Found Document: First Time Myth, Pivotal Features of Godtime

Unusually, this document doesn’t give any clues about its author or date or place of origin. It is written on a type of paper that was introduced to the Middle Sea Empire by the Kralorelan venture some time in Emperor Svalak’s reign – a woven mat of flattened reeds as reinforcement for the pulp of soft woods and scraps of linen deposited on it. The paper has aged quite a bit, its reddish brown approaching the tone of the ink, but the ink still reflects brightly at a certain angle to the source of illumination, quite a bit of which is needed to decipher the lettering.

A few Reconstruction spells have been attempted, and one of those gave us a glimpse at a reader – a dust-covered Zzabur-caste person holding it up amidst broken walls, then rolling it up and pushing it into the somewhat frayed sleeves of his robe. There was no indication of moon glow in the impression, but that may have been due to a Dying or Dead phase just as well as an indication that the reader held the scroll before the rise of the moon.

For all we know, that individual could have been the author, or the copyist of this scroll.

The fabric of Godtime wraps itself in a layer of spirals around its central Axis Mundi, the immutable Spike, and the myths we know and that we can explore create linear paths across this fabric, converging on events that pierce those surfaces, drawing everything close to that near the singularity of that event¹.

Such singularities are static, unchanging – our colleagues at Robcradle in Genert’s Wastes have observed the singularity of the Eternal Battle, a rare case of a moving rather than a multi-local such approach to a singularity. They are alike to the One World of Runes, but not exactly co-planar to that concept, and our perception of such pivotal singularities may be similar to our perception of the Cosmic Mountain itself².

Our Monomyth manages to map intersecting paths of myth onto discrete layers of Godtime, which we discern as different Hero Planes. Our colleagues collecting that Monomyth have identified a Green Age, something like a hyper-surface in myth which leads to a “time before”, a state of innocence. Yet all of our modeling agrees upon the first and second applications of Death – on Grandfather Mortal, as people are addressing our ancestor Malkion, and on the Evil Emperor which the evil empire of Gbaji identified with Yelm, as enough of a pivotal First Time that it changes the separation of body and intellect in an unprecedented way.

There are mythic paths which include a departure from Green Age Innocence entering a later Age – often the Golden Age, but Death specifically entering the Lesser Darkness cycle. Rather than defining the departure from the Green Age as the coming of the Golden Age, it may be more useful to think of these departures as Green Age Moments, as manifesting the singularity of such pivots. There may be earlier paths approaching such moments but not piercing that membrane, leading to a lesser premonition of the actual event, and there usually are many later paths which reinforce the primary transitional event, forcing those who travel that path to undergo the experience again.

There is a special potency in undergoing the primal, pivotal event, though. Exiting the pre-Golden Age through a Green Age Moment will imbue the quester with the special mark of the First Event, greatly magnifying the magic that can be drawn from the experience. This is fraught with consequences, though, as any subsequent approach of a path to this singularity, however carefully and distant, will pull the quester into that event with the full opposition of that original event, and added to that any future opposition out dealing with the consequences of that event.

A number of severe backlashes on expeditions have led some universities to retire heroquesters who have undergone such an event, limiting them to writing about that experience and giving the writings to other researchers to derive spells from that.

1. The Spike, or after its implosion the empty Void left behind in its place – while desperate sailors may have looked across it, seeing the opposite side of the Maelstrom rising higher and higher above them, no mortal or deity has ever claimed to enter the former volume of the Spike.
2. Which might indicate a good chance that further research into this perception will grant new insights leading to even greater applications of accessing mythical powers through carefully calibrated sorcery.