In the beginning there was the One Creator. Such was his power that all he spoke and thought was Truth. When first he spoke, he made a place of glory and a throne from which he could sit and view all that was. This place he named Heaven and his throne was called Order. The One spoke of a blue orb that rested on the arm of his throne. This orb he named Temporance, and to it was given the power to control the flow of time.
The Time of Angels
It was now that the One began to speak of new creations. To each one he created, he gave a unique name and the twin gifts of life and free will. Each creation was created differently, but to the whole he gave the name Angels. These angels were divided into 21 precepts and a single angel was appointed to be the head of each precept.
Each Angel was made to serve the One and to serve the creations that would come after. For the first time other voices were heard as they began to sing and praise the One.
Lugus- Angel of Light (Sun)
Sirona- Angel of Wisdom (Spirit)
Bhall- Angel of Fire (Fire)
Nantosuelta- Angel of Faith (Enchantment)
Sucellus- Angel of Growth (Life)
Amathaon- Angel of Fertility (Creation)
Junil- Angel of Justice (Law)
Arawn- Angel of Death (Death)
Oghma- Angel of Knowledge (Metamagic)
Danalin- Angel of the Water (Water)
Dagda- Angel of Balance (Force)
Kilmorph- Angel of the Earth (Earth)
Cernunnos- Angel of Nature (Nature)
Tali- Angel of the Air (Air)
Camulos- Angel of Peace (Chaos)
Aeron- Angel of Strength (Body)
Ceridwen- Angel of the Stars (Dimensional)
Mammon- Angel of Foresight (Mind)
Esus- Angel of Trust (Shadow)
Mulcarn- Angel of Ice (Winter)
Agares- Angel of Hope (Entropy)
The Birth of Man
Heaven was full of many wonders which the angels spent centuries studying and praising. When the One felt them ready, he commanded them to take flight outside the boundaries, and to fill the vacuum with creations that mirror those of Heaven. To them he gave the power of creation. So did the countless angels set off in every direction, creating as it pleased them to create a host of worlds true and good that would serve the One.
When the creation was done there was a countless array of worlds and a nearly endless variety of life upon them. All of it served the One. Seeing this work as good, the One took back the power of creation from the angels.
The Fall of Agares
Unknown to the other angels, and some say even to the One himself, Agares was not willing to lose the power of creation. Knowing he could not hope to keep the power and that he would be left only with the power to manipulate what was already existing, he hatched a plan. Using the power of creation, while he had it, he created infinite plains of raw elements, air, earth, fire, water, life and death. At the center of these infinite reaches, he placed gems of each of these elements which he had secreted out of heaven itself. When the power of creation was lost to him, he still had enough matter and energy that he could go on creating until the end of time.
Once the power of creation was taken from him, Agares continued creating with his infinite planes of elements. He spun entire worlds not in the fashion of heaven but as he desired. The peoples of these worlds were not told of other angels or the One, and Agares commanded they worship him alone.
The other angels took notice of this. Agares claimed that it was cruel to take the power of creation away from them, and that the One was jealous that their creations had outshone heaven itself. Six angels sided with Agares as they were eager to regain the power of creation, and he showed them his infinite plains and how to use them to create. These angels were Camulos, Aeron, Ceridwen, Mammon, Esus and Mulcarn.
It was then that the One intervened. Seeing Agares's blasphemy he sought to remove it from all of creation, but by this point Agares's taint had spread through creation; nothing existed that would still exist if he removed the evil from it. So pervasive was Agares's corruption, that if the One entered creation, it would be destroyed by his holiness. Unwilling to destroy creation, the One condemned all the Angels out of Heaven, to live among creation until the day he returns to separate the good from the evil. The One tasked the angels still loyal to him with protecting creation and guiding it toward enlightenment until the day he returned.
Those angels that followed Agares opposed the One's decree and took up arms against the angels loyal to him. From this point on the angels that fell were known as evil by men, those that opposed them and were charged with protecting mankind were known as good and the 7 tasked with maintaining the functions of creations besides man were known as the angels of neutrality.
After throwing all of the angels from Heaven the One sundered the path between Heaven and Creation so that none but he could pass between them.
