The History of Pannithor

Before the dawn of the noble races, in a time so long ago even the elves have scant record, the world came to be. It was created, in all of its bleak majesty, by the efforts of the Old Gods, known as the Primogenitors.

The Primogenitors were each themselves fashioned of the very stuff of which existence is composed: Life, Death, Darkness, Light, Earth, Water and Air - each of them wholly possessed of and driven by the nature of their own makeup.

Bhanek was among the youngest, twin of Shobik. Bhanek was the God of Life, delighting in bringing the spark of sentience to a vast and bewildering array of creations and forms, his imagination as limitless as his capacity for joy. His brother, Shobik, presided over Death, though the word itself does the concept little justice. In reality, Shobik represented time, entropy, decay and the hope of rebirth. For a mortal mind to even attempt to comprehend the full majesty and perfect harmony of the one twin with the other is simply impossible. Where Bhanek was excitable and intemperate, Shobik was aloof and logical. Where Bhanek would often let his creations loose in the world with no idea as to their potential or capability, Shobik’s every action was considered and calculated, never resulting in anything other than exactly that which he had intended. The two were as fire and ice, Bhanek’s flames rising to melt Shobik’s ice, which would in turn douse the conflagration of Bhanek’s ardour. It is impossible for the mortal heart to comprehend the depths of emotion exchanged between these two beings - a fraction of their fraternal love would burst the hearts of a million suitors, a mere sliver of their jealousy and rage would send whole populations insane with anger. And yet, the two coexisted closely, Bhanek’s creations giving him delight, Shobik’s inevitable attentions taking them away, paving the way for the next and the next. Theirs was a relationship of perfect harmony, such that the whole of creation was balanced more finely than any scale by their actions.

Ohmpek, God of Light and Raiser of the Sun, was paired with Lonok, Queen of the Shadows and Bringer of Darkness. Unlike the twins, these two enjoyed a fiery co-existence of endless opposition, each constantly battling to vanquish the other utterly. Their struggle was endless, chasing one another around the globe, neither able to best the other or cast the world fully under their own influence. Where there was Darkness on one side, so there was Light on the other. Where the sun rose and illuminated the lands at one pole, the stars winked from the cyclopean darkness at the other. The Sun itself, dragged forth from the heavens to shine the brighter near the world, is countered by the Moon, which Lonok uses to drag shadows across the globe. In some of the older parts of the world, in lost civilisations still holding to the Old Ways, a solar eclipse is seen as a sign that the two are at the peak of their rage with one another, the longer periods of twilight and dusk that follow the result of the exhaustion of each as they slink away to regain their powers for another day.

Threnekka and Korgaan’s relationship was a playful one - the God of the Air would send forth mighty winds to stir Threnekka’s oceans, whipping them to frenzy. Threnekka would take these winds and use their strength to form enormous waves, and the resulting storms were as epic as they were beautiful. Neither cared much for the creatures gifted both of them by Bhanek, not the birds of the skies nor the beasts of the deeps, as each was too wrapped up in their affections for the other. Even the ancient wyrms, mothers of dragonkind, were considered clumsy and beneath contempt by both gods. Some of the greatest lakes, mountains and rivers were formed by their constant and tempestuous back and forth, and in a very real sense they shaped much of the world as it is known today.

Of all the Primogenitors, Dianek alone lived a solitary and mournful life. Hers was the earth and all that lay beneath it. Bhanek had no interest in making creatures he was unable to see and show off to the others. Shobik bestowed only the lightest attention on the Underworld, ensuring that time would drag there infinitesimally slowly. Ohmpek had no use for a realm in which light could not survive, and Lonok saw no use for a realm whose stygian depths drank light more deeply and completely than any shadow she could conjure. Threnekka found Earth to be anathema to her, fit only to wash away in slow erosion as she carved her signature through it, and Korgaan blew across the top of the earth without once touching it. While the other Primogenitors played and marvelled above the earth, exulting in their powers and vying to outdo one another through the heavens, Dianek remained below and tended to her depths in solitude. Try as she might, she could fashion no truly sentient creatures from the clay and mud, though she could raise simple mindless constructs of rock to do her bidding, puppetlike.

None living can truly say how long the reign of the Primogenitors lasted before Bhanek ushered in the beginning of its end with his creation of the elves. All that is known is that these seven between them began the shaping of the world into what it is today.

The world has undergone much upheaval and many wars in the span of its existence. Entire civilisations have been wiped clean from both existence and memory, and new ones have come after. Wars have raged in which Gods and God-like beings have fought over continents. Mortals have offered up entire seas of blood in sacrifice for some ideal or belief now consigned to the oblivious vaults of history. Throughout its history the world has been given many names. To the ancient race of men, it has been known as both Mirramoth and Minaholm. The dwarf’s ancestral name, often still used today is khôlen-bakkar which means ‘The over-earth’, although Berranonn is also used in more modern texts and carvings. The elves of old called everything they surveyed Shalath’enir meaning ‘between the seas’, but it is Pannithor, a name of unknown origins, which has survived the test of time and is still the most prevalent name, across languages, cultures and species.

