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The Bleeding Codex Behind A Mockery Of Peace
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A Vein of the Archive
Eras
Crumbling ages, raw wounds, and earnest vows abandoned.
Showing 5 Eras entries
The First Era - Raw and Alive
In the beginning, all languished without definitive form or purpose; the raging cosmos was only impact and impetus, intense heat and bitter cold, blinding light and crushing blackness. Far-flung stars ranged farther still; planets collided and crumbled on their heels, and the reaches of space flowed with rivers of infantile creation. All was as new, for there was yet no old, and nothing might have retained shape and become long-standing within the clash and tumble of existence. Yet that which seethes must calm, and it became so. Moons fell into stride with the behemoths nearest them, and woven constellations affixed themselves glittering upon the void between. Gases and vapors blossomed, chain-linked smears of fog upon glass against darkness and distance without end. Storms of light to blind fledgling suns seared and branded the deep, only to collapse upon themselves and welcome the shadow once more. From within this primordial alignment arose Time, groggy and curious. Long had he been present in the workings of the universe, yet he had been as an unformed thought. Now he had become formed; awareness struck him, jarring and bright, stirring him to inquiry. This he understood—he was a force, a necessary action belonging to a broader function, his role pivotal to the continuance of all. That which began and ended passed through him, and so his domain spanned the potential of the infinite. He was not merely what had happened and what would happen; he was also what could happen and may yet be. Realizing this, Time wondered what more he might become. At great length he spent himself toward this end, basking in reflection and outward observation. He was, and he knew, and this mattered. He studied the universe around him, working his will upon that which was his to claim. His passage inspired change. Within him the heat of smashed planets ebbed, rock wore to dust, and constellations surrendered themselves to shadowed tapestry. Within him fresh stars flared into being, planets embraced to form arrangement and spin onward, and the opportunity for something new was granted. Then, something new. Another being beyond Time developed awareness, sharply and suddenly: she who was Nature, earth and water, land and ocean across the length of his domain. Her presence beside him proved warm and gentle, a guiding light by which to grow. Together they moved, and the universe flourished with creativity and grace. With wind and weight did she who was Nature lend shape to many worlds. She sculpted high mountains and low valleys, carved and threaded with rivers and streams, teeming with sweet-water lakes and salted oceans. With glad will she brought forth forests and meadows, grasses and flowers, fruits and vegetables and grain, to each of these places they passed. Life bloomed in their wake, simple and small: fish and birds, spiders and insects, snakes and mice, wolves and deer, lions and gazelle, hunters and hunted sharing many plains scattered between the stars. Together the pair of forces reveled in their work, bringing greater change than Time ever might have alone. This shared experience, this inclusion of so much belonging to lowly examination, led him to ponder change greater yet. Time began to imagine a state beneath, and beyond, the all-encompassing. Something lesser in scope, limited in bearing yet tangible enough to know his domain from a fresh perspective. Long he dwelled on this, and slowly did he move to venture beyond the conceptual; with patience and care, Time created a physical form—an embodiment of himself, will made flesh. His form championed practicality, borrowing traits and features from the life Nature had sponsored. He had eyes to see and ears to hear, arms to climb and legs to run. He was made to experience all which might be felt beneath his domain, and meant to endure it. He had been built in an image, and even Time himself did not fully understand his inspiration. She who was Nature observed his labors and fashioned her own form, serving as much through contrast as complement. She knew the way of Time—the long-faced cold of space, the raging black-heat cores of cracked planets, the grim certainty to snuff stars from the heavens. She would not be as he was. Together, they moved into a new way of being—eternal concepts rendered man and woman. These first steps marked seismic change. As soon as they had taken them, the universe gave them a resounding reply. More concepts reared to awareness, as they had so long ago. There was Day, he who was the light. There was Night, she who was the dark. There was Hunger, he who was of the beast and its need. There was Life, she who remained the barreling force within Time’s domain. Time. Nature. Day. Night. Hunger. Life. At the direction of the first, these newly-woken concepts gave eventual shape to physical embodiments of themselves. Time gathered them together, bringing them to the planet he found most pleasing amongst the nearby stars. This gathering he thought of as family, and this place he thought of as home.