The First Age--The Age of Dragons
Those days following the fall of the angels were hard upon mortals. The wars between the angels were fought across the faces of the worlds while men and other races huddled in caves, fearful of the power being unleashed around them. It was during these days that the dragons were born, mighty creatures empowered by the angels to fight in their battles alongside them.
Seeing the devastation they were wrecking on the lands, and that they would have nothing to show but bloody battlefields when the One returned Dagda commanded the fighting to stop. With the aid of Arawn, Kilmorph and Oghma he threatened to fight against whoever acted aggressively in the conflict. Dagda had enough angels that agreed with him that the others knew it was pointless to fight him. They agreed that certain restrictions should be placed on the conflict if the lives they created were to survive through it at all. As a symbol of this alliance a weapon of great power was made, the Godslayer, a weapon with the power to slay an angel, and the weapon was given over to the most powerful of human men, a warrior named Finner. This was a power that none of the angels had on their own.
The days of the Age of Dragons were days of huge supernatural battles, powerful storms, earthquakes and volcanoes. Its heroes were brave men without the benefit or magic or knowledge, who were little more than savages trying to survive in a world they didn’t understand and where death came even to the strong and swift.
The Second Age--The Age of Magic
The war still continued, but more subtly than before. With the war not directly on the worlds, men and other intelligent races were able to build and establish cities, begin trade, and learn. It was during these days that the angels began to share their gifts with the races of the land. For the first time, healers and druids began to appear. Each of the angels began to teach their followers in different ways, but the most powerful of these teachings came from Ceridwen; she sought to teach men the powers of the angels themselves, and the men called it magic.
Magic is chaos. It is the breaking of the rules put in place when the worlds were created. The angels believed they had the right to change the rules of the planes because they had created them, and saw it as a horrible corruption that Ceridwen was teaching the men to do this.
In these days there was no good magic, only goodly priests and very powerful evil wizards. There is only so much magic on a plane and the men did not have the angels' ability to reach out to separate planes for their power. This wasn’t much of a problem because the magic of the plane was enough to power the relatively few wizards that Ceridwen had taught to channel it. But as more wizards learned to channel magic, it became harder for any individual wizard to cast the more powerful spells.
While the amount of wizards were few, these were the days of the most powerful of wizards ever to exist. They were evil and created many evil artifacts, some of which still exist to this age. Fire was a holy weapon in these days, and the goodly man's only defense against the unholy power of magic. Although it was rare for a wizard to fall, when they did it was almost always to the flames of the righteous.
The days of the Age of Magic were days of relatively peaceful times but always with strong undercurrents of superstition and fear. Spells could destroy cities or swallow seas, and magical weapons could make a farmers son into the most powerful of heroes, but it always had a cost.
The Third Age--The Age of Ice
There were three events that occurred almost simultaneously and marked the end of the Age of Magic. The events were so catastrophic that the progress made in the Age of Magic was nearly forgotten, and it was the closest Creation has come to destruction since Dagda forced the other angels to make their pact.
It began with the preparation of Mulcarn to break the Compact and enter the worlds again. The angels of good had decided that they would each be responsible for watching one of the angels of evil and it was the angel of fire’s (Bhall’s) responsibility to be watching the evil angel of winter. But Bhall was suffering from the persistent temptations of Agares himself. When Bhall gave into Agares’s temptations, she threw off the order of the One and choose instead the chaos of Agares. On this day fire turned against men and rained from the sky on thousands of worlds. Immediately the sorcerers who had feared the flames found them easier to control than any other element and the flames became the sorcerers' most powerful weapon.
At this same time one of Ceridwen’s most powerful sorcerers, a man named Kyorlin, turned from his loyalties as well. Tired of the evil that surrounded him, he found some soft spot in his heart that Nantosuelta gently tended to. At first broken to sorrow for his past actions, he was quickly moved to righteous anger. He prayed and preached for all those who had also fallen to evil to turn away from it, and when that failed he used the power of his sorcery against them. This was the first time magic had been used by men for good. The angels of good were pleased by the battles Kyorlin fought and won in their name, and the many converts that followed him instead of Ceridwen. They blessed him and deemed that men should have the power of magic and Nantosuelta was selected to guide men in it.
