Chapter 5: The Fable
In the beginning, when the world was unbroken and time was but a languid stream, all things lived in harmony. The rivers murmured their secrets to the valleys, the forests sang lullabies to the wind, and the sky stretched wide, embracing the earth in its boundless blue arms. It was an age without discord, without stress, without sorrow—an age where peace wasn't just a concept.
It was law.
The beasts knew their place beneath the moon. The flowers opened only when called by morning. The mountains slept with their heads in the clouds, dreaming ancient dreams of stone and rain. Even death, when it came, arrived softly, like a hand closing tired eyes.
Nothing begged to remain.
Nothing feared becoming something else.
All things came.
All things left.
All things returned.
Then came Man.
A paradox given flesh, the first contradiction the world had ever known. To create, he must destroy; to love, he must hate. The gods beheld him with disdain, for he was neither beast nor divine, yet possessed the arrogance of both. The paradise that once was soon became a ruin of his own making, a fragile dream shattered beneath the weight of his ambition. And so, the gods and men parted ways—separate worlds, separate destinies.
But separation is not the same as peace, dear child.
A wall may divide two worlds, but it cannot keep longing from climbing over.
Until the day everything changed.
In this era of first men, one of them did the unthinkable—he fell in love with a god. She descended from the sun, her lips like fire upon his own, and together they wove a love that should never have been. It was a radiant, impossible thing—a fire too bright, yet so warm. When they embraced, the sky itself trembled, dawn and dusk colliding in hues never before seen.
For seven mornings, the sun rose too early.
For seven evenings, it refused to leave.
They were happy.
But the heavens did not rejoice.
They roared.
The gods, in their immutable wisdom, looked upon the lovers and saw only blasphemy. Their fury was swift, their judgment unrelenting. The stars fell from the firmament, the seas rose in sorrow, and fire rained upon the earth. Love, in its purest form, had dared to defy the balance of all things, and for such defiance, punishment was inevitable.
She was torn from his arms, cast into a prison of white rock and sealed.
Some say that white rock became the moon.
Some say the moon merely guards her.
I say, on nights when the world is quiet , you can still hear her singing from inside it.
His punishment.. was even more severe.
He—he was condemned beyond even the reach of oblivion.
Not to death, for that would have been mercy. No, his fate was far crueler. The gods flung him from the world of men, past the veil of time, and the boundaries of creation itself. He fell into a place where even the gods dared not tread—a realm untouched by the lesser deities who had inherited dominion over the world. He fell into the land of the Primordials, the architects of reality itself.
For the gods did not create everything.
They only inherited what was left behind.
Before the gods, there were the Primordials.
Before prayer, before judgment, before sin, before sorrow had a name, the Primordials shaped the bones of existence. They carved space from nothing. They gave silence its depth. They planted the first shadow beneath the prime light. They were not good. They were not evil. Such words are too small for things that watched stars being born and atoms breath.
The First Realm belonged to them.
Not heaven.
Not hell.
Not the world of men.
The place before places.
The wound before the body.
The breath before the scream.
And into that impossible land-
the man fell.
His suffering was not of body but of soul. His love was neither dead nor alive, forever just beyond his grasp, like a shadow receding from the touch of light. The echoes of her flame flickered in the spaces between moments, but he could never reach them. And so he faded.
The land rejected him, his mortal frame unsuited for a place beyond life and death. Cold, indifferent, eternal—it crushed him beneath its weight. He gasped for breath that would not come, his mind fraying against the edges of madness. He was an anomaly in a world that tolerated no imperfections, a fleeting thing in a realm that had seen the birth and death of universes.
The rivers there did not carry water.
They carried forgotten names.
The trees did not bear fruit.
They bore faces.
The sky had no sun, yet it burned with a dull purple ache, as though light itself had died there and left behind a bruise.
And beneath the soil, something ancient watched.
It watched how this man...this simple man ... did not break.
He crawled, then walked, then stumbled onward. He endured. And in his decades of torment, he reached the heart of the void.
There, waiting, was a being neither god nor demon. Hooded, unmoved by the rise and fall of empires, indifferent to the whims of time itself. And yet, it looked upon the man and saw something different. A fragile spark, a flickering light in the abyss. Something that should not have the will to continue—yet did.
For the first time, the First Realm witnessed something stranger than creation.
A mortal who refused to disappear.
The being reached out, pressed his trembling hand into the soil, and spoke words older than silence.
And the land changed.
Pebbles swirled, dancing on an unseen breeze. The air smelled different — honey and cabbage, sweet and sour, a contradiction that clung to the throat. The sunless sky cast a warm, familiar glow, though no light could be seen. The ground, once black and purple, now trembled with slivers of green pushing through the cracks —it was beautiful.
A place that was once desolate and cold now felt drenched in déjà vu from the world of men and beast.
Flowers opened with no sun to guide them.
Grass grew where no seed had been planted.
The rivers whispered in voices almost human.
And somewhere deep beneath the realm, something vast turned in its sleep.
For the first time in its inception, men could walk here.
But do not mistake this for kindness.
The First Realm did not welcome Man.
It learned him.
It studied the shape of his grief, the stubbornness of his breath, the terrible magic of his refusal to end. It tasted his sorrow and found it rich. It felt his longing and understood that mortal pain could change even eternal things.
And from that moment, the First Realm was never empty again.
And so, dear child... Because he endured, you will endure.
But do not mistake survival for mercy.
This place—the First Realm—is the beginning of all things. And when the end comes—and it will—it will be the last.
Here, forces beyond comprehension reside. Forces of beauty so profound your eyes will fill with tears. Forces so terrible that devils and demons dare not speak their names. Their power is vast. Their gaze, unblinking.
There are gardens where the flowers bloom only from buried lies.
There are lakes that show not your reflection, but the face you would have worn had joy never touched you.
There are beasts with golden antlers who speak in riddles, and if you answer wrong, they take not your life, but the memory of your mother's voice.
There are doors carved into mountains that open only for children to never be seen agian.
There are bells buried beneath the roots of dead trees, and when they ring, it is the last thing you ever hear.
The First Realm is not a place one enters.
It is a place one is judged by.
It watches without eyes.
It remembers without mercy.
It does not care if you are innocent.
Innocence is a word made by those who have not yet been tested.
The creatures here do not answer prayers.
They do not grant favors.
Yet among them, one stands apart.
The Everlasting.