On Creation
Deep in the murk of irreality, Faeja stirred restlessly. Before the light was known, neither was the darkness. Only Faeja. Intellect breathing in the nether preceding time.
Loneliness, a feeling then unnamed, pricked His soul, and He dreamed. Unwinding a thread of His essence, He cast it forth into the void and named it time. Eternally it grew and crept away from Him, drawing in the wake of its seconds subtle traces of Himself. Every second lessened His being which had once seemed infinite, unwinding His thread of self.
But still he created. For He loved the newness, the brevity of current, past, and future. A frail and filtered reality beneath His former plane. Existence devoid of the eternal—a novel and ingenious beauty.
Despite this new wonder though, loneliness persisted, a hunger unsatisfied with simple time. So Faeja drew them forth. Out of His soul He formed the Passions and the Traits to dwell in His new creation. They were beings of Faeja’s own ether, each Passion and each Trait representing an element of His fuller being. Curiosity came first, followed by Love and Malice. And then came the rest, hundreds and thousands of names now forgotten: Lust and Generosity, Cruelty and Kindness, Guile and Honesty—they slid like glass beads upon the thread of time and made their way along its course. They met with one another and mingled, each interaction altering those involved, each perception of another passion diluting the purity of he who perceived. By these dilutions, the Passions and the Traits developed into conscious beings, ruled by their first natures but broadened to encompass all emotion.
Faeja smiled, but He desired more. He desired a stage, a reality to frame the intellects that dwelt in time. So He created matter in the form of spiraling spheres and molded bodies to house the souls of His first children.
Ever forward, Curiosity was the first to alight upon a world in the new universe, the first to find that he could touch. And finding touch, he wanted more. He wanted to mold and to alter just as Faeja Himself had done. So Curiosity approached the throne of Faeja and begged Him for the gift of creation.
Faeja smiled on Curiosity’s request and unbound from His own essence a small portion of His creative force, His cyntras, to give to His favored son. Curiosity, still awed with the sensation of touch, used this borrowed cyntras to create new senses that would complement touch: sight, hearing, taste, and smell. All of his fellow Passions and Traits reveled in these sensations for a time. But the matter of first creation was too uniform to long hold their fascination. They approached the throne of Faeja as a body and begged Him for more creative power.
Pleased with Curiosity’s creations, Faeja removed all the cyntras of His being, all His creative force, and bound it into the strings of a mighty Lyre. This Lyre He handed down to His children, content to watch them play the tunes of creation.
For a time, the universe continued in harmony. Curiosity used the Lyre to play the music of reality. With the vibrations of the strings, new melodies sprang forth from matter. Atoms and molecules multiplied and formed into elements. Stars and planets discovered their orbits and the universe began its eternal expansion outward from the Lyre. Creation was a symphony, written for the delight of its own musicians.
Imagination alone grew discontent with Curiosity’s music. Seeing the eternal repetition of old scales and familiar chords, Imagination begged to take the Lyre that he might discover new melodies. With the Lyre, he crafted life. Plants came first, practice for the coming wonders. Then came the naiads and the dryads, spirits for the rivers and the trees. Fire Sprites rose from the notes of the lyre and fell to fester in the crust of the earth, churning the rock to liquid lava. To balance the heat of the fire sprites, water sprites dripped from heaven to people the seas and the rivers.
And in all of this, Faeja was pleased. He descended to the thread of time and walked beside His children on their earth, critiquing the beings they had created, the crudeness of their minds and the simplicity of their motivations.
Imagination again lifted the Lyre and struck up his former tune, gracing earth with all its beasts. But each new creation still fell short of Faeja’s desires. Tired for a time, Imagination yielded up the Lyre to his sister Love. Love played a new song, imparting feeling for the first time into the ordered music of her brothers. From her notes came the merpeople, the first race of the new earth. The merpeople were a deeply passionate race, driven by emotion before thought. Their lives were as wild as the waves of the oceans they swam in, consumed by every feeling both light and dark.
After Love had finished, Endurance stepped to the Lyre. A perpetually silent deity, Endurance was the last Trait that any might have imagined creating. But Endurance had grown sick with watching the merpeople, disgusted by their inconstancy and subjugation to feeling. So he played his own tune, a slow, haunting melody that clung to every note till the final echoes had faded. And from his song came the minotaurs. A hardy race, they stepped forth from the rock of the mountains and peopled the land left open by the merpeople.
Then, when the final notes of Endurance’s long dirge had faded, Curiosity once again lifted the Lyre. And he made man, a race to balance the passion of the merpeople and the strength of the minotaurs. Gifted with both high reason and deep passion, man was driven by an insatiable need for knowledge.
After the creation of man, all of the Passions and the Traits began to understand the nature of creation and its new inhabitants. Many cried out for the Lyre. Philia created the elves, a tribal race bound by familial affection. Introversion created the dwarves, a race given to solitude and art.
In time, each of these races began to flourish, to grow and to multiply, taught and reared by the Passions and Traits they most admired. The Passions and the Traits became gods—rulers of races and dispensers of law. The world blossomed under the ever flowing music of creation.
However, the Passions and the Traits were not perfect beings. Though modeled after the perfections of Faeja, their natures were subject to corruption; and experience altered their forms, letting their purity fall into distortion and entropy.
Malice, twisted by his association with Desire, grew tired of the simple, pastoral world which his brothers and sisters had created and crafted two new races: the eelings and the goblins. Beings of hatred and violence, these new races ravaged the rest of creation with the invention of war.
Grieved at the violence of His children, Faeja repented His gift of the Lyre and drew it back to himself. He sealed up the music of creation and bound His children within it, cutting them off from all reality outside of matter.
After the banishment, the peoples of the earth all but forgot Faeja and the time when He walked among them. The Passions and the Traits became lawless, struggling for dominance to fill the void left by Faeja. Their created races became armies in battles for lordship, and the Passions and the Traits became contenders in a battle for godhood.
Despite the removal of the Lyre, cyntras flowed freely through all of creation in the centuries following the banishment, leftover melodies from the first songs. Directionless, this power sparked creation wherever emotion reached climax. In battlefields and weddings, new creations sprang forth. Whenever a being felt an emotion in perfect sync with that emotion’s Passion, whenever a being developed a trait in perfect sync with that Trait itself, cyntras became a usable power.
In all this time, the Passions and the Traits struggled for dominance, maneuvering the peoples of creation like pawns on a chessboard, toppling nations for personal grievances. It was not until the day of the first extinction that these minor deities finally repented of their struggles. The stories vary on what race died, but the scholars tell us that on that day Grief became the most powerful Passion the world had ever seen. So many tears fell, both of the Passions and of the peoples, that Grief harnessed the full cyntras of creation. Full of anguish and righteous indignation, Grief used his newfound power to bind all of the most powerful Passions and Traits in prisons beneath the earth, protecting creation from their lust.
Grief established a covenant with his remaining brothers and sisters to never again reign in the affairs of their creation. He guided the many peoples to a rich and fertile land he called Rehavan and left them there to carve their history.