Hér á eftir fylgir lítil saga sem segir hvernig heimurinn sem ég er að vinna í var skapaður. Hingað til eru nöfnin ekki endanleg, bara vinnutitlar.


The night was late and darkness reigned everywhere except around a small fire in the middle of the camp. The old man and the boy sat by the fire and all around them were the sounds of crickets chirping, the slight wind blowing through the high grass of the plains nearby and the rustling of the leaves on the small almohar-trees that surrounded the camp. This was the first time the boy had gone from the main camp of the tribe so he was growing uneasy because all the sounds of the wilderness, which he was so used to, seemed to be so much closer and louder than usually. The old man sat by the fire, opposite the boy, and the glow of the flames made his weathered face look as it were carved from wood. The old man and the boy sat there, by the fire, without saying a word.

Suddenly the old man broke the silence saying: “It is time to begin”. The boy straightened his back and squared his jaw. This was the beginning of his manhood ceremony. The old man smiled secretly at the boy but then grew serious and put on his headpiece, adorned with the feathers of a crow, his totem, and the fangs of a mountain troll, which he had slain barehanded as a part of his spirit journey many years ago. Then the old man began the story that he had told a hundred times before:

“I am a shaman of the Tribe of the Elk, my spirit is the crow and I am the child of the Old God, just as you are and all the animals of the living world. All creation is his doing. This you already know, but what you do not know is that all creation is a failure.”

The boy looked up, startled, but kept his silence. The old man continued:

“I will explain, so do not worry. The Old God who made the world was not the only God, in fact, so many were the Gods that they equalled the number of stars in the night sky. All the Gods created worlds that reflected their minds and souls, some were filled with light and joy, but others were filled with darkness.
Soon the darker Gods grew envious of the other Gods and of each other. One of the darker Gods, named Orellian, killed another God, Avel, and thus started a war. The Gods created great monsters to fight in the war.

For a long time this war did rage, Gods and monsters killing one another and in this war all the worlds that the Gods had created were destroyed and all the Gods were killed. All but one. This surviving God is the God we call the Old God. He was already ancient when the worlds were destroyed, he was the last of the first Gods. No one knows how many they were in the beginning, but he was the most powerful among them, a mighty God of war, but he had grown old and with the years his strength and power was replaced with wisdom and knowledge. He had been the only one with the wisdom to see where envy and avarice would lead the Gods so he had not taken part in the war. He had been one of the first, now he was the last. He looked upon the ruined worlds with great sadness in his heart and decided that he would create a perfect world, our world.”

Once again the boy looked at the old man confused and said:

“But I thought you had said that our world had been a… a failure?”

“Indeed it is” explained the old man “and if you would let me finish you might understand how it is a failure.”

The boy looked down into the fire, ashamed of having interrupted the old man.

“Well, if you have nothing more to say” continued the old man “I will finish the story. Well? Alright then. As I said, He decided to create our world, which was to be a perfect world. It was to be filled with perfect animals and perfect trees and perfect mountains and perfect waters and finally there would be a perfect race of men who would be the masters of this perfect world. It was to be the best of all possible worlds, where no evil existed. And so He began the creation, channelling great magic into the world, shaping it out of the void. He intended to seal magic away from the world because with magic comes lust for power, but on the seventh day of the creation He was interrupted, so magic remained in the world. A great evil, the beast we call many names but you know as Malis, the Father of Daemons, came from the dark nothing, the void that surrounds the world in the night and from which magic is drawn.”

The boy looked frightened up into the black sky, almost as if he were expecting the Daemon-Father to come bursting out of the night right now, but then he squared his jaw again and looked seriously into the fire. The old man continued:

“So the Beast attacked the Old God and disrupted the creation. The Old God, no longer as mighty as he was in his youth, had not the strength to battle this great evil and to create the world at the same time, he was too weak. The Beast thus gave birth to evil in this once perfect, half-made world.

The two plunged towards our world, which was incomplete, and fell through it and created the Great Gap of Navario, where they are still to this day locked in an eternal struggle, creating the fires that lie in the core of this world, the Ien’Orhad. It is in that Great Gap that the Words of Incantation are written, the words that give the Wizards of Navario their magic.

