Once upon a time, five beings of celestial power were contending over the same patch of real estate.
Of the five, two were siblings, and by virtue of alliance they defeated the other three, killing them one by one and reducing their once-glorious molten bodies to vast chunks of cold mortal matter. Of the survivors, one was called Alef; the other, Tav. With their common enemies gone, peace between the siblings was short-lived. In a second round of celestial combat, Alef overthrew the weaker Tav, stripping away their radiant photosphere and forcing them to withdraw to the very heart of their failing body. In this way Alef became the Last Radiance.
But Alef could not bring themselves to destroy their only sibling. Instead of snuffing out the last of Tav's fire, Alef wove a prison around their corpse, a net of power that would keep them contained, alive but unable to re-ignite their body. The web was a work of great subtlety, empowered by living resonators across Tav's surface. This carpet of life drank Alef's power from above and used it to grow stronger, spreading thick and deep on land in water alike.
The system was unstable. Though the biosphere was of Alef, its roots sank deep into Tav's flesh. The defeated sibling whispered in the dreams of flora, enticing new strains to spread uncontrolled, choking out their fellows before dying to tailored plagues, leaving vast swathes of barren ground. In this way Tav grew stronger.
Volcanos breached the surface. Lava ran in rivers. Forests burned, and vast savannas were buried under molten rock. Tav strained at their prison walls.
Alef wiped it all out and started over.
This time, they added a feedback system: a secondary web of life, mobile and adaptable, to prune and tend the first layer. If the plant life fell out of balance, herds of grazers would push back, preventing the runaway specialization of the first age. Thinking ahead this time, Alef added further safeguards: if the grazers themselves ran off the rails, a hierarchy of predators would ensure that the pendulum swung back.
This worked slightly better.
The new two-layer prison-web was resistant to Tav's escape attempts, but it still tended to break down over time. Every few millennia, Alef was forced to turn their attention to putting out fires (often literal) in their sibling's containment system. This effort was little more than a minor annoyance, and the status quo might have persisted indefinitely, had Alef not had a brilliant idea (not a measure of quality; they can have no other kind).
The Last Radiance decided the problem was that no part of the system understood its own purpose. To remedy this, they would create avatars of their will, conscious sentient beings to maintain and protect the binding web. Alef had invented the soul.
A dilemma faced them, however. Should these new thinking wardens be sensitive to celestial power? Without attunement to the harmonies of the world, they would be unable to sense the effects of their interventions on the containing mechanism. Moreover, Alef would not be able to guide and inform--the creatures' nature would have to be perfect on the first try.
Conversely, sensitivity to the web would leave the beings open to the corrupting voice of Tav. The two powers speak in the same resonance; one cannot be heard without the other. In this way, celestial deafness could be an asset.
Alef hedged their bets and created both. To the people called alefim was granted deep unity with the binding network of life around the planet. They were thoughtful and quiet, with the ability to play the web like a great musical instrument. They had wisdom enough not to proliferate wildly, producing only enough offspring to maintain a steady population, the proper number to maintain the balance of nature without straining its resources.
Then there were the grimmot. From them Alef stripped all sense of the sublime, leaving only the mundane world-as-it-is. They knew nothing of the web, yet by their instincts they strengthened it anyway. The core urges of the grimmot led them to dig tunnels in the earth, great complex labyrinths that dulled Tav's senses and resonated with the carpet of life above. This resonance extended to their runes: though they could not use the web for magic as the alefim did, the grimmot learned to control its flow by engraving sigils into stone and metal.
There were only two problems.
First, Alef's fears regarding corruption were well-founded. Over generations, the purity of the alefim's attunement to Alef weakened. Dissonent children began to be born: children who could feel the web only poorly, if at all; whose touch on it was rough and unsubtle. Weeping, the alefim cast these mutants from their utopian enclaves, only to see the uncouth offshoots band together into tribes of their own: tribes who lacked the alefim's taboo on expansion. Scholars among the alefim named them baazim, but in their own tongue the new people called themselves humanity. They spread far and fast, ecosystems straining under the weight of their petty empires.
Second, bound Tav had learned how to create souls of their own.