It is perhaps to be expected then, that the creation of Pannithor itself and the races upon it are lost to the depths of time. And yet, before the War with Winter, before the God War and even before the Celestians themselves bestrode the world, Pannithor and her three noblest races existed under the auspice of very different gods. While so-called lesser races prevailed, the triumvirate of elf, dwarf and man were dominant.

Though the elves are reckoned the most ancient of the noble races, it is the dour dwarfs who have the strongest impression of their own creation. To the dwarfs themselves, this is no surprise as they find elves equally as contemptibly in thrall to the Shining Ones and their Celestial forebears. To a dwarf, forgetting one’s own roots and legacy is about the gravest sin any mortal may commit.

The dwarfs have it that they were created from the tears of the goddess of the Underworld, bereft at her lack of children to call her own. These tears are held to have gathered to form a stalagmite in the form of a dwarf, and thus the first of their kind was created. There is a certain poetic beauty to the tale that resonates and gives it the ring of truth, speaking as it does so well to the character of dwarf kind. They are strong and firm like the rock from which they sprang, yet filled with the deep and sombre passion of the goddess whose great sadness formed them.

The elves were of course the cause of this grief. Where the dwarfs were formed from the despair of a bereft deity, the elves were formed from the sheer joy and unbridled conceit of another. Though the gods of old Pannithor were wont to engage in many contests among themselves, seeking to outdo one another in the breadth and splendour of their accomplishments, there was always balance. Bhanek, the Breath of Life in the world, would delight in creating beasts of every type, shape and size - birds in the skies, fish in the oceans and mammals on the earth. Shobik, the Keeper of Time, would take them back again as the years claimed them. Ohmpek, the raiser of the Sun, would spread light and life from horizon to horizon, and Lonok, Bringer of the Dark, would cover the world in her velvet embrace once again. Korgaan, God of the Winds would delight in stirring the depths of Threnneka’s oceans, the two dancing together endlessly. Dianek, the Goddess of the Underworld, was the loneliest of all the Gods, alone in the eternal twilight of her realm and ignored by the others, and the story of her children began after Bhanek’s greatest creation came to pass - the elves.

Bhanek had tired of his creations being simply left to wander the world for their allotted span, and wished for a creation which could surprise him, one which might leave its own marks upon the world, perhaps even commune with him. His ambitions were lofty, but after many spans, he had created the first of elven kind. Made to be perfectly pleasing to their creator in every way, elves were beautiful, intelligent, fierce and talented. So taken was Bhanek with his new creations, that he feared to show them to Shobik. He could not bear the thought of time stealing away his new children and their beauty, and so he hid them away for many years, flourishing and growing in the heart of what is now Ileuthar, beneath the World Tree, his previous greatest and most lovely achievement.

Of course, the elves could not be hidden forever, and when his siblings discovered them, there was great consternation. Shobik wanted to destroy what his brother had wrought utterly in his rage. Ohmpek delighted in the detail of his brother’s work, admiring the beauty and ability of these little creatures, where Lonok saw them as objects of suspicion. Eventually, after much quarrelling, it was agreed that Bhanek should create some other race of creatures which might be given over immediately to the untender mercies of his brother. Appeased, Shobik bade Bhanek make it so. Thus began the creation of man.

Dianek meanwhile had remained silent. Her realm beneath the earth was barren, home to great wealth and treasure but no life. Bhanek had no interest in creations he could not see, nor Shobik in the unaltering depths, and neither light nor dark nor wind nor ocean made any difference in the subterranean walls of her realm. Her anguished sorrow henceforth brought about the dwarfs, or certainly their shape, and in shame, her fellow Primogenitors heard her tears and bestowed life and the gentlest touch of time upon them in recompense, giving the dwarfs their sturdy vigour and longevity.

Meanwhile, Shobik’s penalty on men, assembled in haste by Bhanek and unlovely and emotionally stunted where elves were sleek and advanced, gave forth a race which would ironically rise one day to dominate the world. For all their awareness of mortality and its grim grip on their destiny, individually and as a species, they were driven harder to test its bounds, to escape the embrace of death itself and bestride the world as Gods themselves.

By the time that Bhanek and Shobik realised the sum result of their endeavours, it was too late. They had set in motion events and circumstances that would prove their undoing.

While men raged and cursed at their limitations, elves followed their own path. Their immense lifespans and uncommon beauty combined with their keen intellects to make all things seem possible to them. Great art, philosophy and scientific progress all came easily to them as they bent their attention to each. As they studied the mysteries of creation, they inadvertently stumbled upon the very power of creation itself – magic.

Every single thing upon the face of the world is composed of matter, in various combinations of the base elements. But magic is the binding force, injecting the spark of life and intelligence into each living creature. Various cultures describe it as the ‘soul’, the ‘life energy’ or the ‘essence’. It is only with magic that life may be created from nothing, that the crude meat, bone and flesh they makes up a human or an elf may become a breathing, sentient creature.

