Tale of Darkness (conceptual)

Spoiler:

Some scholar wrote:

A Brief History of Our World
The Beginning - The Birth of Carrion Reddis

In the beginning, they were only five. They were the greatest and oldest of the gods, the essences of the eternal forces coalesced into consciousness. It is said that the great flows of magic twisting through the void converged on that day and the five beings arose from the five great eddies and knots spooling off from that vast collision. First was the holy coupling: Imon the lord of Magic, and Essala the lady of life and spirit. Then came the opposites, the strangest couple ever to grace this plane or any other, Ethros lord of the nether darkness, and Asshila lady of the flames of heaven, last came Nassan, lord of all the seas. They forged the world of fire and darkness, magic, life, and water.

From the loins of the holy couple came the first of the pantheon we have worshipped for centuries. The eldest of their godly children was Ilmoth, guardian of fate, and his younger brother was Hailek, king of the heavens. As the great magical family grew, they were corrupted by breeding with the semi-conscious children of Ethros and Asshila. Soon the first Half-gods, malicious in nature, and their chaotic lesser brethren the rank and file Daemons were wreaking havoc across the world.

Essala was drained of power by these couplings, she was weaker every day, and all saw she would soon dissipate. Her last act of power was to imbue the earth with life, forging the humans. Imon was devastated, his only companion in the eternal darkness was gone. He breathed a spark of magic into her last creations, though it was tempered with a dark rage which would later bring much sorrow. Despite the urgings of Nassan, Imon departed, and no sign of him has been seen in the ages since.

The Half-Gods soon grew great enough in number to capture the gods and imprison them in dark magic. In their naivete, the gods were not expecting the strike, and fell summarily. Only Ethros and Asshila, far away in the sky and consumed in their act of coupling that fills the sky with their children the stars, were spared. The Half-Gods bound the demons to them in familial hierarchy, and brought the humans to heel as base slaves.

Ages past with few incidents save tussles for power between the Half-Gods. Then, within three humans in disparate villages, the sparks that Imon had laid in them ignited with a vicious fury. Driven from their villages for the warping of their flesh, they were drawn to each other. Eventually they became Demon Lords, and then the first three Darknesses were born as they meditated in the basement of a daemon's mansion in the city of Althakaron. They rose up, and attacked the demons rulign the city with magical might not seen since the attacks on the gods. They fortified an area for one hundred miles in every direction from the metropolis using might wards.

Trained by the darknesses, a force of human free-warpers began to accumulate. When the triad died, they were replaced by a council of Demon lords. For many ages the Lands of Man were consistently a fifty mile radius around Althakaron, and as much other land as they could hold in any direction. Eventually, another triad came into being. This new triad discovered a way to bind daemons into seals and bind them to the will of any man. They worked from the rituals created by certain tribes on the borders of the mans of land that could capture demons. These three struck hard across the central desert that sits at the heart of the continent. They sped towards the Daemon capital, the great and horrid city of Selthin. Here they broke the prisons of the Gods, and bound almost every demon in the city into stones, gems and scrolls.

The City of Selthin arose as the new Magical metropolis under the rulership of a guardian council known as the Zran Zrai, or the Guardians of the Dread. The Guardians spoke out against free-warping, arguing that the new magic was more reliable, and did not produce insane men with large amounts of power at their disposal. The free-warpers of Althakaron were persecuted and driven out of the towns they had only decades ago protected from slavery, destruction, and torture. It was into this world that Carrion Reddis was born.