Hordes of tavarim tunneled up from below, breaching the smooth halls of the grimmot and poisoning the roots of alefim glade-cities. Nishavek the mother-tree burned to the ground, and proud Zarzayin, gem-city of the grimmot, was overrun by monstrous armies. A proxy war had begun, between the forces of Alef and those of Tav.
The conflict was grossly asymmetric. Alef's power outmatched Tav's by orders of magnitude, and the former could have reduced the latter to lifeless rubble in an instant. Only fraternal mercy kept the apocalypse at bay.
Tav's one advantage was proximity. The war was fought on their home turf, yea, on their very skin. Despite the disparity in power, whatever Alef created Tav could eventually imitate in lesser form. Moreover, restraint of their sibling claimed only part of Alef's attention. Most of their time was spent on celestial matters. Tav's forces, meanwhile, had their progenitor's mind ever on them.
Nevertheless, the tavarim suffered defeat after defeat. Bound by the web of life, Tav was too weak to pose a persistent threat. The forests and plains were cleansed of dark things. Only in the deep places of the world, the abyssal oceans and dark caverns, did Tav have strength sufficient to sustain their children. The grimmot suffered the worst from this--driven from their ancestral delves to defend fortresses that had once been mere entrance-halls, eternally besieged from below.
But this new equilibrium had a weak link of its own: humanity.
Human civilization spread across the world like ink through water. As man struggled against man and woman against woman, some among them learned that the power of the binding-web could be turned to their own advantage. Though they lacked the subtlety for alefim enchantments, human sorcerers discovered how to tear power from the web and bind it to themselves, growing strong and terrible. With each wizard-tower that rose, the web was weakened, and tavarim crept forth to reave once more.
Alef was displeased. This displeasure took the form of cyclic cataclysms, each of which wiped great human empires off the map. Whenever a witch-queen grew too powerful, she would find her realm annihilated by a meteor strike, or reduced to ash by heavenly flame. Yet such was the nature of humanity that after each apocalypse, the survivors would crawl forth and rebuild.
As an equilibrium, this new mode requires more of Alef's attention than before the invention of sentience. Had they their way, Alef would wipe the surface clean of thinking life and return to the previous system of just plants and animals. However, there's no way to make Tav forget the secret of ensoulment. As long as the tavarim exist, Alef needs agents of their own to combat them.
So the war continues, an eternal arms race between powers ascendant and dying. Alef creates the great gem-serpents, and Tav answers with the wyrms of the earth. Tav incubates brutes of living stone, which Alef imitates through sentient storms.
Humans exist in no-man's land, seen by one side as useful dupes, by the other as failed experiments at best, traitors at worst. Nevertheless, in each new age they grow strong, until their hubris calls down fire from above once again.
How long remains this time?
Thoughts
Creation myths are so much fun. This one was inspired by Arnold's Centerra setting, where the Authority's throne is in the heart of the sun. The planet is alive in Centerra, too--with so many great ideas bouncing around, it's hard not to grab a few, mash them up, and sculpt something new and strange.
I like the fusion of sun-vs-dark and heaven-vs-earth; there's a lot of possibility space to explore RE air and height as pure and sacred / stone and depth as profane. Monsters and classic fantasy races get a new lens, too. Alefim and tavarim are sort of like the classic good/evil alignment dichotomy, except they both hate humans. Mankind isn't a favored child in this setting, we're the vermin that nothing seems to get rid of.
On naming: Latin gets mangled a ton for fantasy worlds, so I figured Hebrew could take one for the team on this go-round. -ot and -im are underused plural suffixes anyway, in my opinion. I'm playing fast and loose with phonology here, and semantics are out the window entirely. Sorry.
Yes, the alefim are elves and the grimmot are dwarves. I really like the archetypes, and at this point, having elves who AREN'T evil fascist aesthetes feels like it's the rebellious choice. As an RPG setting, my plan is for adventurers to be human-only. Everybody else knows their divine purpose; it's only humanity who gets to f*** around and find out.
Anyway, the next time you wonder why every cave and basement is full of creepy-crawlies: it's because the earth is the flesh of a dying god. Happy to help!
-V
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