[crossfire] [Rebootworld] The true (hi)story

[Lalo Martins]

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 Core history of the new Crossfire world
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 The Tale of Nine Worlds
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With this story I am, in a way, taking the narrative easy way out.
While I want to make our world "believable", by focusing strongly on
the three pillars of internal consistency, detail, and depth; the
truth is that the existing Crossfire content has a lot of mish-mash
content that wouldn't fit in a strict framework without a lot of
effort, but at the same time are too good to discard carelessly.  So
this story allows for and explains those differences, and leaves
things more or less open-ended for future content developers, while
still providing a few ground rules and an over-arching theme and
meta-story.

It also justifies the name "Crossfire", which wasn't a requirement but
I think is nice ;-)

This history isn't common knowledge, but parts of it are, muddled with
myth, known to pretty much anyone of enough culture, at least as
legend.

Elves in general will know the whole of it.  Scornians will known
partial and conflicting legends, except for the great sages, scholars,
and high priests, who will tell it exactly as written below.  Navarish
know a different version, to be covered in another document.

I'm working on what distorted or completely made up versions most people 
believe in...

Khelens
=======

The story begins in a world now lost and all but forgotten, a world
ancient and powerful, where the boundary between science and magic was
ancient history.  Their single city was larger than their world, and
in every house there was a little box, inside which the whole city was
kept.  They traveled through the skies, for pleasure and curiosity, in
ships made of song and formula.

Its population numbered higher than grains of sand in the desert; yet,
although Khelens wasn't a large world as worlds go, their techno/magic
was so advanced that it provided more than enough space and food for
everyone.  In fact, over the millennia, the whole population had
converged into one single city, for convenience; and as their
techno/magic evolved, the city grew larger and larger, while at the
same time occupying less and less space on their world, until it
looked like little more than a bunch of gates.  The city wasn't
underground, nor high in the sky, nor was it outside the world like
the realm of our gods; it was right there, on the ground, like our own
cities, but folded upon itself many times over, in a way that our
science can't even begin to understand.

The gods that had created that world were still around.  They were
respected and revered as elders and precursors, and for, after all,
having created the world and its inhabitants; but they were no longer
beseeched for help and protection, because their followers had long
equaled their power, and then surpassed the power the gods had
originally.  Although it's not fair to say they had surpassed the
gods; as the gods, as the techno/magic evolved, began to make use of
it as well, until at some point they became citizens like any other,
save for their special status.

Khelens was not entirely free of trouble, for they had not abolished
crime or madness; on occasion, something bad would happen, but
response would be swift.  And sometimes, some of their
sorcerers/researchers would cause an accident or discover something
dangerous, maybe even kill many people in the process; but again,
their peers would rush in succor, and minimize the consequences.  Yes,
even bringing back the dead; if resurrecting the dead is within reach
of our modest magic, why would it be otherwise for the mighty
Khelentians?  Death in Khelens was purely an inconvenience, and their
plane of death, where spirits used to be sent in ages gone, had
already been annexed and converted into a functional part of their
society.

Like any other world known of, their world was the center of their
universe.  All that existed had been created by their gods or their
gods' ancestors, with the world in its center.  As the Khelentians
evolved, they explored and understood every last corner, every
alternative plane, until there was nothing else.

But one day, a group of scientists dared to speculate that maybe there
was, in fact, more.  According to their laws of physgicks, the
infinite possibilities of enquantum theory meant that their whole
universe was but a pocket of existence floating in the greater void of
nothingness, an enormous but tiny bubble of fact drifting through
absence.  And since their world had nothing new left to explore, this
theory gradually gained acceptance, until a project was started to
actually seek out other worlds.

The philosophers debate to this day whether the theory was in fact
right, or whether it was their belief that made it true.  The fact
remains that, by the time their project reached prototype stage, the
theory was true; and their probes did find evidence of other worlds.

First Contacts
==============

Now, obviously it's beyond me how the Khelentian techno/magic worked,
and how they navigated the nothingness, or even whether they did.  But
the tales say they did have some manner of choice in what worlds to
reach, and so they preferred worlds that were, like theirs, ancient,
reasoning that contact with younger civilizations would be less
interesting and possibly unfair.

So the world they encountered first was, indeed, about as old as their
own.  Its people had no word for it, for they didn't have the concept
of a world in their culture; the closest they did have referred not
only to the world, but the universe around it and all life in it.  So
their world is known to us simply as First World.  Its inhabitants
lived in almost complete harmony and peace with the world itself, in
glorious living cities; their peace disturbed only by their perennial
enemies, a second sentient race of fierce barbarians who lived to
hate, breed, and fight; some claim this race was created by the First
World gods only to give their children something to do.  You know the
people of this world as the First Ones, the Beautiful People, or
simply Elves; their counterparts are known as the Orcs.

For a long time, the Khelentians and Elves enjoyed each other's
company, and learned with one another.  But eventually, the
sorcerers/researchers grew restless, and went in search of another old
world.

What they found was hardly as peaceful as the First World.  It was a
cruel and harsh world, where one ascended mainly by eating others.  We
call it simply the Dragon World.  And yet, things went better than
would be expected; after the initial conflicts, the Dragons, who are
after all hungry for treasure and knowledge as well, decided it was
profitable to trade with the other two worlds, and some measure of
peace was reached.

The sorcerers/researches were wary, though, that it could have been
worse, and they could have reached a world with an hostile population;
by going for old worlds, they risked the chance of a hostile encounter
being beyond what they could handle.