The gods had used magic in all their creations. What they had never anticipated was that those creations might discover how to harness this power themselves. With such a miraculous discovery, the elves elevated themselves yet further above the humans and dwarfs with whom they shared the world. Early human mages were taught by the elves as the two noble races became ever more closely entwined with one another. Though they lacked the lifespan and iron will of the elves, human mages made up for this with discipline and focus, driven by fear of their own mortal frames and the limitations these placed upon them. The elves came to admire this spirit, indeed it is said that the first love affair between man and elf came about between an elven mage and his human protégé. It was however also to birth the darkest and most dangerous of all the arcane arts – Necromancy.

The knowledge that magic could be used to halt or even reverse the ravages of time was known to the elves of course – their command of the breadth and depth of possibilities afforded by magic was unrivalled. But they had no need of its use. They were near immortal creatures, capable in their long lifespans of perfecting any craft to which their attentions were turned. The concept of regret, of feeling as if one’s life had been lived incompletely, was alien to them. Not so, to humans.

Whether it was in fact the love between a human and an elf which first prompted this obsession with the shortness of span afforded the former is not known, though given the fact that the first human mages were taught by elves, and the closeness that was fostered between such apprentices and their masters, it seems likely. Seeing such beauty and accomplishment at close hand and knowing that it was the result – among other things – of a lifespan many times that afforded to themselves, it stands to reason that this would be a factor in triggering the obsession with magical resurrection and rejuvenation which would eventually morph into the foul art of Necromancy in all its many forms.

The elven appetite for knowledge was voracious. They began to reach out and touch the mortal boundaries of the temporal, and take fleeting glimpses of the spaces between worlds, beyond even the stars in the skies above them. It was on one such journey that the elves drew the attention of the beings known to antiquity as the Celestians.

Precious little is known of the Celestians, save that they were extremely powerful, and not of Pannithor. Some theorise that they come from a distant star, the few survivors of some ancient, advanced civilisation. Others say that they came from another dimension altogether, a mirror world in which mortals had created the gods rather than the other way around. Others still assert that the Celestians come from the future, the elves’ childlike meddling in powers they did not understand slipping loose the bonds of time itself.

Whatever the truth of their origins, the impact of the Celestians is clear. Even before their arrival, the influence and power of the old Gods had begun to markedly fade. As humans, dwarfs and elves alike spread across the world and began to forge their own legacies, their reliance on and belief in their creators waned. For the elves, this process was more or less instant. Their increased delving into magic had seen them pay less and less attention to their divine overlords and even their creator himself. With the arrival of the Celestians - all-powerful and all too eager to share their wisdom with the elves, the use of ‘gods’ eluded them more and more.

But the Celestians were not content merely to share the limited realm of the elves. Such beings would not be contained, and spread their attentions across the whole world, taking in the cultures of humanity and, eventually, even dwarf-kind. The dwarfs were naturally the very last to succumb, isolationism and suspicion built into their very being, but eventually even they were brought forth by the wonders which the Celestians could bring.

And what wonders they were. The history of each of the noble races speaks - frustratingly briefly - of the Time of Light; that almost mythical time of ancient history in which all three races united in peace and prosperity, and reached further and achieved more than at any time before or since. Those who know where to look can find more detail.

Buried beneath the tower of Therennia Adar, in chambers protected by powerful wards, are records of the elves from that distant time. Of the great majesty of their magic and art, the long reach of their exploration as they walked amongst the stars themselves and captured their very essence. Mighty cities of such beauty that mortal men wept at their very sight were raised across the whole of their Western domains. Fleets of ships majestically sailed to each corner of the world, mapping every coastline, inlet and island. It was said that at its height, the elven Empire’s collective expeditionary fleets could have stretched around the globe, and allowed a man to walk the circumference without once getting his feet wet. Their energies were also bent to the arts. The elves created wondrous sculptures so exacting in detail that they could drive mortal minds to extremes of love. More than one account exists of men and even dwarfs being so entranced by an elven statue as to fall instantly in love and stand transfixed forever more until they wasted away. Their paintings of this period were so vivid they almost seemed as windows to the scenes they depicted, every brush stroke meticulously hidden, every colour hauntingly vivid. In music, they devised ballads that could crush their audience with grief in one verse, then lift the heart to the highest ecstasy in the next. And in magic, they became accomplished masters, taking to the mystic arts with the same sense of wonder and discipline as they did all things. It is no coincidence that, to this very day, the mightiest mages in all of Pannithor hail from the elven race. 

In every way, the elves excelled, mastering all they turned their hand to in ways which made their previous achievements seem as childish play, and all along they were encouraged by the Celestians, to whom they believed themselves - in their vanity - to be equals.

That vanity would eventually cost the elves - and the rest of the world - dearly, but for a time, there was nothing that they could not accomplish. The realm of the elves grew and sprawled outward, its cities vast monuments to perfection. The Time of Light shone at its very brightest.