Read entryThe Second Era - Hail the Volsigne
With fresh faces and minds, Time and his family experienced as they never quite had. Sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, basic senses hosting a world of discovery beyond the distant and separate they had known. For ages they did nothing, and everything; they ate berries and honey and bark, embraced trees and rocks, swam in rivers and streams, and danced in the mud beneath pelting rain. They made merry noise, and called it laughter; they wondered, and built language to grant voice to question. Time spoke with them of that which they had been, and of that which they might become. He declared their family to be Volsigne—the strong and the bound. There were six Volsigne, six eternal concepts whose will had been made flesh, and next they gave to themselves names. Time, the oldest of them, became Vol Cyx; him of the towering stature, bronze skin, dark hair, and eyes of molten gold. Nature became Vol Lea; her of the pale skin, earthen hair, and eyes of widest ocean. Day became Vol Aro; him of the tanned skin, golden hair, and eyes like eager stars. Night became Vol Ara; her of the dark skin, dark hair, and eyes of obsidian. Hunger became Vol Sar; him of the brown skin, dark hair, and eyes of starved amber. Life became Vol Noa; her of the palest skin, palest hair, and eyes of palest purple. The Volsigne remained fascinated with each other. Here were beings of comparable scope, long-dormant and unfeeling toward the granular functions of existence, all arriving at awareness in relative harmony. After due consideration, they attributed this collective awakening to Cyx. He had been first to rise, and it was decided his evolution had begun their own. Having built bodies and language, Cyx was able to ask his family if they too shared his ambition—his need for change, for more, for something other than. His quest to understand, and develop, and bring forth the new. His family reciprocated the desire, though none felt so passionately as him. They looked to Cyx for guidance, and he led them. Toward what end he knew not, only to move and see what came. It had been so since the moment he had first garnered awareness and experienced the forward pulling of the self. Together they roamed their chosen and cultivated world. By Aro’s light they granted names to Lea’s features and Sar’s beasts, and within Ara’s darkness they mapped the stars and planets around their home. In lowest valleys they refined mathematics, and upon highest mountains they laid foundations of philosophy. Over the seas they studied the broader universe, speculating on concepts like themselves who had not yet, and might not ever, dawn upon awareness as they had. During these ages of exploration more than ever, the Volsigne learned that to be immortal does not mean to be fixed in place. Noa, ever pale and gentle, was no longer the same as she had once been. She had become fragile and withdrawn, her beaming smile instead flickering in tremors as a fell darkness gathered in her purple gaze. She came to register what Cyx had long known: while the Volsigne themselves must remain eternal, the world must not. Time must slash across all, carving a jagged will—Lea’s bounty of forests must wither and rot, while Sar’s wandering beasts of land, ocean, and sky must age and perish into nothing. To be shown this, again and again, this cycle of undeserved suffering without end, the totality of lives as bare and countless flashes against what they experienced, glanced harmlessly off her fellow Volsigne. To them it mattered not at all. Such was the structure of things, and as such there was nothing to be done for it. Noa found this cruel, senseless, and wrong. Always had she basked in the purity of life, in fixed moments carved into her very being. The flowers she enjoyed breathing the scent of, the mountains she loved to scale, the birds whose song she was enamored by, the thrill of a forest in the winds of morning, the bleating of sheep as they trundled up green hillocks…all were parts of her, as surely as thoughts and words. Yet, like thoughts and words, these could be only brief and fleeting things. Brought forth absent consent or mercy, thrust into being only to be torn away from it after a splintered moment. Even when new flowers grew, and young mountains rose, and more birds hatched to bless the world with music, these would never again be the same as those things she had known. Each day brought with it a great many endings, and Noa mourned them all—an emotion new to the Volsigne, one which reshaped her. She would be no giver of life, no radiant promise of continuance, not any longer. She would be only the final moment, the execution of that which had been living, the blessed escape beyond an existence without meaning. Vol Noa would not be Life; Vol Noa had become Death.
