the Queen of the Dragons, came to claim the Feys kingdom for her own.
The Fey tried to fight her, but they were no match for Shar’tis mighty strength, and the Crystal Dragon tore the Feys kingdom apart. In an instant, she shattered the land that took thousands of years to build, and cast the Fey back to their roots as base, uncultured beasts.
The Survivors of Shar’tis attack, those Darklings and Fey that managed to escape the great Dragons wrath, went on to become all the races of the world.
The Reign of Fire:
Shar’ti ruled her lands for hundreds of thousands of years, but after so long watching the growth of the lesser races, she became lonely, whishing she had other creatures as grand as her to keep her company.
So, Shar’ti created Baléfor; the King of the Black Dragons, and second in power only to his mother: With his birth, the Reign of Fire began.
A Hero is Born:
Deep within the forests of Shar’tis Kingdom, there lived the Pixies; a tribe of small, humanoid descendants of the Fey, noted for being singularly female in nature.
During a particularly oppressive magical storm, energy raining down upon the forest from the Cadence, a very strange Pixie was born. This Pixie was shunned by his tribe, cast out and ostracised because, as it was born, it killed its mother; This Pixie was, unlike all of his kin, male.
Pixie grew quickly; he was fully grown, standing six feet tall, by his third week in the world; much taller than any of his kind. The Pixie wandered the world, out of place everywhere he went, learning all he could from other Fey-kin before moving on to find other teachers.
Pixies first encounter with evil came when he saw a desiccated, broken creature crawling out of the earth; the creature shambled towards him, and, unclear of its intent, Pixie stood his ground as the creature approached.
As it reached the lone Hero, the creature flung its arms wide, and enveloped Pixie, attempting to suck the life out of him. Pixie lashed out, beating the creature again and again but unable to force it off him. Feeling increasingly weak, pixie stumbled towards a clearing where he could see the remnants of a camp;
Pixie was distraught when he found that the camp was empty, but he saw perched against a tree, a thin, simple spear fashioned from the branch of a tree. He stumbled towards the spear, picked it up, and thrust it through the body of the creature that had attached itself to him.
As Pixie watched, the remains of Arnak’thanol turned to dust, and blew away in the wind. From that moment on, Pixie knew that his birth was not an accident. His defeat of the creature that was once Arnak’thanol showed him that it was his destiny to protect those that could not protect themselves from such evils; and so, the first of the Immortal Heros was born.
The Fall of the Dragons, and the Great Stillness:
Baléfor, the first son of Shar’ti, was born with the taint of corruption in his heart.
For Millennia, Baléfor ruled over his children as fairly as any of his brothers, but as the years went on, the corruption that was born in him grew into an evil madness that took hold of his soul. Baléfor left the land of his birth, and flew out to sea to raise himself a new kingdom up from its murky depths. For many years, Baléfor lived in his new kingdom, surrounded by his own sons and daughters, plotting his return to his mothers kingdom until one fateful day, when his brother Rothor, the King of the Red Dragons, sought him out.
The two argued heatedly, and eventually, it turned into a battle. Rothor did not last long under the powerful claws of his brother. Seeing an opportunity to use his brothers death to his advantage, Baléfor sent Rothors tattered corpse back to the feet of Shar’ti.
The great Mother Dragon wept as she looked upon the body of the once mighty Rothor, and was filled with rage at the thought of how far her son had fallen. She took flight, and the creak of her mighty crystal wings can still be heard today as echoes in the deepest reaches of space.
She confronted Baléfor in his lair deep within the centre of the earth, and attacked him in a fit of violent rage. She bested him easily, but as she stood over her son, she could not bear the sorrow of killing her first born; and so, in her despair, she flew up, out of the kingdom Baléfor had carved for himself within the heart of the world, into the sky, the light from the Cascade turned to brilliant, shimmering shards of sunlight as it passed through her Crystal body; as she intended the vast magical energy of the Cadence tore her apart, casting fragments of her hide deep into the earth, where they turned to Diamonds.
The destruction of such a powerful being, so close to the thin fabric of reality that lay behind the turbulent magical energy of the Cadence caused an explosion so vast, it ripped a hole in the world.