Beneath the dark waves of the Infant Sea, buried under the watery grave of Winter’s final spite, lie the ruins of the greatest human civilisation ever to have existed – Primovantor. In the Time of Light, Primovantor covered much of the globe, and represented the very apex of humanity’s existence on Pannithor, rivalling even the ancient realm of the elves for size. In those dark ruins, preserved in submerged murals and carvings, lie the records of the heights of that civilisation. Driven by their ever-present knowledge of their own mortality, humans sought the power of magic for their own ends. Art and literature were all well and good, but humanity sought dominion over life and death itself.

However, for a time, the empires of man and elf grew together in harmony, and the realm of Primovantor - the greatest empire of men ever known in the history of the world – grew ever outwards, covering a large proportion of the globe. Beneath the sprawl of cities and towns composing this mighty empire lay the realm of the dwarfs.

Dwarfs by their nature are an insular people, and this was ever the case, even during this golden time of plenty. Though they lived in harmony beneath the feet of humans and elves during the Time of Light, and treated regularly with both, they did so guardedly. Some theorise that this mistrust of outsiders springs from their creation myths, which they take more seriously than any other of the noble races. Indeed, though the dwarfs respected the Celestians and were known to make great friends of some, they never really recognised them as gods, with the exception of Fulgria. For the dwarfs, Dianek was the only ancient god of note, the one who gave them life and the one to whom they pray and still give quiet obeisance to this day. Fulgria is recognised as the Goddess of Fire, worshipped by certain factions within dwarfen society, but no other deity approaches the Goddess of the Underworld in the affections of her children. 

Thus, the dwarfs traded with the other noble races in the Time of Light, growing their empire beneath those of men and elves who had little reason to complain, having no need or use for the land beneath their feet. The more bitter-spirited of dwarf kind maintained then and to this day that the other noble races looked on them with disdain, seeing them as no better than the spoil and waste they threw beneath the ground. For their part, the dwarfs made good use of their freedom, their empire sprawling out for many leagues. They mined precious rocks and minerals, created huge subterranean cities and profited from providing some of their innovations to their neighbours. Many cities in Primovantor and beyond benefited from dwarfen plumbing, sewers, and other innovations. Always the dwarfs held back though, largely refusing to involve themselves in the politics and affairs of the other races, and mostly treating the Celestians with cautious respect.

The dwarfs never approved of intermarriage between races. The tendency of humans and elves to freely intermix, though not common, was often enough to draw the quiet disgust of the dwarfs. To them, the thought of mixing blood in this way is abhorrent. During the Time of Light, it was a subject deftly avoided by them, and there is certainly no verifiable historical record anywhere on Pannithor of a mixed marriage involving a dwarf.

It was during the Time of Light that the Celestians finally displaced the Old Gods of Pannithor by way of their incredible powers and abilities, as well as their appealing natures. Well able to command the loyalty of any they encountered, the Celestians were easily able to bend the wills of the noble races to their own whims. None really sought to question how they did this at the time, and few have considered it since. However, the scribe Athalaneus, later committed to the sanatorium for his own safety, wrote extensively on the God War and its aftermath, making some interesting observations on the nature of the Shining Ones, the Wicked Ones, and on the suggestions each of these made regarding the original nature of the Celestians.

Firstly, Athalaneus observed that the Celestians seemed, at least in his opinion, neither wholly physical nor entirely ethereal. This in and of itself he concluded, disqualified them from being gods as such – instead Athalaneus asserted that they were beings of great power, who simply appeared as gods to the much less sophisticated mortal races of Pannithor at that time. Claiming to have studied fragmented records stored in the Grand Library of Therennia Adar (a claim which first raised the questions as to his mental equilibrium), Athalaneus spoke of strange ‘otherworlds’ and ‘planes of reality’ which the elves learned to visit by magical means (as taught to them by the Celestians). He posited that the Celestians knew the paths to these places having emerged from there themselves. Literally, he claimed that the Celestians had arrived at Pannithor from another plane of existence altogether, seeking refuge from some calamity or other and seeing in this world an opportunity to rule as deities, easily able to manipulate the naïve, lesser races which dwelled there. 

Certainly, there are elements to the behaviour of the Celestians as it is recorded that invite consideration of Athalaneus’ observations. The elves were flattered by the attentions of these new godlike beings, who immediately began satiating their desire for knowledge and arcane powers. In humanity the Celestians found worship and subservience, feeding on the natural superstition of humans borne of their shorter, more violent lives and credible natures. With the dwarfs, the Celestians sought neither worship nor friendship, happy to maintain the sort of arms-length relationship typical of those dour folk. It was as if the Celestians were simply all things to all noble races, knowing exactly which feelings and instincts to massage in order to maintain their own position of superiority over all three.

And it was not as if any of the noble races did not benefit – at least for a time. The ministrations of the Celestians, their wisdom, encouragement and gifts, helped to usher in the brightest time in the history of all three races, the Time of Light seeing the very zenith of what could be achieved by civilised races. Mighty fleets sailed the oceans, endless cities rose from horizon to horizon, and through the depths as well.