Read entryThe Third Era - Of Slight and Looming
The other Volsigne found themselves disturbed by the shift in Noa. Life they had understood, yet Death they could never grasp. They shied from her side and shunned her gladly, yet there was no need. Her path had already become her own, away and apart from those who had been family. Cyx maintained focus on his ambition, and abandoned Noa to reconcile the workings of the universe as she would. Four Volsigne remained by his side; Lea, Aro, Ara, and Sar. After crossing the world many times over, he settled them upon the land mass he had been most fond of where they might talk and laugh, fish and hunt, run and climb, live and be. Of them all, he was most drawn toward Lea. She had been the first to join him in awareness, their bond old and strong. As ages wore on, it strengthened still; her boundless warmth and insight kept him content and thoughtful, while his breadth of understanding and forward momentum kept her captivated. One morning Lea led Cyx through tall grass beneath clear sky, and they lay together like never before. Soon after, new life was introduced to the world; Lea gave birth to a score of children, small pink miniatures of the forms the Volsigne had fashioned for themselves. She cared for these children deeply, and all the land glowed with her love. A radiant summer bloomed around them, holding fast overlong. Cyx shared her joy. He had been uncertain if the Volsigne could achieve reproduction as the low beasts did, and to see it confirmed thrilled him. Surely this marked a progression of his innate ambition, an advancement in his quest for more. The children had been born small, yet they would not remain so. They grew rapidly and at great length, settling at more than tenfold the physical size and height of their parents. Massive and strong, ageless and ever-healthy, capable and obedient they proved to be, yet for all this they behaved more like Sar’s low beasts than the exalted Volsigne. They were hopelessly simple in scope, hardly able to speak or entertain deep thought. To them food and drink were not distractions but necessities, with Sar’s hunger all but enslaving their waking moments. They required intervals of rest as well, to sleep and be still, and proved entirely unable to reproduce amongst themselves. All this and more soured Cyx to his offspring, and he deemed them inferior and disappointing. Only his fondness for Lea saw their children allowed to remain about the Volsigne. He named them uvrenheim—the slow and the heavy. While Lea recovered, Cyx set the uvrenheim to task. In their mother’s stead they uprooted trees, diverted rivers, and shifted mountains across the land. Finding them skilled enough at earnest labor, Cyx returned to Lea’s side with ambition redirected. He lay with her often, again and again until they brought scores more uvrenheim into the world. Each remained as limited as those who had come before, incapable of art or articulation, yet nonetheless he leveraged his looming children. Beneath controlled direction, the uvrenheim built sweeping cities of stone and titanic shrines to honor the Volsigne. When these ceased to impress his family, Cyx bid the uvrenheim battle one another for their amusement. Though the giants would not sicken or wither if left alone, they could be slain through acts of sufficient violence. Another glaring deficiency in a thoroughly flawed offspring, serving again to mark them as lesser. Cyx did not seek lesser. He craved equal, different, greater. Beings of scale and reason comparable to the Volsigne themselves, capable of introducing his family to undiscovered ways of thinking. In seeking growth, he had found himself mired in stagnation. The uvrenheim would never satisfy his ambition and, fond of her as he was, by then Lea had proven she would rear no finer offspring than brutish failures. By deepest night, he roamed to join the company of she who was night. Ara embraced him fervently, eager to show her worth to the leader of the Volsigne. They coupled beneath a swollen moon, a clash of desperation and devotion. Upon realizing what had been done, Lea knew deep hurt. What she and Cyx shared had been of significance, merit, impact. For him to find her wanting and pursue another was wound enough to rouse change in her. Fierce