The Story of the Earth

A creation myth from creatures of The Territory

As translated by Zelda

Foreword

The history of our clan and the world are intertwined tales that stretch back for eons. Over these millions of years, the stories have been passed down, kept and retold by elders and clan leaders. What follows is a detailed account of this story, incorporating many variations and noting possible incongruities. These tales came directly from the mouths of my elders. Many speak no human tongue, and a best attempt has been made to let your speech convey the depth and spirit that the animal language carries. At its core, this long thread of mythology spins a web that makes up our existence and our world.

Our history does not begin with the beginning of our kind, but the creation of our planet. Before time was defined by all of the things that mark it now, there existed a new body in space. It was sterile and blank, containing substance but possessing no life or nature. As they do for all things in the universe, four elements of being converged on this planet to shape it. Fire, water, earth, and sky are the four elemental parts of everything that exists, either in whole or in part. These elements warred over the newborn Earth, scarring the surface and the atmosphere with raging wind, searing fire, pounding water, and thundering stone. These four great powers of being warred against each other with exactly matched force. They fought with such terrible ferocity that they began to change, in and of themselves. They began to meld into one another, and new things came into existence. This was the point of creation for all things that exist, but do not live. Earth and fire combined to produce lava. Water and sky merged in the rainstorm. Countless things were born anew. Though they were not as simple and pure as the elements themselves, these new things had a power and energy that was unique, stemming from their parts and yet greater than their sum. These things which do not live have come before us. They are the second-parents of things which live. The four elements of creation continued to wage their war, catching these products and combinations in the wake of their clashes. Somewhere and at some time, all four elements combined themselves into one object, a thing which did not only exist and have being, but with the mix of all four elements this thing possessed life. We do not know what this first life was, what it looked like, or what nature it had. But we do know that it existed, and so we exist, and that is all that is needed. All forms of life contain within them a balance of these four elements that is completely unique. No other life within the stretch of space and time will ever duplicate such an identity. It is likely that this uniqueness also forms the base and permanence of our spirit. We believe that, much like a special power exists in all nonliving things, the mixture of the four elements with in all life creates the immortal and undecaying spirit, a part that lives on after flesh and bone fail this place of life. The body, merely a composure of nonliving materials, degrades back to the source, while the elemental spirit continues to exist, aware but separate of living and nonliving things alike. Such an elemental uniqueness is present in both physical and spiritual forms of all things in nature, no matter how simple or complex they may appear.

We do not mark a specific time for the beginning of our history. It was not the beginning of time, of even the beginning of our time. Our clans grew up in the footprints of giants, in a world where simple elements and complex life created chaos and opportunity to adapt and thrive. We do not remember a time when there were not four our species roaming together. We do not remember a time without leaders and Tournaments to establish them. Perhaps, like life itself, we simply did not exist before the conglomeration of our species occurred. Our history dawns in a broad and populous time, when countless numbers of clans roamed the planet from pole to shifting pole. The environment was far different then. We were low on the food chain. We carried bigger bodies and heavier bones. We did not fly or swim as if we felt those elements within us, as we do now. We herded on plains and held packs in forests. It was a long span of slow change, survival by gradual shift through lucid chaos. Not much is remembered of this time because it stretches so far and for so long into our past. But one event marks a very violent change in the tale, and so it is a marker for our spirits. It is the point where the slow change ended.

It has long been believed by our clan that meteorites or falling stars symbolize the tears of our ancestors, from their place beyond life. The truesight of our dreams, the minstrel guards of the Territory, and these streaks of light are the bulk of what little we can exchange between the planes. The story of our kind finds its first solid rooting on a single night, when all stories tell that all of the stars rained out of the sky. This is the beginning of a chaos that the planet had not before seen. The elements were not disturbed. Made active, but unchanged. Nonliving things were changed and destroyed, born anew in forms of existence that had not previously been known. The stories tell of great destruction. Variations branch off in details; great fires, hails of acid, and continents cracked asunder. No specific length of time is named for such a violent period, but it is made to seem comparatively brief. This great destruction caused confusion and death, its details are short and thin. The tale redefines itself again in what is commonly referred to as the dark time, a period that stretched for eons. Though the dark time spans long, even here little is known save for one thing: the Plague. The Plague is a defining part of our clan. It is what shaped us and changed us into our current form, far more quickly and harshly than the chaos of life before. The Plague is, to the best of our knowledge, a sickness of some kind that swept the globe. We do not know if this was a sickness of body or mind. It is told in darker tales that the very elements of life dissolved to nothingness before the Plague, which was misnamed and represents an unidentified force of anti-creation rather than a disease. In any case, the effect of the Plague is always the same. Our clans, and all life in general, vanishes beneath it in a wave of quickly-spreading death.

Our clan is the only one not to have been exterminated by the effects of the Plague. Old tales pin us as residents of the High North, most likely a scrub or steppe region of a northern latitude. When the Plague started to spread amidst the clan, rather than dissolving in fear the clan’s ranks held, and the group moved farther north. It is not clear why the decision was made to venture out into lands of snow and ice that obviously could not sustain the clan’s well-being. It is thought that the clan may have simply taken a blind risk in the move, or were willing to have themselves freeze to death at the hands of the elements, rather than be taken slowly by the Plague. We know few details of this last surviving clan, our closest ancestors. We do not know their number, nor what time they lived in. We only know that it was during the dark times. This one clan traveled north, into the cold, to escape extinction. This northern land has many names in many stories. It is the High North, the Great North, the Cold North, the Starred North. We know for sure that it was high toward the magnetic pole, and the climate was freezing and arctic. This was a land that our kind has still not adapted to, and the clan would have perished, had they not taken shelter within a massive network of caves. It is said that the caves exhaled warm damp air, and their walls glowed even in the depths of the earth. It is thought that this light came from phosphorescent lichen and algae that grew in the damp cave, and this was the clan’s primary – if not only – food source. We do not know how many years the clan remained hidden. Tales tell that all those who ventured outside only did so to die of the Plague, for traces of it had followed them even into the High North. To this day it is the Plague that slowly consumes all who reach old age, as rot would an ancient tree. We are sure that this stay in the northern caves was a very long one, for our four species emerged from them changed and reshaped by the elements. Our bodies grew smaller in the tight spaces, with thicker scales and coarser fur and feathers. We gained wide wings, lighter bones, and quick metabolisms to regulate temperatures in the alternating cold and damp.

Many stories do not mention much of the exit from the caves. There are versions that do, however, go very distinctly into this part of the tale. It is unusual that such a thing would be remembered, because it features only a single creature. It is not remembered what species or sex it was, to say nothing of the animal’s name. These versions tell that one night, this creature looked out of the cave and saw that the stars were back in the sky. Some say the sight drove the animal insane, others say it was a sign from the ancestors. The most likely explanation is that this animal went through an ordeal called a spiritfall, a great trial of both body and mind. Whatever the cause, the creature was driven from clan and cave, and ventured southward into the ice alone. That creature’s body fell within the bounds of what is now the Territory, and every member of the clan has since died within those bounds. So is the story of the Earth and our kind upon it.

The End