In that time, there were so many Celestians, and so much prosperity and wonder, that the endeavours of individuals are now mostly lost to history. A few notables remain: Liliana, now subsumed into the Green Lady, the Lady herself, and Valandor. All achieved great things and performed mighty deeds. And yet none can equal the one name that echoes loudest down through the ages. A name accursed by all who speak it, the name of he who brought the downfall of everything the Celestians had built, for reasons which remain disputed and unclear to this very day. Oskan, sometimes called the Father of Lies, though this soubriquet would not be earned by him until after the nefarious events he set in motion.

Athalaneus speaks much of Oskan in his fevered writings. Whether his ideas are the ramblings of a madman or are truly insightful, the truth has been eroded and lost by time. He asserts that Oskan was the youngest of the Celestians, possibly even the child of an unhappy union among their kind. Bitter, and full of loathing both for his own kind and the noble races of Pannithor, Athalaneus writes that Oskan conceived of a way to destroy both without challenging his peers himself. Young and weak as he was, barely tolerated by his kin, Oskan feared the oblivion of death more than anything else. He sought the destruction of his own noble impulses, which he saw as an alien being trapped within him, so that he could give in to every dark impulse. For this, he would need a pawn. One fateful day as he wandered the sacred glades of Therennia Adar, Oskan crossed paths with none other than Calisor Fenulian, greatest of his kind and the most powerful elf to have ever lived. Oskan could not have found a better pawn for his plans. 

After Athalaneus was committed to the sanatorium, he continued to write furiously until his death. Upon examination of his cell, works were found carved into every surface by a sharpened rock. One word repeatedly scrawled and scratched out that has continued to baffle scholars and historians alike was the name Reiliur. Many outlandish claims were made, including that Valandor’s twin aspect was Ba’el, the loathsome general of the Abyssal armies, and that both would one day return for a final reckoning.

The saga of Calisor and Elinathora is more commonly referred to as the tale of the Fenulian Mirror. There are almost as many different tellings of the story as there are stars in the sky, and certainly the details of this epic myth differ wildly amongst the different noble races. To the elves, it is a tragic story of doomed romance, a tale for the ages of the lengths to which an elf may be driven by love. To the humans, it is a tale of the selfishness and arrogance of elvenkind, the horror of an elf not being able to accept the will of a human and instead seeking to override that will by means of sorcery. To the dwarfs, it is a simple warning of what happens when the other races intermix in the way that elves and humans have often been wont to do throughout history. The dwarfs view such intermarriage and interbreeding with horrified disdain, maintaining that if only the other noble races could have ‘stuck to their own’ as they themselves do, then the world would not be half so full of woes.

Nevertheless, regardless of the colour which might shade an individual’s viewing of the tale, the salient facts remain the same. Calisor Fenulian was the most brilliant elf who ever trod the lands of Pannithor. There was no single endeavour beyond him - the arcane arts came to him as easily as the physical ones, his mastery of warfare was equal to his gift with poetry, and his peerless appearance was matched only by his easy charm and wit. To read the chronicles of Calisor is to read a tale of a being who appears surely mythical in the modern age; even amongst his own kin, there are those who question whether any one elf, however gifted, could possibly have been responsible for such a lengthy and varied list of achievements and great deeds.

Such talent and passion combined with the near immortal lifespan of an elf could only end badly. Calisor’s mastery of everything to which he turned his hand made the charismatic young elf prideful, even by the standards of his kind. When he finally fell in love, it was the unmaking of him and his era.

Elinathora was daughter to a minor but respected noble, brought with her father to Therennia Adar’s court when he accepted his post as envoy to the elves. Her mother had died when she was young, and Elinathora had taken care of her father and family from that day forward. Strong-willed, fiercely independent and loyal, she was a remarkable woman in her own right, but her station in life had given her no expectation of marriage into nobility.

Calisor, however, was entranced by the young woman from the first moment he laid eyes on her in the court of the High King. He resolved that he must have her hand in marriage at any cost, and began a pursuit of the young woman that would be the downfall of him and the world he knew.

For her part, Elianthora was respectful, polite, but uninterested. Not only did she have her own affairs to attend to in looking after her father and siblings, but Elianthora had a healthy fear of the impact of committing to a life with an elf, let alone one as mighty as Calisor. Her mortal dread was to live with a husband who would not only drastically outstrip her in every way – physical and mental – but who would also live for several hundred lifetimes longer than she. Half-elf children tend to take far more of the elf aspect than the human, and the thought of children she would never see reach their full maturity, paired with a husband who would never age relative to her as she withered and grew old, filled her with horror.

Acquaintances of both begged Elianthora to reconsider, including her own father. Here was an opportunity to be wedded to the most radiant member of the most radiant race on Pannithor save the Celestians themselves. Her father implored her to think of the possible benefits to their own family, their city and their very people. The elves who came to see her were less romantic, confused by how this simple human woman could refuse the attentions of their greatest scion. Though not exactly cruel, they were baffled by what they saw as her temerity – even arrogance – at saying no. None could sway her, and nor could the overblown attentions of Calisor himself, who tried all manner of outlandish gifts and feats to impress the object of his desires. All was to no avail, and the greatest son of elvenkind slipped into a deep, morose depression.

