Ages of Creation

Before space, before information, before time, before a sense of before and after really as commonly understood with time, there was something. That something was existence, the very raw essence of existence, always has and always will exist. Arcano-cosmologists would like you to think that here existed only the Ethereal plane, the realm of ideas, of thought and spirit, and while we just don't know for sure... they're probably right. The Ethereal plane is a realm of no time, place, or meaning really, truly just raw magic. Magic, as a rule, is constantly in flux, and is changing and shifting, and the stuff of existence must change with it, so as a great deal of this rawness came to be, it took the form of matter and energy. These fundamental particles formed a recognizable quadrumvirate of creative elements, Water, Earth, Fire, and Air. The four elements bonded and crashed together to cause a great and sudden expansion of matter and energy, a Big Bang, if you will. As their violent meeting was causing a rapid explosion since all forces need their opposite so too did those elements implode, in unto themselves they created planes of existence raw and bonded with each other that would bind and support and provide a foundation for the miniscule marble of material (and now also time) that was the universe.
Somewhere hitherto insignificant in this universe, as stars come to cool and the orbiting planets that hold themselves in motion around them fall into patterns they will maintain for millions of years; such as one lonely scrap of Iron came to rest in a comfortable ellipsoidal route around a sun with no one to name it yet, and so it began its project to create life. Life is a planet’s way of recycling the matter on its surface, and as it stood in Qeltar’s first creation the surface was covered in magma, scorched rocks and ever showering meteors.
At the center of this world, was the spark of something special, something powerful. Arcano-cosmologists would later call it WorldFire for the way it manifested in the first draconic species of Qeltar, but it is more elusive than a simple plasma. Some would say it is a force, and entity, a god, a law of physics, a hand of creation, what is known is that it is the source of much, possibly all of the most powerful magical entities in Qeltar's existence. It has taken far more complicated forms since the days of the Fire Drakes hundreds of millions of years ago, influencing the magical world forever after, marking Qeltar in a unique place in the universe.
In the violent formative era of the Fire Drakes, the conflict between the most powerful of their kind left the world devoid of life, but with all the necessary ingredients to rebuild it once again. The graveyard of this paleolithic species cooled down after many millions years of cosmic formation, and later was replaced by an oceanic planet which combined just what was needed for life on a much smaller scale than the Fire Drakes. The microbial bacterial entity that replaced the Fire Drakes as the dominant life form spread across the surface of the underwater world, claiming nearly all other species of plants, animals, and all other living things and assimilating it into it's singular collective hivemind. The not-quite vanquished final surviving Drake of Fire from the previous age was awoken by this new colonizing force, and his immense size and overwhelming power immediately threatened the new hivemind. The microbial super-computer calculated the threat and assembled a weapon of the fallen greater Drake to do battle, and as the two creatures found they were evenly matched, the hivemind learned that the source of the Drake's power was it's own, that of WorldFire of the planet that birthed them both, so it used its skeletal form to leap from the surface of the oceanic world, sending both of them spinning off into the stars forever.
The world they left was remade, with great oceans but also massive continents of land, and a tolerable atmosphere to support new life, and whole lots of raw magical energy. The next race of dominant creatures to walk the land were somewhere squarely in between the two extremes of those that came previously, the Astral people. Proto-humans made of the magical forces of nature itself, nigh immortal and with an innate ability to control the essence of the world around them. They guided the formation of the natural world, and accelerated and manipulated natural selection, to create every mountain, every sparrow, every rushing river, every colony of insects and bacteria, every plain and valley. They held their own dominions, and continued to exercise their power for ages. Eventually, the Astrals began to look outward to the stars, and inward to their own mysterious origins. Being immortal, unable to reproduce, and few in number many of their kind considered themselves the chosen gods of their world. Between two extremes, their population split in their beliefs, one side in favor of self-empowerment and excess, the other in stagnation and restriction. The former became the Infernals, the latter the Celestials. They came to blows and ripped their world apart to destroy one another, and those caught in the middle collected their own power to drive the others out, and lock them behind a gate. This act turned the world inside out and protected the inside from the Angels and Devils outside in their own Astral planes. Those that survived had given up their power as Astrals to become mortal, and they became the first people, the first humans of Qeltar.