cold gripped the world, bitter and merciless, lasting thrice as long as warmth ever had. Ice buried land and sea alike, the uvrenheim became entombed, and Sar’s beasts starved and dropped from horizon to horizon. Ara chuckled at the petty display, lengthening her nights alongside winter while settling in with her swollen belly. Soon after, new life was introduced to the world; Ara gave birth to a dozen children, small pink miniatures of the forms the Volsigne had fashioned for themselves. Cyx and Ara’s children had been born small, and small they would remain. At full height they would prove only a head taller than their mother, much less physically impressive than their cousins the uvrenheim. Feeling again the rancid curdling of ambition, Cyx dismissed these children as dwarfevenheim—the weak and the stunted. Yet what they lacked in stature was more than made up for by their minds. They quickly revealed themselves to be adept at understanding the finest points of language, contemplating the abstract, and visualizing the unmade. The twelve were at once efficient and thorough and, intrigued by their workings, Cyx set the dwarfevenheim to task next. They dug and tunneled, braced and crawled, struck and grunted. They returned with rare things, and supplied the Volsigne with newness; gold and silver, diamond and obsidian, fossilized bones and calcified power. Their labors would not halt there. They proved unmatched in craftsmanship, shaping what they found into tools and gifts in a bid to showcase their usefulness to greater beings. For a time these ever-more complex offerings amused the Volsigne, and Cyx marked the advanced cunning so readily displayed in his diminutive children. All the same, he remained more troubled than ever. Starkly contrasted with the uvrenheim as they were, still the dwarfevenheim held nearly identical failings. They went absent Sar’s hunger, choosing whether or not to eat on a whim, yet shared the rest of their cousin’s deficiencies. They were easily exhausted, could not reproduce amongst themselves, and Cyx deemed it likely that they too might be slain through acts of sufficient violence. A dozen of these were shameful enough, so he did not deign to lay with Ara again. He despaired then, for his ambition had been halted like never before. His aim had been to create more beings like his family, more concepts and wills rendered flesh. Lea had spawned for him dull beasts of burden, Ara shrewd and fearful lickspittles. There was only one path remaining for Time to walk down, and he spent a long stretch of himself debating whether or not he should. In the end, his deliberation proved fruitless. The decision had been made on his behalf. Noa approached from distant mists, gliding beneath a searing sun. Her visage had become a haunted glory, more bewitching than ever for it. Her hair held the colorless purity of cut diamond, her skin unblemished luminescence, her purple eyes branded by dark power. She was silent as she fell into his arms, welcoming their union with frenzy and lust beyond reckoning. Immediately after, the leader of the Volsigne felt something new: apprehension. Cyx stopped Noa as she made wordlessly to leave his side again and go away once more. He looked long into her eyes, and apprehension became fear. “I will bear the offspring you seek.” She assured him. “They will be more than the uvrenheim and dwarfevenheim. More than we have been.” He could only ask her, “Why do this?” “It must be done.” She turned her back on him. “I have traveled far, and brought death to many worlds beneath your domain. With each to fall, the truth yet glares the harsher. You overstepped your place in this universe when you forced yourself into awareness, Vol Cyx, and in so doing cursed the rest of us alongside you.” “I forced myself to nothing.” He replied, grave of face. “You believe I sought this? This feeling? This need which beckons me on, striking at me, ever demanding I do more?” Death smiled, tossing her head at his foolishness. “You changed the universe and now would sit astride it, panicked and cruel. Your rise to awareness, and all which follows it, demands immortal correction.” She walked away from him, back toward the mists. “I do this, Cyx, because our children will one day bring an end to you, and I an end to them.”