The effect of Calisor’s upset was felt throughout Therennia Adar and the wider elven realm. His people had come to rely upon Calisor for so many things, not least the simple knowledge of his greatness and his steady hand at the tiller of so many duties. Eventually, rebuked formally by the High King for his inattentiveness to his responsibilities, Calisor cast down his symbols of office, wrapped himself in a simple traveller’s cloak and took to the glades surrounding the city to wander alone in misery.

Perhaps at this juncture, had he wandered a different way, or not driven away any who might have otherwise accompanied him, the history of the world might have been written very differently. This point in the tale is one where the tellings diverge as one might expect. The dwarfs write Calisor off as a sulky child, striding forth to pout at not getting his own way. The elves tell it as a heartbreaking apex point of the tragedy, the final breaking of Calisor, body and soul, from the anguish of his heartfelt and unrequited love. Men recount it with bitter cynicism – the first and best example of the flighty nature of elves, the hubris and arrogance with which they view the world and the hollow nature of their capability in the face of adversity. Regardless, each tale recounts what happened next with equal horror.

As he wandered, Calisor cursed the heavens, sometimes loudly and sometimes beneath his breath. He wandered in deliberate patterns, seeking to avoid contact with any other, though in truth none lived in Adar who any longer had patience to speak with him. It was therefore cruel fate, chance or perhaps something darker that saw the elf happened upon by Oskan, when he was in the very nadir of his misery.

Exactly what passed between them is unknown. Perhaps Calisor vented his woes to the young Celestian – after all, he was used to treating with the divine beings on a regular basis, and would have felt no sense of awe at the Celestian’s presence, nor any sense of shame in divulging his sorrows to him. Perhaps Oskan vented his own feelings of displeasure with his station among his peers, his unhappiness on Pannithor, his disdain for the noble races and the way they looked upon his kind. It is clear however that Oskan learned, one way or another, of the source of Calisor’s misery, and his solution for this was something which would echo down the ages – the Fenulian Mirror.

The exact nature of the Mirror is disputed by scholars. Some insist that it was a literal mirror, forged through arcane means from various artefacts but nonetheless identical to its mundane counterparts in basic operation, if vastly more lavish in appearance. Others argue that it was a mighty spell, the like of which has never been performed before or since, and that the complexities of it were such that it could only be described to lesser minds than Calisor’s as a mirror in a kind of simplified metaphor. Whatever the truth, and regardless of the version of the tale being told, certain basic factors remain the same. The Mirror was suggested to Calisor as a means to win the heart of Elinathora, if she would but gaze within its depths. To create it was an undertaking that would go beyond any magic previously attempted by any elf including Calisor himself, and would require many exotic and rare elements, but rarest of all, the glimmer of the Star of Heaven. This is a literal translation from every text detailing the event, and the wording remains the same in ancient Dwarfish, Elvish and Primovantian.

Oskan’s caveat – that Elinathora must be prevented from gazing into the mirror past the singing of a golden bird being heard from its depths – seems to be delivered as an afterthought, and this would appear to be no accident. Surely, by that point Calisor was too enraptured by the thought of his love being returned to notice the oddity of this detail, or to pay it too much heed. Why Oskan would mention it at all is another matter which baffles those who study the tale – perhaps some rule or customary practice among his kin, or perhaps simply a slip of the tongue motivated by his nobler self, acting in vain against him. Whatever the truth, it is unimportant in the context of the legend. Calisor strode forth from the glades that day with renewed purpose, and something of his old vigour returned to him. When he arrived at the Court of the High King and begged the use of a mighty fleet and massive resources for his quest, the High King gladly granted both, happy to see the elves’ brightest and best son returned to something of his old self. It was this concession that damned the elves in the hindsight of the dwarfen telling – had the King been more mindful, had he paid more attention to the gleam in Calisor’s eye, or questioned him more closely on the nature of his quest, maybe disaster might still have been averted. The elven telling is predictably more forgiving – the High King was under much pressure from many quarters in Calisor’s long absence, and his apparent return must have granted much relief.

At any rate, Calisor set forth on his quest, which was to last several years. He gathered the required materials from far and wide, taking each at great cost in resources and sometimes people. None dared question him, but by the time he declared his quest complete and secluded himself in his private chambers to commence work, the fleet he had taken was decimated and the coffers of the High King were substantially emptier. This was of no consequence to Calisor – he had what he needed, and the great work could begin. 

Legend tells that the world itself shuddered with paroxysms at each stage of the work. Mighty earthquakes shook the very foundations of Therennia Adar, the seas boiled over and flooded inland, and the skies darkened. Nothing could dissuade Calisor however, and eventually the Mirror was ready for its final piece. Aiming it at the Star of Heaven one fateful night, the Mirror captured the light from the star, trapping it, fusing with it, and drawing power from it to fuel its function.

