The First Age

The First Age

(The Age of Peace)
Long ago the world was young and covered in all manner of plant and creature and germ but none that thought like men do. With youth comes strength and the hope of longevity...but also naivete. Elsewhere in the Cosmos other worlds were not so blessed to be alive birthing new things. There was a Darkness that had come to them and swallowed up their life. It spread across the Cosmos devouring all that it could. It would be easy now to call that Darkness “evil” and in the terms of men and elves perhaps it is. But in the vast, bleak, eternal terms of the Cosmos it was not evil; it simply...was. Perhaps it could be called chaotic. But what is the heart of a star if not chaotic? What is life unrestrained if not chaotic? Surely chaos is not “evil”. But I digress. These are questions for theologians and philosophers. I am a historian, and what happened next changed the course of the world forever. There are thinking powers in the Cosmos more ordered than the Darkness and they saw that it would devour all things in time if it were let to. But this tiny blue-green world was young and strong. There were no thinking creatures living on it to be corrupted by the Darkness. And so the Celestial powers in the Cosmos that sought to preserve order pooled their energy, bound up the Darkness, and hurled it deep into the center of the strong, young world. The ground grew up around it, snapped shut, entombed it. The surface of the world still bears the scar and so that range of mountains is still called the Arr (which means “scar” in the Elven tongue). The Celestials placed along the mountains of this prison world, this Voktegård, a race of guardians resistant to the Taint of the Darkness: The Blue-skinned Elves of old. And thus, the Age of Peace ended and the age of Elves began.