So next they touched a younger world; and that was Gaea, the world of
our own ancestors.  It was, for their standards, a primitive world,
with fledgling science and with magic that was nowhere near as
powerful as in the other three.  On the other hand, we had gods that
were much more active and willing to intervene.

Our world was, then, at relative peace; just a little over a century
earlier, a great hero called Skud had conquered the whole world and
unified it into one single Empire.  By the Day of Contact, he was
already long dead, but his legacy lived on; the Empire was thriving,
and science was advancing much faster than ever before.

But the sorcerers/researchers weren't impressed.  So while some other
Khelentians did take an interest on us and our world, the
world-finding project itself progressed, once again setting their
mathemagics to older worlds.

So they located the next world, and stepped into it; and these
explorers were immediately destroyed, their techno/magic stolen, used
to reach Khelens itself, and utterly obliterate it.

The Fall
========

For as you may have heard in the temple, our own world started out of
the nothingness; a small number of Primal Gods arose from that
nothingness, and found each other, and loved or fought, producing more
Primal Gods and lesser beings and ruling over all there was; until a
group of Primal Gods, their children, and others banded together in an
alliance sworn to the greater good, and took on the others.  They were
victorious, and became the gods; and from the spoils of war they built
the world itself, and later created humanity.  The origins of Khelens
were almost identical, although the details differ, especially the
traits of their gods and Primal Gods.  And though the religion of the
Elves is a secret to all but the initiated, they did recognize that
the story was mostly similar; the same on the dragon world, except in
their case, one single god emerged victorious, after eating Primal
Gods and gods alike.

But in this one case, things went differently.  Wrong.

In this case, the Primal Gods had already created a world and some
life.  And the group of proto-gods that banded together was a group
that believed, essentially, that ultimate beauty and truth was the
primordial nothingness, and the Primal Gods and their creation were an
abomination.  After an arduous war, those nihilists won; they devoured
the Primal Gods, becoming even more powerful than them, and devoured
the world itself, being left only with themselves in the nothingness
they so much loved.  And so they slept, satisfied, for æons.

Until one day, some bratty invaders from Khelens stepped into the
place their world was supposed to be, reveling to them that somewhere
in the nothingness, whole other worlds existed.  They found this
revelation to be hurtful and an abomination, and made a vow to put an
end to it.

So after devouring Khelens, its world, and its gods, they moved onto
the Three Worlds.

We wanted to resist, but in our primitive state, we were unable to
even fully comprehend the nature of the threat.

The Dragons responded the only way they knew; with violence.  And some
contend that it may have even been the correct response, but with
insufficient preparedness.  For even, for the first time in their long
history, fighting all together as allies, led by their dragon-god and
his court of demigods, they had no chance.

And the Elves, with their advanced knowledge and their keenly sharp
martial skill, immediately understood the odds, and despaired.

The Escape
==========

But all wasn't lost.  The few remaining Khelentians — the ones who had
been in one of the Three Worlds when Khelens fell — seeked out our
gods and outlined a plan.

And so the gods and Khelentians took a city from our Empire, and the
surrounding areas; a minor city, that hadn't yet been targeted by the
invaders, but a city with a long, proud history, for it was the
birthplace of the great Skud.  And likewise, the elven gods took some
of their followers, and same with the dragon world.  And the three
pantheons together, aided by Khelentian techry, built a whole new
world, far away where the Others would take a long time to find.

They also sealed off the five worlds the Anti-Gods knew about behind a
barrier; while the techno/magic says nothing is impossible, in theory
it should take thousands of years for them to actually beach it.

However, they can reach beyond it.  Just like our gods can hear our
prayers even when in their houses beyond the world, so can the Others
from many worlds away.  And they quickly discovered that; they'll
extend their tendrils into a new world, and slowly influence some of
its people, until they become followers of the Anti-Gods; and as the
number and power of these followers grows, the barrier weakens... or
maybe it is that the world is pulled inside the barriers... until they
are able to claim it whole.

But we knew nothing of this.  For many centuries, we lived in our New
World, learning to coexist and moving on with our lives.  And this
story gradually became legend and then myth.

Until, a little over a hundred years ago, we made contact with the
Dwarves.  Apparently, they had been taken to New World quite a bit
before that, and had been living in secret, underground, wary of
contacting the noisy, absurdly tall surface dwellers.

Not long after that, arrived Navar; an entire kingdom, taken from a
world of science beyond ours but almost no magic, a world of humans
identical to us and yet such a strange world; with their miserable
peasants and rich noblemen, with their castles and knights, their
rich, fortified, yet tiny city, and their strange one-god religion.

And only a few years ago, the half-breeds arrived, from a world that,
by the looks of them, must have been interesting; the Serpentmen, the
fox-like Fendrakis, the Mewmet cat-people, and the Werewolves.

Reaction
========

But now, the high priests and archmages finally got news from the
gods.  As it turns out, we're not here only to escape and survive.  As
it has been revealed to us, we're brought here to grow and become
stronger; to gain power, until one day we're able to take on the
Anti-Gods themselves.  This day isn't today and it isn't tomorrow, but
it will come.

best,
                                               Lalo Martins
-- 
      So many of our dreams at first seem impossible,
       then they seem improbable, and then, when we
       summon the will, they soon become inevitable.
                           -----
                  http://lalomartins.info/
GNU: never give up freedom              http://www.gnu.org/