Whether the light was necessary for the function Oskan had intimated is unclear. Some posit that the Celestian simply used his own powers of illusion to create the simple fantasy that would capture Elinathora’s heart, and that the true purpose of the device itself was the sundering of the Celestians all along. Certainly they enjoyed some special and particular link with the Star of Heaven, apparently drawing their power from it, or possibly even their very essences.

Whatever the truth, with the light captured, the Mirror was complete, and the next task which lay before Calisor was perhaps the hardest of all – getting Elinathora to gaze into its polished depths.

Once more he found himself frustrated, his wit, charm and wealth unable to cajole, persuade or bribe her into ascending his private tower to witness his new marvel. Elinathora had not changed one iota in her convictions, and in truth was disappointed. She, like all in Therennia Adar, had heard of the new lease of life in Calisor and had hoped that this signalled his final acceptance of her rejection, and perhaps even a new love in his life. Now he was again lavishing the same smothering affections upon her, and it was all she could do to remain polite.

But Calisor was not to be ignored. He pestered Elinathora, and her father. He harangued her friends, her maids and anyone else who might have any portion of her attention and affections. Eventually, after many long weeks of not being able to speak with a single person who would not entreat her to see Calisor one last time and marvel at his great works, Elinathora relented, presenting herself at his chambers to witness his creation and maybe regain her own life once more.

And thus, the inexorable course of history was set. Elinathora gazed upon the Mirror and saw images which melted her heart and turned her every thought towards love for Calisor. Visions came one after another – a life of wondrous and endless invention and adventure. A life lengthened many times over by Calisor’s attentions and ministrations, and a glorious, golden twilight to this magnificent life, lived out in a vast and beautiful castle raised by Calisor in her honour, perfected to her every wish in every last detail, and surrounded by the adoring multitudes of elves, humans and dwarfs, united in their love for her and devotion to her husband. She saw children, fine and strong, heroes of the world and loved by all. She saw her beloved father, happier than he had been since the last day her mother had been with them all, and living just as long as she. Every last detail quashed every last one of the convictions she had held against the union, and she reached out to grasp Calisor’s hand even as she remained transfixed by the tableau which played out before her unblinking eyes. Calisor grasped the hand eagerly, so enraptured by this final achievement of his heart’s most ardent desire that he failed to notice the singing of a bird, fine in golden plumage, until it was too late. 

The images in the Mirror darkened, taking on a different aspect than before. A marble tomb appeared, breathtaking in its stark beauty and bearing Elinathora’s name. Calisor noticed the bird, and began trying to drag Elinathora away from the mirror, Oskan’s warning loud in his memories. But the woman was planted as if in rock, fixated on the images which played before her, and he dared not exert force for fear of breaking her delicate human frame. Horror-struck, Calisor could only watch as the love so recently born in Elinathora’s heart for him withered and died to be replaced by horror as she witnessed the Mirror’s prediction of their union’s end.

In the images, an unkempt and dishevelled Calisor screamed at the sky as he beat his fists bloody on the unyielding marble of the tomb. A flash, and the scene changed to their bedchamber, flash, flash, flash, each one a new woman or women sharing their marital bed with him, none of them even close to her beauty or radiance, all discarded in short order as he sought some physical solace from his pain. Another flash, and their children appeared, wracked with torment at the duality within their very souls. Their eldest son, embittered by his mother’s loss, enraged by his father’s desecration of her memory with his string of lovers, took up arms against him. They met on a blood-drenched battlefield, face to face, and Calisor, old now and feebler than ever, was run through and then crucified. Even his own men cheered as he died, finally rid of their mad master.

After many minutes, as the jeers of his men at his final gasps of agony died to a murmur, Calisor became aware of the sound in the room beside him. Elinathora was screaming, the cry of the truly broken tumbling uninterrupted from her lips as the horror of what she had witnessed battered at her sanity. With a sudden movement, her balled fist lashed out, smashing the glass of the mirror and splintering it into a mass of shards which rained down around them. Calisor was reeling from all he had witnessed in its depths. The dead weight of Elinathora falling beside him brought him back to the reality of the room, to the lifeless corpse of his beloved, a shard of mirror buried deep in her heart, her hand resting atop it.

The eventual fate of Calisor is unrecorded, and for the purposes of the tale itself, unimportant. Though he had been the greatest of his kind, his hubris had brought about the worst consequences. Whether the act of capturing the light of the Star of Heaven itself caused it, or the smashing of the mirror by Elinathora in her rage, the outcome was the same – the Sundering of the Celestian race, destroying many outright and splitting many others in twain, their nobler aspects removed from their darker ones to create mirror image twins of hatred and love which would face one another in a conflict that would change the face of the world forever.