Over time, the hole grew bigger, and bigger, until eventually it threatened to destroy the earth; but in the end, it was the accursed spawn of Baléfor that saved us all. Thardon, Baléfors first son, and primary amongst the Black Dragons, saw what his father had done, and he knew that it had to be put right, lest the entire world be consumed by the void.
He flew east, back to the dragons home-land, and sought council with Baléfors first sister, the Queen of the Golden Dragons. He told her of his plan; he said that, if all of the Dragons in the world could be assembled, and they all flew into the void in unison, then the sudden absence of the vast magical energy that they exuded would be like starving a fire of oxygen: Not only would the expansion of the void be stopped, but it would close completely, and the world would be saved.
Gweden, that was the Gold Queens name, looked into Thardons soul and saw that he did not possess the corruption that bred within his father and the rest of his Kin, and so together, the two of them rallied the Dragons of the world; all but Baléfor and his closest kin, and together they flew through the void, into the absence of reality that lay beyond, and behind them the hole sealed shut, leaving the sky still for the first time since the birth of the world…
The Seeds of Evil
Throughout all of this, none of the races had noticed the dust in the wind; that fateful day, so long ago, when Pixie destroyed the remains of Arnak’thanol and cast his ashes into the wind, sowed the seeds of evil in the world.
The ashes corrupted everything they touched, creating everywhere it went the mark of evil, the outwardly physical changes became the lesser creatures of evil; Minotaurs, Banshees, Ogres, Trolls and Goblins, Vryxin, Nacks and the Undead. But where it touched those higher beings it truly created evil: and that evil spread.
The Sons of Stone:
It had been a long time since the Great Stillness, when the world once more began to change. From the Stone, where the shards of Shar’ti had lodged themselves after her demise, there grew the first Dwarf, Malbir. Malbir, the wisest and most powerful of Dwarves, was followed from the rock by his brothers and sisters; and so the race of Dwarves was born.
Born with the spirit of a Dragon, the Dwarves were prone to random acts of aggression, and it took all Malbir had to keep his brothers and sisters from destroying the land they inhabited.
Over time, the calming influence Malbir had began to saturate the Dwarves, and they became a much more peaceable race.
The Dwarves, born of the Stone, had a natural affinity for the earth, and built the first of their mighty kingdoms deep beneath its crust.
The Dwarves lived within their earthen stronghold for many years; Malbir, the first Dwarf, passed on after an abnormally long life: Promising to grant immortality to those who prove themselves worthy of it, as his spirit passed into the rock.
Out of the Forests and into the Fire
From deep within the bounds of the few forests left after the Reign of Fire, there came the Elves, the last descendants of the Fey, and the second Higher Race of the new world.
Immediately after leaving the forests, the Elves found themselves being harassed by the Dwarves, who were less then welcoming towards their new neighbours.
The Dwarves, who had long since lost the influence of their leader, Malbir, and had fallen under the reign of the power hungry King Hjord, declared war on the Elves with the intention of wiping them out and taking their spoils.
However, retreating into their forests once more, the Elves proved to be more than a match for the Dwarven armies. The Dwarves, enraged by this, began to burn the Elves forests to cinders; but before long, the two nations would be united against a common enemy….
The Enemy of my Enemy
As the forests burned, and the Elves fought back against their aggressors, from within the earth emerged the Humans, descendants of those Darklings that survived the first war and the Reign of Fire.
The Human race was young, and it was foolish, but within the heart of each man and woman burned avarice so powerful that it drove them to great power.
Centuries passed while the Elves and Dwarves battled; the Humans watched, hidden away, amassing power and wealth in the lands far away from the turmoil. The Humans, who saw the wealth of the Dwarves of the mountains, desired conquest of the Dwarves.
Marching on the Dwarven army’s stronghold outside the great forest, the Dwarves saw the size of the Human army and panicked. Appealing to the foes they’d been battling with for centuries, the two nations formed an alliance to try and combat this new threat: Unfortunately, for the Dwarves, they were unsuccessful.
The Elves and Dwarves, weary, having fought one another so long, proved to be no match for the fresh, battle ready Humans. Routed, their alliance broken, the two armies fled: The Elves falling back to the depths of their forest, never to be seen again for many, many years and the Dwarves retreating to the mountains to prepare their forces to combat the pursuing Human army.
