More Fiction: A Lost Heroes Creation Myth
I like to read fiction – on-line or off-line – related to a setting/game I’m pondering to play, at least to get the “right” (meaning with “right” as envisioned by the authors) feeling.
I think it’s a good idea, a small offering of whats in store so to speak. I wrote this short piece of fiction for version 0.18 of Lost Heroes (never released). It appeared at the start of the work, before the introduction and nearly everything else. It fits in one page and it was intended to delimit the actual beginning of the book. There is also a second piece that went at the end that I’ll post later.
And so I present:
A Lost Heroes Creation Myth
The Moerae are more ancient than the Gods and older than Time. The three sisters, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, sit deep in a cave, spinning the fates of man and woman. Atropos cutting one thread here, Clotho making more there and Lachesis weaving them all into patterns.
Sometimes they like to talk. They remember the beginning and they foresee the end.
They say in the beginning there was only Darkness.
Some say it was the God of Day and the Goddess of Night that came together and created the world. Others claim the World created itself by rising above the black waters of the Void.
It was a time of creation, the birth of Gods and Angels, of Worlds and Planes. It was a time without Time, without Death. Everything was Original, New and Perfect and the World was surrounded by Love.
Some call this the time of Aeon when men knew no suffering and life was endless and death was a brief sleep.
But then there was the Great War. The Angels called it Armageddon. The Aesir called it Ragnarok. Some say it was a war across all the Dimensions culminating in our Plane. Some say the Dark Gods who were once willingly invited to the sanctuary of our World rebelled and went Mad. Others say that Gods fought among themselves.
The likes of this war have not been seen since. It raged across everything in existence and not one thing was left untouched. Its bloodshed haunts all our buried memories.
Satan led a third of the host of Heaven against God but was defeated by the Angelic Choirs. Typhon’s monsters destroyed many lands and the Olympians were nearly defeated. Loki and the Mad Gods consumed great swaths of the world. The Tuatha Dé Danann defeated the terrible armies of the Fomorii but were forever weakened. And the Gods fought among themselves, the distinctions between Good and Evil, Light and Dark, forgotten. They destroyed entire civilisations in their wake.
The fighting had no end. The destruction was eternal. Some say there was a plan by a nameless race that sacrificed themselves and so invented True Death and the world finally died. Pain and suffering were thusly created. Others say that the devastation was so vast the World simply fell apart.
But from the ashes of the Golden Age, the Modern World arose like the legendary Phoenix. It did not have the glory of Aeon but it was more stable, more solid. It knew Death and so it knew Suffering and Age. But it also still remembered Hope, Life and Beauty. Love exists and holds strong to the World.
The World was split into many Worlds. The Veil split the World from the Magic of the Dreamlands. The Dark Gods were imprisoned in the Eternal Darkness, the ancient Gods settled in the lands of Dream, and the Higher Dimensions were barred from our plane.
The World was given cycles. Man rose and was made into Male and Female, both equal in measure. They lived and died and their children lived and died and so on and so on.
Man discovered Magic and Science. He built a world and civilisations with such variety that some say it is beginning to rival the time of Aeon and the Gods no longer have total dominion over the Earth.
But the Deadlands are always expanding and the Dark Gods only get hungrier. The Fomorii are building a vast army ready to engulf the world. Satan, Typhon and Loki are growing in strength everyday and their appetites only get worse and equal only their rage. The Gods pick at one another, the Angels can no longer tell Good from Evil and now Humanity has the power to destroy everything.
The World is no longer safe (nor ever was). Many believe that the inevitable has only been postponed and that the World has been placed in a slow spiral where it will be consumed in darkness, and reborn many times. But each time it will be diminished until it is nothing but a frail memory of the original creation. Many more believe that the World will one day simply die.
In the end, when all is done, there will only be Darkness.
Perhaps then Atropos will cut the final thread and the Moerae will finally rest.