This is a tale brough from our far ancestors. Before any kingdoms or strife.

In those immemorial times, there was a great tree, Alcorn. It stood alone in the emptiness of the universe. For an eternity, the immaterial plane was nothing but incandescent light until one day, a single seed grew the great tree’s branch. It plunged toward the ground and on impact grew into a lively dancing flame. The flames danced around the tree merily and explored the vast emptiness.

The flame was Life and she named herself Fey. As she frolicked in her fiery dress, life spread across existence. It spread so much that every nook and crannies of existence became engulfed by its creation and it could grow no further.

Chagrined that life would come to a halt, Fey approached Alcorn and begged for it to allow more life to be created.

Alcorn asked her if that was truly her heart's desire.

Fey agreed, and so another seed sprouted and fell to the ground. A miasma spread from it which slowly extinguished life.

Fey felt betrayed, but for every life that died, a new one could take its place.

She felt respect for this new being which allowed her to create more, despite destroying what she had created. She introduced herself and it did the same. It was death and he named himself Solomon.

A balance was struck and the perpetual cycle continued, but it felt incomplete. It had no movement. Life stood still only to wait until it was extinguished from existence.

A third seed sprouted and from it two beings emerged and approached life and death. They introduced themselves as love and named themselves Meiriem. They brought life together allowing a movement, but inevitably life became stagnant once again when all of it was brought together.

Frustrated Meiriem approached Alcorn and asked to make their action meaningful and so it once again sprouted a seed.

Immediately it started ripping apart life and aggressively threw them far and wide. It never stopped, constantly splitting what had once been a whole. It only told the others its name as it travelled from one bunch of life to another. She was Scorn. She was hate.

The world now flowed in a cycle of life, union, separation and death. The pattern repeated itself eternally in this order like the flow of water.

To Alcorn, this pattern was no different from the incandescent void. To keep the pattern of change, yet another seed fell from its branches. As soon as it hit the ground it started rolling in all directions. It bumped into life, death, love and hate indiscriminately. It introduced itself as Diid, he was Chaos.

Diid was so effective in the unexpected that nothing could happen properly. The patterns had not only been broken, but completely thrown into disarray, and so Alcorn created one final seed.

She was Seeir, the one who brings order. She reined in Diid yet permitted the world to move within a functioning ecosystem.

It is then that memorial time began. The infinite consistency that had made up the universe up until then had been broken and life now could flourish.

The beings that made this possible came to call themselves gods. They would use leaves from Alcorn to create further gods to direct new aspects to their creation. In time, an infinite amount of gods came to be. They started shaping life in their image and to protect it, they all created beings they could call kin. These kins came to be known as mann and were tasked to maintain the balance between the different aspects of the universe.

But it was not to stay. The First War occured and tore the immaterium apart. Gods pitted their kin against other gods and the world fell into a pandemonium that risked extinguishing the entirety of existence.

Countless gods came and went from existence, and their kins did as much. The war raged on until it came to a standstill. The six original gods met under Alcorn to discuss how to reestablish a balance.

They came to the conclusion that one of them had to withdraw from the world for balance to once more reign. Diid created an uneven dice upon which their fate would be cast. Each of the 6 sides represented one of them.

The dice rolled, but only stood on its edge. A collective realisation came to them. The only one who had not been represented on the dice was Alcorn himself.

This one accepted his fate and withdrew. As it's root withered, the immaterial plane it had supported collapsed. God, mann and the rest of creation fell to the material plane. In doing so, gods lost much of their insight and influence and were confined to physical form. Alcorn tasked the gods to care for mann who had suffered greatly in their war.

As a parting gift, Alcorn created Evergreen, a great oak tree, which allowed mann to commune with gods, no matter the distance.

It forever connected the fate of mann and gods, for if a god failed to commune with its kins, it would be a god no more.

Over the centuries, manns and gods spread far and wide from Evergreen.

They intermingled and created kins of impure blood who, despite being of gods appearances, no longer bare their attributes. Few of these pure kins still are in existence today. They live in far and isolated places.

Most gods rescinded from an active role in the world, believing mann to be deserving of self determination, but others thought differently who decided to guide man directly.Such was the case for the goddess of order Seeir who created a Theocracy where she reigned supreme.

This splintered religious fervour. While gods walk among us, they are far from omnipotent. Churches were established by them to protect the balance, but over time churches had developed minds of their own. Although an order had to be approved by its god and given a miracle to be considered official, the continent was far and wide, a god, especially a major one like Meiriem, relied on its bishops to enact their commandments. They, in the end, decided what offset the balance.