A Tale of Seven Worlds
Book One
By Adam Martin
The gods are good,
The gods are just,
But when their power wanes
The gods shall gather dust.
A Place to Call Home
Chapter One:
The universe is a vast and mysterious place. Trillions of planets orbit trillions of stars in a trillion galaxies. Stars are born in a spark of glory and vanish in a burst so powerful they take their orbiting worlds with them. However, most remarkable of all are the creatures that live on those worlds. Teeming with ideas and desires; they pass through their lives making the bravest of decisions or cowering in a corner. They grow, they love and they create and some. . . some of them worship.
In all the grandness of the universe, floating through the ether and inhabiting the higher planes of existence, there are many gods. They are born into being with the breath of a prayer, falling from the lips of someone who needs something so badly they can only hope that something greater than themselves can bring it to pass. Others take their place among the gods through sheer willpower, strength and the death of another god; stealing the spark of the divine that grants them power above mere mortals. And as with all beings, where there is power there is the desire for more power.
So it is that the gods war amongst themselves in a neverending struggle for power. Good versus evil, apathy versus greed and the few who remain neutral avoiding all battles but those that are brought to their feet. Out of sight of the “lesser” folk, but using their worship as a source of energy, they ebb and flow through the mortal realm seeking to raise their status. Unfortunately, the minds of man and beast are often more easily swayed by instant gratification and promises of power; they never stop to think the promises are a lie.
But time does not pass for a god as it does for mortals. A thousand years is but a moment in the long history of their war, merely a drop in the cosmic bucket of a war that has raged for millions of years. A few gods seek to use this to their advantage and from time to time, from the ashes of war and time, new worlds are born.
In the Era of Iridescence the kindest of the gods of Good, their numbers 5, set out to create a new place in the universe; A place with a purpose to worship all things good and through that worship give power to the gods to rid the planes of evil. To this end, they worked together to gather the dust of the fallen from a thousand dead planets, they pulled together the winds and rains from a hundred planets that did not bare life, and the god of light pulled the last bright embers from a billion dying stars.
Pooling their power, they issued forth a new solar system of impossible odds. A new star was born from the ashes of the embers and around it they placed five planets given the names of Fa’See, Fa’Len, Fa’Jo, Kigstow and Mi’Roden. Such is the nature of magic, however, that sometimes things occur outside the realm of the gods’ will; through that chaos of magic the planet of Sha’Roden was born, sharing it’s orbit with Mi’Roden and teeming with random magics.
Orbiting on an outermost ring were Fa’See, Fa’Len, and Fa’Jo; largest and slowest of the planets they were provided with massive provinces of land and oceans to break their surface. Circling the next ring of orbit, in a dance of dangerous balance, Kigstow was placed; its orbit taking it against the flow of the outer planets. To Kigstow four large continents were provided, separated by enormous seas, and host to the most fertile of soil. Mi’Roden, and Sha’Roden by chance, were the smallest of the planets. Falling into the rhythm of worlds they found themselves in the innermost orbit and, pulled by the flow of galactic measure, they orbit the same direction as the planets of Fa’.
Onto these new worlds they poured the rains and winds, life and plenty, and the dust of their most loyal fallen worshippers. They breathed life into these beings once more and the races of planets born a million trillion miles away were new again. Worship can come from the most unlikely of places and so all races were welcomed here, spread across the worlds to mingle and merge.
With the planets created and their worshippers raised, the gods turned their gaze back to the universe and realized that in the vastness of all creation it would be impossible to keep evil entirely away from their newest of realms. It was decided that a seventh planet should be created to which evil could be banished. For this purpose they created Col’Lrot; a tiny planet by comparison to the others and locked in a tight orbit around the sun. Fashioning a planet into a prison they forced it to stop spinning, allowing it only to orbit the sun with one side ever turned to the bright burning glory of its light and the other forever banished to stare into the cold darkness of the galactic abyss.
Open thine eyes
and see the truth,
that the folly of gods
is to presume the mortal’s virtue..
A Place to Call Home
Chapter Two:
Years passed peacefully on the six primary planets. Those brought back to life by their gods flourished on their new worlds. They built homes, made tribute, held peace with races foreign to their own, but similar in devotion. Eventually, they took lovers and bore children, propagating their species and filling the world with their ilk. Good nature, however, is not hereditary and darkness lies in the deep recesses of the heart in all sentient beings.
From the first time a dwarf coveted a new stone mined from the earth by his neighbor; the first jealous flutter of a heart over another beings lover, and the first time a doubt rose in their hearts about a god who would allow someone else to have more than themselves, evil crept into the new and shining solar system.
Where there is doubt in faith, there is room for evil and evil always seeks a new place to settle it’s roots. At first, the gods of good were able to keep up with the descension of their worshippers, banishing those of ill intent to the planet of Col’Lrot, but eventually it spread too far and fast to manage and their own good nature kept them from destroying the lives they had created. And this is the power of evil; the relentless ability to destroy all things in opposition to the nature of good, which must endure the wicked to save those who are good.
Slowly evil filled the hearts of man and beast and soon the envy led to greed, greed to theft, theft to violence, and violence to all out war. The people of the worlds divided into factions, those factions became nations and the nations fought constantly over who would own what and how much blood would flow to ensure it happened. It was these wars that brought the gods of evil to the new realm during the early years of the Amber Age of mortals; when a lover fell to violence and their spouse uttered a prayer most deafening to the ears of the gods, “I forsake you for what you have done. I forsake you for abandoning us in our time of need. I abandon all faith in you and pledge my devotion in search of a new god, any god, who will provide me with justice and the power to exact my revenge!”
Echoing like a great chorus and resonating with the malice of a thousand unnecessary deaths, the prayer spread out into the universe and across all planes of existence. It brought pain to the heart of a god trying to provide for so many followers and continued on to whisper in the ear of a distant god who held no intent of good. Gathering all who would follow to his side, this new god of evil raced through the stars ripping through galaxies and leaving torment in his wake until he reached the origin of prayer. And on that day evil rejoiced. They applauded the work of the good gods and thanked them for their bounty, thanked them for creating brand new worlds in which evil could thrive and thanked them for failing to keep their promises. But when the laughter fell and the applauding stopped, the war of gods resumed.
A great battle tore through the plane of the gods, spilled into the mortal realm, and set the cosmos on fire. Good fought evil and evil fought everyone, for the truly evil have no allegiances and seek only power. So powerful was the battle that it set seas to boil, rained great meteors on the lands and imbued even more chaotic magic into the worlds. The continents of Sha’Roden splintered into pieces and rose to float above the surface, roaming in the open air above an enormous sea.
When the fighting was done, good and evil weighed equally in the hearts of all creatures on the planets in their path and a lesser god of good was rendered to sunder; his energy and blood cast through the universe to shine like so many burning stars tinted red, blue, and gold. To the mortals below it was a magnificent sight the likes of which had never been seen, a small remembrance of the tumultuous events that had just been released on their worlds and lives, and forever distant and visible as a new great galaxy spread across the night horizon.
In the end, the battle was finished and, though the gods of good and light were not vanquished, evil had rooted itself to this new world that was fresh no more. In this way, as is often the case, the forces of evil claimed a small victory and the new worlds, large and small, were now a home to all sides of the war. . . With new worshippers for all the gods.