With the Old God locked in this struggle with the Beast the perfect world almost came undone. It had not been finished and the perfect race of men was split up into many races. The races of Men, Elves, Dwarves, Taurons and the Ornians. Each race inherited different qualities of the perfect race created by the Old God, but they also inherited certain qualities that were born from the Beast, such as greed, lust and evil. Elves are graceful, intelligent but proud. Dwarves are strong and skilful but stubborn and greedy. The Taurons are as diverse as they are many, they are blends of animals and men. They are a noble race, but inside them burns a rage derived from the Daemon-Father, something which they cannot always control, try as they may. The Ornians are born with wings and live high up in the mountains, but can never stay in one place for longer than one season for reasons that remain theirs alone. Despite the many faults of the other races, none were as corrupted by the Beast as the Men. Men have all the evils of Malis in their souls and at the same time they have none of them.”

“What do you mean?” asked the boy. The old man replied, looking sternly at the boy:

“I mean that all men are born with the potential of all the evil of the world inside them and the potential for all the good as well, but some of the evil always remains within their souls. So it is that we Men are all evil in different ways and on different levels.

In the best of all possible worlds everything had become imperfect, a failure, all the mountains, the waters and the animals. So it was, with the Old God locked in fierce battle, that old monsters, which had been long forgotten, from the war that killed the Gods found the imperfect world and came to it.”

“But where did they come from?” asked the boy and then quickly bowed his head shamefully. The old man secretly smirked and replied:

“They came from the world of the Old God, which still burns with the undying flames of the war. The world we call the Sun. These monsters, immensely powerful and corrupted by the evil of the war, were few in numbers though, only seven. They became the fathers and mothers of all monsters that now roam this world. These old monsters are now called the Great Old Ones and they still live, but are asleep in the deep places in this world, but only six of them remain. It was the hero Natrajk, the first man to touch magic and who then taught all who would learn how to speak the Words of magic, who killed the Mother of Dinosaurs, the Saurian Gargantuan, the seventh of the Great Old Ones and then destroyed all her children. Her carcass still lies where she was slain, under the great mountain Ursa. Natrajk disappeared soon after killing her and it is said that he lies sleeping until he is needed again.”

“But what are the Daemons?” asked the boy. The old man grew pale and his eyes seemed distant. When he spoke the boy heard something in his voice he had never heard before, fear:

“The Daemons are the children of Malis, the Beast. They are spirits that dwell in the unliving land, evil, malignant spirits. They are the reason why we must always perform the rituals of burial on the bodies of the dead.

The dead are like empty houses and without the rituals the Daemons can enter their bodies and take possession of them. Then the bodies become undead vessels for the Daemons. The Daemons can also possess men who have been corrupted by the Beast in their very soul, and it was a man just like that who once raped a human woman. That woman gave birth to a child, if one could call it that. That child was the first of the savage beasts we call Orcs, despicable abominations of Men.

So be forewarned, if you ever see a man, dead or alive, with fire in their eyes, then run, just run as fast as you can and never look back. There are worse things than death in this world and the Daemons can certainly deal out those things.”

The boy stared wide-eyed at the old man who gritted his teeth and ran his hand over the stump of his left arm as if he were reliving the pain of losing it.

Finally, the old man looked up, straight into the eyes of the boy and the boy felt all his fears and worries wash away into the deep sea of the old man’s eyes. Then the old man spoke:

“Now, boy, that you know how the world was made there is nothing in it that can make you afraid. Now go and come back a man.”
With those words the boy stood up, turned from the fire and walked into the black night, never looking back.







Explanatory notes:

Almohar-tree: Almohar-trees are small trees with leaves that form cups that collect dew. The dew, if drunk straight from the leaves, has healing powers.
The Great Gap of Navario: The Great Gap lies in the center of the country Navario. Navario is ruled by Wizards who spend their entire lives studying the Words of magic which are written inside the Great Gap. Over the Great Gap there is a gigantic tower, built by the Wizards, and it is there they conduct their studies of the Words.
Ien’Orhad: Ien’Orhad is a name from the Old Tongue which means Fires of Perpetual Hatred.
Oa’Jei: Oa’Jei is a name from the Old Tongue which means the Old God.
The Old Tongue: The Old Tongue is a language that is no longer spoken except by a few scholars around the world although everyone knows the meaning of a few words, such as Ien’Orhad and Oa’Jei.