Abyrinth

So, you wish to hear another story eh? Hmm, let's see… No… No… Ah! I know…   Millenia ago, men lived on a great sphere. This sphere was tethered to another, greater sphere, which blazed with uncountable fires, and the two spheres spin around each other. This realm had two things, day and night, where one part of the world was shrouded in total darkness, and the other, in total light. Their sphere was twisted, and parts of it got more light than others during special times, creating times of life, death, decay, and renewal.   Men used magic to tell stories at great fires to stave off the total darkness, built great dwellings to hide themselves away from the ripping talons of the rampant cold, or scorching heat, and struggled in grand and noble conflicts, over realms and ideals, like freedom and life. They created monolithic towers that seemed to hang from the sky, great moving constructs to move them to places in mere minutes, could heal a person at the brink of death. Even the great dome of sky could not hold them back from the outside realms. They visited other great, tethered spheres in the sky with magic creatures, seeing the spheres through the creature’s eyes as if through pools of clear water. They could go to the bottoms of great bodies of water, so deep as if to crush a man, and even that was not closed to them. Man had dominion over the entire earth, holding sway over disease, weather, battle, and the creatures of the world.   But their magic could not hold away the natural cycle. The magic left them in the day of the Chrysalis. They found great magic coming from center of their realms, the Chrysalis. The great kingdoms in which they inhabited ran to find the magic, each with their own end. The kings found the energy, at the core, but their greed and struggle between each other brought ruin upon them all.   The whole realm shook, its strength diminished, and the great waters of the world, massive lakes and rivers, poured into the holes made by the kingdoms, and the fiery middle of the world was extinguished. The Chrysalis, shaken and revealed, ripped the world apart. The Chrysalis became the Rift, the source of heat, life, and magic that it is today. The world slowly split, great lengths separating the realms as time went on, forced by the great water and the new tethers of the Rift, pushing and pulling the islands in, until it found balance. The guardian sphere of the olden world, called Luma, crashed into the broken ruins, and it broke upon the world. The water the realm used to have was burned away into air, and what water was left froze in the massive caverns and formed the lower islands and shell of the realm. The air spread about, forming the voluminous clouds that float through the realms and Aerie. Great quakes occurred, the tethers between the rift and the pieces of the realms weakening or anchoring in different places. The realms settled, and time passed in peace, allowing the realm to become new once more. The cycle of life, death, decay, and renewal repeated, and realms continued to shatter and reform. The great clouds, what was left of the giant bodies of water, protect us from the deadliest rays of the Rift’s magic. The gas giants froze and melted in cycle, a shifting crystal cocoon around the Rift, bringing about the day and the night cycles, and what was left rested in lower frozen shells, or pooled in the new caverns in the layers of the broken world-shell. But men disappeared from the world while it was formed…   The realms were formless, invaded by the warped creatures that were changed by the Rift’s magic, and untouched by me. Soon, men returned, alien to the new realm. They remembered their technology, and the old world that they loved, but knew nothing of the new world that had become theirs. They used their magic for a time, whatever they had left, but the Rift’s new magic weakened their own. Time passed, and men separated, looking for new lands and new ways of life, but the magic began to change them all, the plants, the animals, and men.   Nothing is known of the other spheres, aside from the now dead Luma, as the breath of the Rift diminishes past the ice shells, and nothing can go father than those places.   Nevertheless, I digress. The stories it holds are like none you have every heard tell before.