The Mirror itself is a different matter. The so-called ‘God Splinters’ are said to be fragments of the Mirror from its smashing. Oskan’s dark aspect himself is said to have plucked the very shard with which Elinathora had ended her life to use as his own weapon, steeped as it was in sorrow and the weight of a life taken by itself in despair, making it a powerful dark artefact indeed. With it, he ended the life of his nobler half, the first God Murder, imbuing the shard with more power still. It is said that he gathered several other fragments which would eventually be distributed among his Dark brothers and sisters before he was driven away. The remaining splinters were gathered and secreted away, though they still appear from time to time as amulets, charms, weapons and other artefacts. The genuineness of these artefacts is always difficult to prove – indeed, the existence of shards of the mirror itself is highly questionable and hotly debated among scholars. But the fact remains that some magical artefacts possess unimaginable powers from unknowable origins. 

Some describe it as the soul. Others as the spark of life. These, and a hundred other poetic descriptions of the primal element known as Magic, fail to fully capture the complex beauty and intricacy of the thing. Even elven language, with all of its subtlety and nuance, cannot fully capture the true depth of Magic.

Just as a smithy controls fire in his furnace, and a farmer manages the earth to cultivate his crop, so an experienced mage can exert their will upon magic to achieve all manner of things. Being the pure stuff of life, Magic is a powerful and unpredictable energy, and only those properly trained in its application, manipulation and use can even hope to properly control it.

It is a common belief that some special natural ‘talent’ for magic is required in order for this training to be given. Indeed, various traditions exist the world over in different societies, and even in different colleges or ‘factions’ within the same society, to choose those deemed ‘worthy’. In the Golden Horn, the Order of the Ardent Light takes apprentices only from noble families whose lineage can trace some connection back to Valandor himself. In Therennia Adar, only the first-born sons and daughters of noble houses are considered able to take on the mantle of mage. The truth is, with enough discipline, training and focus, many individuals can master the art of controlling magical energies, though the extent of their abilities will be bound by the limits of their endurance, their physical prowess and their mental capacity.

Thus it is that orcs and goblins have their crude magics, and those races in the alliance of nature may make use of arcane powers. Such usage is done in a less regimented and more ‘natural’ way than by men and elves - for orcs and goblins, the crude energy of their creation tends to cause a natural build up when many of them gather, and their shamans act almost as lightning rods for this energy, directing it as much by instinctual reaction as any form of planning. For the forces of nature, including the druidic and shamanic orders, the flow of magic is simply part of the natural balance of life, another thread to master the ebb and flow of, acting as a conduit rather than attempting anything so crude as control or direction.

Dragons too derive much of their power from magic, for how else could a biological creature conjure fire from its lungs or exert its will upon other living things merely with a gaze? As dragons age, their aptitude for these arts increases, meaning the older the dragon the more dangerous it becomes. It is for this reason the elves of Alandar bond with dragons when they are almost freshly hatched - it would be folly indeed even for one of these fabled dragon masters to attempt to exert their will over a fully mature dragon and expect to live.

Of course, darker forms of magic lurk in the hearts of all mortals, but foolish indeed are those who seek to pursue such paths. The art of Necromancy is more varied than the uneducated assume - some practitioners seek the departed soul of the subject and drag it back to its mortal shell. Others learn to split their own essence, transferring shards of their own soul to the shell of the departed. Still others steal the energy required from the living to puppet the corpses of the dead. Whatever the precise form of Necromancy practised, the focus and energy required mean that only the most talented and well-trained can hope to master the art, and this means that Necromancers tend to be singularly dangerous individuals. It is seldom that any mortal seeks dominion over the dead with noble motive, and indeed some of the greatest threats to the order of the world have come from practitioners of this dark art. From Mhorgoth the Faceless to Mortibris himself, powerful Necromancers have been a dread threat to the noble races.

The dwarfs tend to avoid magic - ingrained within their culture is a belief that only work done by the sweat of the brow and the strain of the sinew is honest. Their natural distaste for adopting any of the practices or customs of other races also feeds into this reluctance, and the legend of Calisor Fenulian is to them a cautionary tale of the excesses an individual is wont to pursue and the disasters that may arise from an over enthusiasm for the arcane arts. Nevertheless, like all mortals, they are physically able to harness the mystical energies of the world, though few actually do so. In dwarfs, with their particular affinity with the earth and the stone on which all of the world rests, this manifests itself in an incredibly esoteric way, which the dwarfs themselves refer to as being ‘stonewise’. Individuals so afflicted can be dangerous left unchecked – their talents can cause seismic shifts in the earth and rock of a hold – and they are rightly viewed with a mixture of suspicion, awe and fear by others in their society. Nevertheless, once taken in by the Order of Stone and taught to properly channel and control the power they possess, they become immeasurably useful parts of the dwarf arsenal. Theirs is the power to control the very earth itself, and they are taught to harness this by summoning Earth Elementals – terrifying semi-sentient constructs of earth and stone bound by magic and sent forth to smash apart the enemies of the dwarfs in battle.

Magic is simply a part of life on Pannithor, wherever one may wander. Such has been the scope of the magical conflicts between gods and mortal races, between gods and gods, that the world remains positively soaked in this most vital and volatile of elements.