The First Era
THe first known era of the DungeonVerse, as related by Gurn, the Immortal Herald, the Lone Forerunner, the Walker of the Void
Humans do have a flair for the melodramatic, and I admit I am seduced by the simple charm and brazen confidence of their form of writing. Hardly the most effective way to pass information or leave records, but the creation of a proper mnemaglyph is beyond their mortal ability. Thus, I have laid down this tract, an incomplete and bitterly fragmentary recollection as only so much can be reduced to letters and words. There are humans gifted with the ability to infuse their writing with emotion, but this is a cultivated skill and one beyond my paltry skill with a quill and a scroll.
To tell what came before would be to start at the very beginning of this realm.
There was nothing.
There was a great deal of nothing.
You could traverse one end of nothing to the other end, find nothing, but have lost an eternity in the process.
Then there was a speck. I approached this speck and as I did it grew. To my great surprise it kept growing, larger and larger. It was no increasing in size, no, I was getting closer to it and realized that the void could be full of these things, these specks, and I had seen none of them for how fast I went, searching. MY gaze was too large, too wide.
It was land, a great stony precipice, pulled through the void, like the bow of one of your great oceanic vessels.
How lovely.
There it was.
You would not recognize it in the slightest, but this was Cridhedun. The great prow was Tir Artach, the spire of the world, and everything spread out from it like a ... snowflake. So above, so below, the structures of tiny things and vast things repeat. Should I describe what your world looks like to you? I don't think you could comprehend it, but I will try. It is a snowflake, growing outward in lovely complexity and perfection. You cannot perceive the symmetry, but that is okay, I assure you, it is there. For this flake of perfection, there are streamers, they flow out, connecting to other snowflakes, these are growing in the wake of Cridhedun, and she trails them behind her like a maiden in her wedding gown, a grand train pulled down the aisle.
Yes, I know your customs, I have clad myself in the limitation of mortal flesh and felt the world as you do. I envy you, because it is so beautiful and poignant to you, knowing that it will endure and you will not.
I have digressed.
As my perspective changed I became aware of more and more that did exist, and I had not been aware of. As a man passes an open field with his horse in a full gallop, he perceives nothing of note. Had he dismounted and walked into the grass, what would he have found? Wildflowers in profusion, the rich and variegated lives of the voles and mice who live in the field, their struggles against the terrible hawk and rapacious serpent, all against the aching beauty of a seasonal creek that vanishes in the Winter, leaving behind bare stands of hardy grasses and their lairs where they have fortified themselves and their hoardings against the coming privation? Yes, this is what had happened. In my haste, I had passed this all by.
I dwelt upon the surface of Cridhedun then, and it was not a place you would have recognized. There was air, and stone, water, and sky, and little else. You see, there is something of a phantasmal substance in the void: clouds, but these clouds are vaster than entire planes and entire worlds. They possess color and character, though nothing off intelligence, they are dust in the void, but so very much of it. The movement of Cridhedun through the aether excited it. The normally invisible dust began to glow, and for a great distance, the void was washing in the colors of the clouds.
Red clouds were incendiary, and as the realm passed through them, it burned. The airs were set aflame, and rains of liquid fire and ash fell. The stone did not notice overly much, and the welling mass of the encircling oceans boiled at the edges, but drew only a little warmth from this passing.
Orange clouds were composed of some corrosive stuff, and the very air was compounded by its presence. The clouds over Cridhedun thickened and turned sallow yellows and oranges, and heavy caustic rains of acid fell, terrible storms roiled over the realm, but these too passed, leaving the surface sizzling from the strange chemical interactions between this elemental acid and terrestrial matter. Great caverns were worn through Cridhedun, and few of these remain because almost every acid-cut vein became the domain of a dungeon. This should be no great surprise.
Yellow clouds were the most dazzling, the friction between them and the air of Cridhedun sent them shivering and boiling, and lightning like you cannot imagine dazzled the heavens. Great Tir Artach shuddered from the frenzy and fury of this discharge, lightning strobing through the firmament and the seas. This might interest you, but where the elemental lightning passed through the firmament, the stone was changed, and this is where the primordial metal came from. The lightning passed great amounts of heat into the firmaments, and that is when the volcanos appeared, venting this buried heat.
Green clouds were vivid and lovely and seemed to pass without much interference, but I noted that after passing through one such bank, the surface of Cridhedun began to take on a verdigris patina, and this was the dawning of the first growing things. They would not be recognizable, as they were little more than green rocks, bubbling away in the oceans, and raising hairy tendrils into the dry air.
Should I mention that not all red clouds were the same red? Not all green clouds were the same green? Would it bother you to know that in places these clouds merge and create beautiful colors your primitive eye structures cannot comprehend?
