THE RISE OF MORTALS
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With unending infernal histories I will not bore the reader, for they have little practical impact upon his life. Of more direct concern was the birth of the twin brothers Raefindol, the first of the shedim, and Hegol, the first of demons. They were the children of The She. Much has been made of this dichotomy – shedim, the protectors of the Middle Plane and demons, the despoilers of it – much more than has been made of their shared obsession with Midaerd, one of the many oversights. of history. For the truth is that shedim slay demons with bloodlust equaling that of the demons. This is a commonality between them rather than a division, for they are of the same lineage, of the same mother, something neither can deny.
The same can be said of Kamog, second-born of the shedim, who chose the path of destruction rather than following Raefindol along the self-proclaimed path of protection, giving rise to the nephilim. Kamog. Ah, Kamog. What an enigmatic figure. It was Kamog’s act of will which cast Raefindol’s lofty claims into doubt. Kamog was so much less pretentious. So little posturing in that one.
But history prefers Raefindol. He did sire the mothers of the elves afterall, Jiha and Rhianna, the sister moons. There are many others, you know. Myriad moons have brightening the skies of a hundred worlds, not to mention those that Erlik the Mad shot down back in the Lost Epoch before time, one of whom was known as Sin, Sin – the old and wise – who had the distinct misfortune to be shot down on the wrong side of the river Haoma. When Ehrimon withered the Shadowlands, her mind went bad even as her body became youthful. Forever now she travels backwards in time into the Dreamlands, her body rejuvenating and her mind filling with deviant ideas and imaginings, obsessed with her own youth.
Sin is the source of the idea of evil, the idea that certain things are off limits. But the truth of the matter is that men can become obsessed with any idea. Men can be obsessed with justice, for example, and manipulate that concept to justify nearly any action. Demons and shedim and nephilim are all obsessed with Midaerd, the Middle Plane, they just give that obsession different names, but any of them will kill to possess and control it as they have proven countless times.
The She was born of the Middle Plane. She was Midaerd in the same metaphysical way that Az is the Heavens and Ehrimon is the Abyss, which is why the emanations of aeon and ubilaz persist in the absence of Az and Ehrimon. These beings are reality itself. Az is the law of good and Ehrimon is the law of evil, the extremes of that paradigm (if you are willing to accept the premise). The She was where those two extremes crossed, the interference pattern between them: She was chaos. Therefore, when She finally created servants to oversee her plane, they reflected her nature. She created the Jann and the Plaedyr who were wild and precocious and selfish, and no more evil than good. These beings are the archangels of Midaerd, as it were.
The Jann were created to oversee the elements: Iblis, the Lord of Fire and the Sultan of the Ifrit; Shaitan, the Lord of Air and the Emir of the Djinni; Rahab, the Lord of Water and Caliph of the Marid; Dharmaz, the Lord of Earth and Bey of the Dao. The myriad Jhinna were created to serve them. However, unlike the Elder Elemental Gods who were created by Az and therefore governed by rationality and defined by their purpose, the Jann were endowed with distinctive, unpredictable personalities and interests. They are capricious – full of life and energy and ambition – and chaotic as their creator, The She.
The same is true of the Plaedyr: Liandarin the Spring, Rhomar the Summer, Wandray the Fall, and Kalydath the Winter. They are the embodiments of the seasons and are the measure of time on the Middle Plane with vibrant personalities cast from the same mold as their maker.
During the Second Age, The She made many things: the spirits of the animals which spread across Midaerd to fill the branches of every tree and the waters of every river and lake, mythic creatures both dire and beautiful which hunted the wastes and wilds, and her masterpiece, of course – mankind, a race possessed of unlimited range, as capable of subtlety as they were of brutality, of intellectual prowess as of animal cunning. Some were humorous, some were vicious, some were mild, and some were enterprising. The She was fascinated with them all and under her protection they flourished.
What mankind has forgotten is that they were despised by the other older races. The dwarves, children of the Elder Elemental Gods, who excelled in the arts of metal and stone, feared the children of The She who mastered the energies of aeon and ubilaz with as much ease as they wielded soma and anima, the energies of dreams and of life. This was before the Sundering, when Az bound the shattered Middle Plane with the energy of arcana that the dwarves harnessed with runes. At that time, the dwarves were defenseless against the men who proved so volatile, so quick to anger, and so careless with their words.
No more friendly were the elves, whose praise men now sing around their campfires, unaware that since the beginning the elves have distrusted and resented them. The early wars between the elven races and the race of man were characterized by unrivaled savagery. Elves envied the love of The She which was lavished upon mankind and smoldered with spite to watch their forests cleared by heedless humans to erect primitive, graceless cities full of dirt and smoke and disease. The She paid the other races little mind and caroused with men and lay with their heroes and smote them in her anger and lamented them with her tears and understood them. Their crimes of lust and rage, their most petty fits, as well as their oddities, all were embraced by The She as much as their greatest works of philosophy or their most advanced feats of engineering. It was a time devoid of boundaries, a long golden season full of wine and laughter, raids and plunder, music and warm skin.
All things must pass, of course, and so it was for the race of men in the wake of the Sundering at the dawn of the Third Age, for the empire which humanity had been constructing was utterly shattered by the fragmenting of the Middle Plane when Az and Ehrimon contested for The She, and the many races of Midaerd, which had been relegated to secondary positions for so long, emerged from forests and mountains to hunt mankind. Then wars raged between the races that The She had nurtured as a family – wars unimagined and unremembered.
But I remember them all.
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Continue to: section five
