the-book

Lorzen and Kiviak were looking for an ancient book with insight into magic, gods, and the true nature of reality. Whomever reads the pages of this book will unlock great power with the knowledge it holds. The book’s pages were torn apart and scattered about during The Mortal War. Most of its pages held by titans, their written evidence the gods were impostures. These titans then went into hibernation and hiding toward the end of The Mortal War.

The Men of Hidden Honor, led by Zalafrin, is looking to re-collect this book. Vic Shadowspawn of The Salt Mercenaries had encountered The Men of Hidden Honor and this desire for the book. Finding a book matching it’s description, he handed it to Lorzen in the Sunken District, who saw it to be a forgery. The real pages, in part, read:

[!The Book] The Book Out of nothing, a drop of water condensates, setting off ripples across the empty vastness. Undulating fields brush past one another, throwing a spark, igniting a furious fire, and causing an inflation with roaring winds. Clumps of the raw energy of the forming universe swirl and collapse into dense matter and soil.

A shine of life and a shade of death sweep over, imbuing these planes with the endless cycle that permeates across all space and all time. Reality is unfurling in straight order but behind, beneath, and inside all of these events is the high pitched, bright glare, and sweet smell of primordial magic.

These fundamental elements and forces thrum with an underlying unconsciousness. Each with their own drives- but unthinking, unrelatable. At the boundaries, a tumultuous mixture becomes the material plane.

Out of the caves, mountains, forests, and plains sprang the first people. They struggled and fought against the great beasts that grew in the world, unchecked. The beasts rampaged. The first people fought the second people and the third. Lands were conquered and lost to wars and the wild. Heroes and monstrosities thrived and died.

From these primal lives, some experienced things on a finer level. They tapped into the natural energies that created their world. In time, they developed their craft and became so much more than their fellow creatures. Eventually, they came to claim the source of this power as their own. They sought obedience, tribute, worship.

As these beings rose to power and their followings grew, war broke out amongst them. For centuries, people died in the turmoil as power was fought over. In the space between the deities battling over their domains, a new generation of powerful titans grew. Their budding powers were a threat to the ascended themselves.

An alliance formed, hidden from the people that served. The domains were drawn and the ascended waged a destructive war on the titans, killing many and banishing the rest. With their domains drawn and the heretical titans put to rest, the ascended flourished into the Deities by realizing how to unlock the ultimate powers. Harnessing power from the natural elements and forces requires rituals and personalities that reflect the unconscious forces’ underlying  proclivities; aligning every part of their personalities with their ideals. As they ascended, they lose their own conscience to obtain their ultimate potential. If the forces of nature and magic are the nearly motionless mountains, valleys, and plains, the deities are the amazing fauna and flora that blanket the regions, each taking on unique traits specialized to their niche. But even mountains shift across the surface of the earth over grand enough timescales and everyone must adapt or parish.