The blue clouds were among some of the most lovely, but their touch was tremendous. The air cooled, blizzards dried out the sky, the oceans shuddered and crusted over with ice, and the vastness of Tir Artach became a white spear of ice as it made its way through the void. The skies were filled with cold flames, the oceans creaked, and the stone itself cracked. Only the heat it held from the passage through the yellow and red clouds kept it from crumbling like dust, and in the depths the waters still stirred.
The Ocheonne Pharos
The Ocheonne Pharos was a celestial body that Cridhedun encountered on its path through the Astral Sea, and like a dolphin riding on the bow wave of a ship, Ocheonne became the guide and guardian of the realm. Ocheonne was a strange thing of gleaming metal and clockwork artifice, a legacy and remnant from another time, another alien place. As the two realms aligned with each other and came into a common resonance, Ocheonne seemingly awoke from an unknowable slumber. As its vast gyroscopes, gimbals, and orrereys spun up, it began to shine. This was a cold actinic light, sharp and harsh.
The Age of the Pharos was a striking time. The terrible brightness the Pharos produced burned up the astral clouds, protecting Cridhedun from their terrible effects. The light grew brighter and denser the clouds were, and when it burned the brightest, some of the cloud's effects would reach the ground. This was worth knowing because, by this time, the first races had appeared in the realm. Where they came from, who can guess? The nature of this place is that things just happen from time to time. But mind you, this was so long ago in your own measure of time that it is nothing but smudged handprints on a cave wall.
The first race I noticed were strange creatures. I find most creatures strange, but they were more so. They came from the oceans, and were bivalve mollusks, but had developed a language, could use tools and weapons, and wielded the power of magic. They were not true cultivators, but they could, in time, tap into their own essence. They were also terrible cowards, afraid of everything, and violent in this regard. They unleashed spells that you cannot fathom and dominated the whole of the realm. They spread down the chains and tendrils that drift behind the great realm and conquered those places. As Cridhedun passed other realms, they made the jump to those realms. Why would such a cowardly race act so boldy? They were afraid of each other as well, and there were so very many of them. They crowded out the oceans, and then the lakes and rivers. They learned to live on dry land, and covered Cridhedun with their coraline cities. It was certainly lovely to see, all the colors of their secreted fortresses and fastnesses, just splendid.
They encountered other races along the way.
And destroyed them.
The pink glob things, I didn't mind when my meta-mollusks butchered them. They were crude and very unpleasant.
Then there were the plant-insect creatures, they were rather elfin in their disposition, but very strange. They were extraordinarily pleasant, and wise. I was very sad when the mollusks destroyed them.
Then they found something worse than themselves. I assume you know what a caterpillar is? Marvelous creature hatches from an egg, becomes a monstrous grub-like thing, and then becomes a soft egg again to emerge as a beautiful flying creature with the most lovely wings and colors. Imagine that grotesque caterpillar form, and make it the size of a ... horse. I was going to say a gronta, but that means nothing to you, my apologies. These great space grubs were an ancient and powerful race and they had come for something they lost.
They had arrived to collect the Ocheonne Pharos, apparently, they had built it from their own realm and it had somehow escaped. How a grub loses a metal star is rather beyond me, but whatever. They came and made war against the mollusks, and were bitterly unprepared for what happened. The space grubs were slaughtered in their millions. The mollusks likewise perished in their millions, but there were billions of mollusks and there were not so many of the grub. They were not fearful creatures, they were hateful things. They warred on each other, and this kept them from reaching the success of the mollusks in numbers. This was even the reason they had come to reclaim the Pharos, it was some sort of weapon, and they desired it to make better war on their own kind. There were different colors of grubs, and the black grubs had a seething hatred of all other life, especially the green grubs. They had already had great success and had eliminated the white grubs and the yellow grubs. This angered the green grubs and triggered a terrible war.
And thus the skies above Cridhedun burned brightly as the grubs made war. Weakened by their long fight with the mollusks, the black grubs were not able to hold their prize. The green grubs won, scattered the surviving black grubs, took the Pharos, and left.
I had to wonder how long I had drifted along in the astral void with Cridhedun for such things to have happened without my notice, but the astral void is immense and I did not yet have a concept of time. Time is unusual in the astral void, because it doesn't really exist, like gravity. The more distant one becomes from the great islands of reality, the more everything breaks down into just ... nothing.
The Age of the Seven Stewards
Cridhedun shuddered when the grubs took the Pharos and departed. No longer was the realm protected from the astral clouds and there was much suffering. The coraline cities did not last long against the rains of fire and acid, and terrible lightning blew the crenelated towers apart. The mollusks retreated to their marine homes, the oceans protecting them from the worst of the clouds' damage. Then the cold came. The oceans chilled and began to freeze. Blizzards covered the surface with ice sheets of stupendous thickness. The mollusk race died out, the last few freezing to death as their homes offered no refuge from the biting cold and solidifying ice.
