Preface

When the world started there was nothing. It was a vast emptiness with only light and darkness. Light and dark were different than we know them now; they were not seen as good or evil, they were simply light and darkness, in nothing. Then came the three.

No one knows the origins of the three. There is a rumor among the temple acolytes that not even the three themselves know how they came to be. The priests would kill these whisperings, calling them blasphemous. Are not the three all-powerful? Do they not know better than us? Yet still acolytes will whisper among themselves in the dark of night, and priestlings will believe themselves above such behaviors, until the very ones who dared whisper loudest become the priests that punish such base rumor bearers the most harshly.

Into this void of light and dark the three emerged, fully formed, already in balance. The Lady of Light, and the Lord of Darkness, and the one who came between,the one who men now think evil, the Lord of Death, who kept his brother and sister in balance. It was the three who created the heavens. The Lady of Light set the sun in the sky and the Lord of Darkness chasing his sister's sun from its place with his cloak of night.The Lord of Death created clouds and mountains to keep the light at bay during the day and sowing the stars and moon into the night to keep the darkness from overpowering the light. The three were ever in perfect balance and harmony.

Their creation however, continued of its own accord. The mountains Lord Death had intended to cast shade on the flatlands still rang with the life he had given them. The breathing stone grew a spirit of its own deep within itself, spewing violently into the air with all the lava and ash of the first volcano in the world came this living spirit. The stone of the mountains was not the only thing filled with the life of creation and left to its own devices by the three creators. The air moved and sang through the mountaintops, blew across the seas and formed white topped waves to beat the beaches of the flatlands into submission. The lava from the birth of the spirit of stone spread fire, blazing stronger with assistance from the wind. The clouds, fed by the heat of flame and cooled again by the water, twisted and spun by the strength of the wind grew into the first storm. In this way five created one another. Each had the power to make another stronger, each could weaken another.

The five were not in balance as the three had been. They loved deeply, but shifted their affections easily and fought amongst themselves. Despite these faults, from the five came something the three had not thought to create. the sentient races of earth were born from the five: man, loai, and magicians, fighting and loving and living as fiercely as their forebears. Living more fully than the three had understood life could be. 

The five were violent, concussive forces, much more so than their offspring. They caused disaster for their earth-bound children. Without them the three races of earth would be able to keep the balance. The three came to the decision that something must be done about the five so that they would no longer be able to harm the earthen peoples. They could not be killed, Lord Death explained to his brother and sister, for to kill the spirits of the earth would kill the very thing they strove to protect. The five would be bound to the heavens, it was decided, imprisoned within their own home. So the our people were saved by the three from destruction by our own creators.