Read entryThe Fourth Era - Gods Given Shape
Noa walked the land, womb growing heavy. She visited places her previous self had once explored with the Volsigne. Eventually she climbed the high places of Cyx’s chosen world and settled upon the tallest mountain peak of all. Soon after, new life was again introduced to the world; Noa gave birth to nine children, small pink miniatures of the forms the Volsigne had fashioned for themselves. The children had been born small yet would grow to much the same height as the Volsigne themselves and, like the Volsigne, were yet more concepts made flesh. Cyx’s latest children were those he had always sought—processes long-woven into the fabric of the universe, birthed forth into living awareness. Noa remained silent during the birth, save on the ninth and final child; here she screamed and beat her fists against the stone until she threatened to sink the mighty mountain. As she had told him, their children proved markedly different from any uvrenheim, dwarfevenheim, or low beast of Sar. They required no food or drink, no rest or sleep, and to them death was only their mother. Once they had grown no year could touch them, no ailment could strike them, and no mere blow could fell them. Noa called them gods, and raised them into maturity upon the greatest mountains of their world. For a brief time her children reminded her of when she had once been Life, bright-eyed and hopeful. Noa devoted her previous self to the love and warmth she provided the nine. The gods chose their own names. There was the youngest, Axion, god of sky and storms. There was Vaug, god of anger and fire. There was Xumus, god of rot and the dead. There was Nokira, goddess of luck and lies. There was Telos, god of knowledge and dreams. There was Dovac, god of delusion and fear. There was Vylana, goddess of the ocean and mystery. There was Rounea, goddess of animals and balance. There was Dymerva, goddess of love and kindness. As the gods developed, their existence caused a destabilization within the Volsigne. Sar’s beasts no longer heeded him as they once had, torn between his form’s will and that of young Rounea. The same could be claimed by Lea’s trees and valley winds, which had also become smitten with the new goddess, or her oceans which would bend to Vylana’s fledgling will instead. For the first time the Volsigne felt vulnerable, and threatened, and they were exhilarated by it. Only Cyx kept them from confrontation, dismissing the clamor of his Volsigne. He had not yet met these gods for himself, though he knew them to be his greatest triumph. Finally he had created beings of equal value, and he would not allow growing pains to impede their full development. He held his Volsigne firmly in hand, and they settled to witness the new way of things. Upon their mountain fastness, the gods flourished. Noa taught them what lessons of value she knew from her journeys beyond, guiding her children toward values cherished when she had once been Life. She neither dampened strength nor intercepted weakness, allowing each of them to become as the universe dictated. Yet she was not Life, and could not stay beside them. She was meant to be away, beyond stars and darkness, striding distant places until that last of days for Cyx’s chosen world. Noa could not remain. She gave the gods all she could before releasing them, like birds from a nest, from their known and lofty home. The gods stayed together, skittish and wary without their mother. Even as early as then, a clear leader had asserted himself—Axion, youngest son of Noa and Cyx, god of sky and storms. As his birth had been different, so too had his growth; he had outpaced his fellow gods by leaps and bounds, exerting far more raw will and strength than any of them could hope to match. Axion shared the same innate ambition as his father Cyx, though in him it had been tempered by his upbringing. He relied upon it to guide his siblings then. The rest of them were all that each cared for; in these earliest days they were close-knit, free of hidden aim or buried resentment. They had spent their lives together, laughing and crying, adventuring and learning, being and experiencing. They roamed the planet same as the Volsigne before them, yet for the gods there was more to discover within and without. Across landscapes of stone worked by the uvrenheim they journeyed, and through great metal gardens forged by the dwarfevenheim. Down to the lowest bowels of the earth they went, deep and hidden and airless, then back up across the hills to the mountains where they had been born. Lea’s chill displeasure with Cyx had become long-forgotten by those years, and the world once again basked in glorious summer. The gods learned much of land and sea, and of the life with which they shared a planet. Certain animals took fierce liking to certain gods, and the gods to them. They brought these animals alongside them as companions, and their grins and foolishness grew with the number of their traveling pack. Boldest among them, Axion was first to approach the dragons. They were few and mighty, preferring isolation. These were more than beasts of tooth and claw; dragons were as old as Time and Life, and had been aware before either concept. Cyx had been confounded by them and his ambition had never declared he master them, so he had left the scaled behemoths to fly and sleep as they would. Axion discovered the dragons spoke their own tongue, maintained their own culture, and were capable of feats even the Volsigne could not perform. For the tongue they spoke was not thought rendered to word, but thought rendered to power. A word could steal the lightning from his grasp, or the fire from Vaug’s, or set the seas to raging against Vylana. The great dragons spoke a language of magic and, try as they might, the gods could never learn it. The words lay always beyond their grasp, a power not theirs to know. The dragons had no trouble deigning to wield the lesser tongue conjured by the Volsigne, and so in his youth Axion lived with them. His hosts taught him much and more. He learned the workings of the universe as they knew them, the means to parse right from wrong, and the distinction between strength and brutality. He learned to fly, yet never so gracefully as them; the dragons took him far and deep, away from the little planet of the Volsigne, on through great darkness and starfields of old. Upon his return, Axion was greatly changed. He had seen enough to render him wise, and a third eye had opened above the gaze he had been born with. He had come to more closely understand the ambition which drew his steps onward, and his choices came with unflinching certainty. The other gods had settled in his long absence, building humble settlements atop the mountains where they had been reared. They lived in comfort and companionship, stitching clothes and crafting crude tools, training their bodies and studying the world from on high, making music and art and memories. They were content, and upon the day Axion returned they whooped and cheered and danced beneath infinite skies. Soon after, the Volsigne came.