The War of Ascension
The War of Ascension, as it later became known, was the massive, thousand year long war fought between the Humans and the Dwarves.
The war was comprised of almost endless small skirmishes, and huge numbers of large scale battles, including some truly massive engagements.
The war only ended after the Dwarves, who had been warring for millennia, realised that they could not win; When the Humans seemed to be gaining the upper hand, the Dwarves would simply return to their impenetrable mountain stronghold and begin preparing to battle back the Human forces. However, the Dwarves would never make it far out of their city when the sheer numbers the humans had at their disposal would allow them to push back up to the Dwarves front door.
In the end, both sides signed an agreement: the Humans, who had colonized the areas and essentially taken over the over ground world that had once been the home of the Dwarves, would retain their new lands, and the Humans would take a large bounty from the Dwarven nation. In return, the Humans agreed that they would release their choke-hold on the Dwarves; allowing them access to certain over ground areas where they could hunt for food.
The Schism
The Dwarves, sobered by their defeat at the hands of the humans, withdrew more and more into their Kingdom within the Earth. They began tunnelling down; deeper and deeper, constructing underground cities to rival the splendour of those the humans built above their heads.
Eventually, the Dwarves, like their Elvin counterparts, withdrew into the earth completely, leaving the Humans with the run of the land.
Then, after centuries without the other races, the Humans forgot about them; and as technology advanced and drove humans down the path of science, rather than magic, eventually that was forgotten as well.
The Re-emergence
Only a few Humans knew of magic, and even fewer remembered the two races who once shared the world with them. The few who remembered watched on as human society changed, became one more at home with technology than the occult, and eventually decided to try and atone for their races past mistakes.
Some emissaries travelled to the great Mountains, where once the Humans had fought bloody, visceral battles against the Dwarves; some travelled to the Woods, where the reclusive Elves had seen the power of the Human race and recoiled from it, drawing back into their now shrinking forests.
The Emissaries were met with trepidation at first; the Dwarves, humbled by their defeat at the hands of the humans, were found to be a much more pensive people than the aggressive, violent nation detailed in the sparse scraps of history they had left. The Dwarves, initially wary, found the humans to be of endless interest as they discussed their technology and advances with the underground people. Eventually, after years of trying to coax the Dwarves out of hiding, they once more stepped out into the sunlight.
Those who sought the Elves, however, met an entirely more unpleasant fate. Driven by their brutal treatment at the hands of those that shared the world with them, the Elves killed the Humans on sight; More and more came, in pairs, trying to penetrate deep within the woods to the Elvin cities, and one by one each group perished at the hands of the scouts living high in the treetops.
The only thing that saved the Elves was the humans Persistence. After many years, and many wasted lives, the scouts, as dictated by the Elvin King Phoen, allowed a group of the Human emissaries through.
Though it took the Humans and Dwarves a very long time to convince the Elves of their sincere apologies for their past misdeeds, eventually, the Elves agreed to send a small party away from the forest with the Humans, to assess the world, and the truth in the Humans claims of their races Schism from the world of magic.
Returning with tales ringing of truth on their lips, the Elves once more emerged from the Woodland, which since has seen massive deforestation, and grew into human society.
The Council
Now that both Dwarves and Elves had seen that they no longer had anything to fear from the Humans; the three races decided not to bring magic back to Humanity; they agreed that the Humans, descendants of Darklings as they were, could not be trusted to hold such a gift in good faith; in stead, only a few Humans would be allowed access to the gift, that way its use could be more easily controlled.
They also decided that, even if it was the Humans who caused so much trouble in the past, Magic was too dangerous a force to leave unregulated throughout all races.
So, elders from all three races established ‘The Council’: A group of elder magi who would keep a vigilant watch over the use of magic, policing those who use it wrongly, and punishing those who break the rules.
And so, the world carried on in such a manner to the present day; behind the scenes, the Heroes fought alongside one another to battle back the continuing growth of evil: Until, one wet, cold December evening, a little girl was born two months prematurely, and she would change the world forever.
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