The Seven Stewards were seven bright points of light that appeared over a relatively short amount of time and replaced the Pharos in its old role of protecting Cridhedun from the damaging nature of the astral void. As they cast their pale blue light across the realm, the clouds burned away from the realm and the land began the long slow process of thawing. The oceans grew, and in a manner that cannot be explained, the tail of Cridhedun also grew, many of the trailing realms growing larger than the original landmass.
My beautiful Cridhedun. It grew like a flower, opening and blooming, trailing more flowers in its wake. Still connected, but separate. This is the beginning of what your modern scholars call the DungeonVerse. The Stewards were things I found, and I brought them to Cridhedun. These were great luminous stones, vast in size, furiously burning things. Like the Pharos before, they tumbled through the void before Cridhedun, and their fiery mien blew the clouds away and protected my beautiful land. After the ice retreated, growing things appeared again. Forests appeared, wild grasses and sedges spread, and the oceans teamed with microscopic life.
This you would also not recognize. The trees were yellow and red in their full growth, and the blooming of algae stained the waters the color of tea, sometimes flashing with vivid red bioluminescence.
New races appeared. They grew and thrived in the light of the Stewards, they made kingdoms and nations, made love and war, created many things, and in the fullness of their time, they rose and fell.
Nothing lasts forever, and the Stewards began to fail. Over time, they consumed themselves in their luminescence. They dimmed, so I moved them closer together, and then the first burnt out and crumbled. I moved them closer to Cridhedun and two of them broke. They fell to the earth, smashing holes in the ground and exploding like great bombs. I was able to save one of them, and I moved it further away from the realm. I had done too much damage, the falling debris had destroyed cities, civilizations burned, and for the first time I wept.
The Age of the Sun
There are no concrete records of the time periods that might have existed before the Sun. It is commonly assumed that the Sun and Cridhedun, along with all of its moons and celestial objects came as a package deal.
The world needed something imperishable to protect it from the ravages of the astral void. What could be so imperishable as to protect it? I considered leaving to find the Pharos, wondering if it still existed, or if the grubs had become more terrible. I also considered if leaving, if I could find my way back. If I did find my way back, how long would have passed while I was away? It took some time, watching the Stewards fail before I concocted my bright plan. I, myself, would assemble a new Pharos to light the way, and it would belong to me, to Cridhedun, and none could gainsay it from us. I felt a fierce pride as I began this great work.
Luminous orichalcum came first, and I created the great lattice. I knew it would have to be a holy geometric shape, strong and durable, and I failed several times. The sky is not littered with my failures because when I realized a shape was not right, I would melt it down and start over. I later learned that this was all visible from the surface and that entire cultures grew in the light of my work and worshipped the forge in the heavens, even when molten gold rained from the sky.
Eventually, the superstructure of my Pharos was complete, though only a fraction of the size of the grub's cold design. Mine was better, perfect. It was a 'truncated icosahedron', composed of twelve pentagons and twenty hexagons. Wrapped around into a sphere, it was to be the cage for my light. What was more imperishable than myself? I entered the frame and began to cultivate my own ancient essence. As the essence pooled and began to rotate, the frame filled with light. I worked to fold the flows of essence, to weave them into tapestries so that as the density increased, so would its strength and power.
This took a great deal of time, and after what mortal beings would call an age, I completed this task. The carefully laid essence ignited and became radiant. The patterns kept it moving, and the great frame kept it all contained. I didn't have to fight to hold such a vast amount of power, because either I could cultivate or I could contain, not both. But it worked.
The Dawn of the First Day
The light of illuminated essence was different from the cold light of the pharos, or the distant twinkle of the Stewards. It was filled with a furious heat and tremendous radiance. The creator of the Sun knew that this was going to be an issue and that the great vessel would have to be like a ship in the sky, moving around Cridhedun lest he burn the surface worse than the astral ephemera it passed through. Thus, the movement of the Sun began.
As the great task began, there was joy.
The Great Vessel was far better suited to the task of protecting this realm, and the flow of radiance created a bow wave in the astral space, and what clouds were not burned away were pushed aside or blown apart. Glory, glory to the great vessel and its task. Below, the land changed. The seas turned from a dark purple to blue, the skies of the realm turned blue. Clouds as man knows them came white and gray. The land, left barren, changed and green things flourish and grew. There was some sadness, as the green things changed colors, because the old green things were not to use the word you use, green. In the old words, green meant plants, growing things. The old plants were purples and indigo, oranges and blues, because there are complex relationships between the green and light. And thus, green became green, and there was so much of it.
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