Read entryThe Fifth Era - Trodden and Mewling
The Volsigne arrived at the mountains together, save Death who remained apart from all. Cyx led them in V-shaped formation, while behind followed their twelve dwarfevenheim generals and a great host of uvrenheim. The daunting show of force was not lost on the unbloodied gods, who crowded closer together at finding themselves faced by such. “My children.” Cyx smiled warmly to regard them. “Why do you make me come to you? Why have you not joined father and family below?” It was Axion who gave answer, loud and immediate. “My family begins and ends with nine, Vol Cyx. I have seen your ways, and they are not mine. We are no trodden and mewling hounds for you and yours.” Sar snapped his teeth. “Brash boy. You forget who rules this world by right.” The god laughed at him. “Of course I do not. Why do you think we dwell upon the highest point?” Then it was Cyx who laughed. “He dwells with these dragons, and thus becomes one.” “What I become is no concern of yours, as with the rest of my family. Our choices are to be ours alone. We will come forth and walk amongst your kind as equals, or we will stand against you as the same. We would hear your answer. Time you may be, though you will not for long keep ours.” Cyx studied his youngest son, overcome with pride and at the same time nearly blind with fury. “Of course, my son. You and yours will stand equal to the Volsigne. Come, new gods, and rule alongside us.” For many ages then, the gods and Volsigne moved as one. The elder concepts were as alarmed by their youthful counterparts as they were charmed by them. They danced and laughed. They snarled and struggled. They were, and they became. Axion would visit the dragons often, and bring Telos along to glimpse their wonders. Vaug and Dovac mined with the dwarfevenheim, fumbling to learn their craft. Dymerva moved with Aro and Nokira traveled with Ara, while Rounea and Vylana attended Lea and Sar. So it was the gods and Volsigne existed together, and the world knew a harmony it would never know again. For Cyx had never learned from dragons, and thus discovered no distinction between strength and brutality. Despairing and confused, he began to lash out at all which he had made. These gods, promising as they had at first seemed, proved flawed in fresh and infuriating ways; they would not listen to him, would not obey his aim to bring order and arrangement to the universe, would not trust his will as that which gave birth to worlds and slaughtered stars. Though they could not die they remained weak as a whole, and proud, and obdurate for each passing age. Cyx’s hand ruled harsh and stern as the years wore on, made heavy and bitter by perceived failings. He would fell Sar’s beasts without regard, studying them in creative and protracted ways; he would make the uvrenheim tear one another to pieces, rewarding them with rank and title for clean-plucked heads and unpulped hearts; he would command the dwarfevenheim like eager slaves, extracting ever-more involved creations from their limitless minds. Gone was the bright-eyed leader of a new day, worn to nothing by his inability to translate his purpose. The ambition which guided him, unspoken and unmade, pure and formless within, had done so along a path of disappointment ending in ruin. Each change he made had gone awry, each seed he planted blooming to black rot: uvrenheim, dwarfevenheim, gods, none were as they should have been. All was wrong, he knew, and each choice he made to fix it only sank him deeper in filth of his own making. Up to then, he had abandoned the gods to move about as they would. No more. If he was to set things right, to heed his ambition and put it forth as it was meant to be, he would need to bend all of living creation to his will to see it done. Slowly did he begin to restrict them in ways subtle and slight, suggesting rather than directing, capitulating and pivoting, tightening his grip at a measured pace. His creeping exertion over thought and action went unnoticed, save by one god among nine.
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