As soon as Bhall fell, Mulcarn, who had been waiting for that moment, moved into the world. Sucellus went to stop him and the two battled on the tundra of a forgotten world for days. Sucellus was beaten and since Mulcarn couldn’t kill him he broke Sucellus into 7 parts and scattered him throughout all of Creation. With the angel of nature gone, and the angel of winter in the worlds and flush from his victory, an Ice Age set in across Creation.
The Ice Age had a wide impact but lasted only a few hundred years. Nantosuelta gathered the bodies of Sucellus that Mulcarn had spread across creation except for the one that Mulcarn kept himself, the Heart of Sucellus. This age came to an end the day Kyorlin appeared in Mulcarn’s earthly throne room, having traveled across half-a-dozen ice covered worlds to get there. Kyorlin was by this point nearly 450 years old and his magic, the result of both the direct teachings of Ceridwen and Nantosuelta, was said to be more powerful than any other mortal has ever known. He was there to do what a god a failed to do, kill Mulcarn, and when he announced it the entire plane echoed with Mulcarn's laughter, laughter that ended when Mulcarn noticed the Godslayer hanging at Kyorlin’s side.
Mulcarn was killed, and Kyorlin gave the Heart of Sucellus over to Nantosuelta who put Sucellus back together and restored the broken god. Once again, nature bloomed and the ice receded, but Sucellus was changed from the event; during the time his body was torn apart his spirit walked Arawn’s land of the dead with the mortal departed spirits. When Sucellus returned he brought with him the powers of Nature and Death as well.
The days of the Age of Ice were days of chaos and constantly changing conditions. The twin cataclysms of raining fire and the sudden ice age were too much for many civilizations to bear. Life on entire planes was extinguished while others had to drastically change their lifestyle to survive. Dwarves and Elves alike retreated far underground to escape the chill of the surface and the battles of the Underdark began during this age. Then, at the end of this Age, the events leading up to Kyorlin’s battle with Mulcarn, made for the best of legends.
The Fourth Age--The Age of Rebirth
When the ice receded, life once again returned to areas that had left vacant. Man was forced to rebuild again but did so a bit stronger, and a bit more knowledgeable, than he had been before. There were more sorcerers than there had ever been, but that wasn’t to say they were common. Because of this, any individual sorcerers power didn’t compare to the legendary powers of the sorcerers of the Age of Magic. The elves suffered a split, and although most have returned to the sunlit surface some made a pact with darker forces and opted stay in their deep homes.
It is now the beginning of the Age of Rebirth. The Compact of Dagda has broken into two factions: one dedicated to Dagda and another dedicated to one of his lieutenants, an angel known as Cass+C706iel who argues that angels should follow the example of the One and turn the backs on Creation and allow it to succeed or falter on its own, not as part of their schemes.
Only in retrospect will the point that marks the move into the next age be known. It is suspected that the next age will be known as the Age of Enlightenment, and it will be marked by a dramatic polarization of good and evil, law and chaos which will be followed by the return of the One and the judgment that ends Creation. Some ages predict that that Age of Enlightenment is already upon us and point to the nearly fanatical discipline imposed by the Order as evidence, a fanatical devotion so intolerant of infractions it is beginning to be difficult to distinguish it from the planes' most evil dictatorships.
Evil cults seem to be taking root in even the most peaceful of farmland villages. Adventurers are sorely pressed to keep up with the activity as new creatures are spawned and ancient creatures are awakened to terrorize the land. In the shadows it is whispered that the Godslayer may not be capable of killing a god forever and Mulcarn may return; sages fear that, like Sucellus, he may return more powerful than he left. Other rumors speak that a group of men have found the gems at the center of the Elemental planes that Agares stole so long ago. They say the Gems of Death, Water and Air all are being held by mortal men, now with as much power as the gods themselves.
It is said the outer planes mirror this activity, the long dormant war of belief on the planes has taken on new urgency, every planar border city taken is celebrated as if those commanding the war know the battle is almost done. Man has proven that he does not need the angels to survive, his growing maturity is removing the innocence that protected him long ago.
