Interlude: Nexus History

AN: House renovations is done, had some medical issues but I think that's gotten better. Next month should be a lot more productive. A main story chapter should be ready this weekend or a couple days after. I also plan to do one of these for Kayafe's story eventually, but it's going to be a long story even as a summary.

AN2: This chapter doesn't need too much editing, it's not a side or main chapter and just some world building, so no need to nitpick.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1D2bPaF3S6ixPCvgJp2uhglJuuRm1IE8A5aNSeIof4GI/edit?usp=sharing

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Part One

50,000 years ago 

There was a continent where the Goblin people called home. They lived as nomads and hunter-gatherers for thousands of years until Baeo, the Hero, slew a great Roc and ascended to legendary tier. He built a grand throne out of its skull and became Baeo, the First King. Many tribes flocked to his rule, seeking protection for the beasts that roam the land. Baeon, the first city, was founded, and Baeo trained an elite group of warriors to tame the lands and pave the way for agriculture as there was no need to always be on the move in fear of monsters.

Baeo ruled justly, and for the next five thousand years, the goblin people spread across the entire continent, settling new cities under the rule of great warriors. However, Taelan, the Oracle, made three prophecies; ones weaved by fate. The first was that the continent would be devoured by the strongest dragon. The second foretold the coming of travelers heralding the darkest night and disappearance of the Dark Moon. But it was the third that drove Baeo into paranoia. There would be betrayal, and his kingdom and legacy would fall into ruin. 

The once just Baeo would fall ever more into madness, suspecting even his closest friends and wives of betrayal. He would eventually become a tyrant, executing any he feared would betray him. His end would come when poison meant for his last wife was accidentally poured into his own cup instead of his wife’s.

What came next was natural. The power vacuum and unrest created by Baeo, the Tyrant’s, demise naturally led to war, and the kingdom that once ruled the entirety of the continent shattered. Cities would fall and become ruins, the first created on this continent. Nobody knew the dangers that would be created, and once the war settled, opportunists would seek riches in the ruins, awakening the Cursed Beings that ravaged the land.

Eventually, the Cursed Beings would be slain, and lessons would be learned. Entry into ruins would be forbidden, and rules for war would be implemented to prevent more from being created. 

For the next three thousand years, Kingdoms would rise and fall. Borders would change, and legends would be made. Technology would progress until Ranor, a brilliant engineer, invented the first automaton. A wondrous creation of gears powered by mana crystals. This invention revolutionized the continent. Farmers and miners would be replaced by these mechanical workers, paving the way for skilled work to flourish. Genius minds now had time to sit and think, their innovations further improving technology.

It would be two hundred years later until Ranor’s great-grandson, Thanor, made the next great breakthrough. He found a way to make vitality crystals power automations. These new creations were smarter, smart enough to serve in war. It took only a decade for the king, Orlon, to order an army to be made so he could conquer the continent, and Thanor could not decline lest he be executed.

The great war started, the lessons of the past forgotten. Many resisted Orlon with a united effort, but not until nearly half the continent burned. Eventually, the war stagnated, but raids and battles would continue for the next thousand years. Orlon would survive, replacing pieces of himself with clockwork parts, until all that was left was his brain. Vitality allowed for such a mechanical monstrosity, and it was this fusion of machine and flesh that would be forced onto his people, so they could serve on the front lines. With each injury, each limb lost, his soldiers would become closer and closer to clockwork machines just like the army that started this war.

The war ended when Horaen, the Enlightened, discovered a way to merge his body with his vitality, becoming an immortal being. Horaen led a crusade against the evil mechanical conqueror and drove his forces back to his palace. He would confront Orlan, but he could not quite match the machine king. They would slay each other, ending the great war. After the war, machines would be forbidden, seen as unholy abominations that only limited the sacredness of life.

Horaen didn’t leave a record on how he achieved his enlightenment, but he had a journal that described the nature of life, and that it might be possible to merge all four components of life into one single, truly immortal being. The body, Vitality, Soul, and Anima are the four elements of life; representing life in the material, life in mana, life in identity, and life in concept.

The kingdoms, once united against Orlon, the Mechanical King, were now at a crossroads. What path should they start to achieve true enlightenment?

Part Two

40,800 years ago.

Almost immediately, the United Kingdoms broke apart in disagreement. Four factions formed, the Students of Horaen who would eventually found the Kingdom of the Vitality. The body practitioners, who thought the first step was to master their material life, they would create the Kingdom of Body. The Soul Seekers, who believed that the Identity of life mattered most, would form the Kingdom of Soul in time. And the Kingdom of Anima, led by a king who thought enlightenment started with the concept of life.

While most of these factions did not all start out as entire kingdoms they eventually gained enough influence and power over the current kingdoms to become their rulers.

At first, the four factions were peaceful. They participated in debates and meticulously went over Horaen’s notes with the shared goal of achieving enlightenment, but the centuries passed with no progress. Things would eventually devolve from intellectual disagreement to dogmatic ideological arguments, and then, as power consolidated into pseudo-religious sects, the political relations would turn into a game for power and influence.

War would break out between the factions, and eventually, the reason became lost to history. For the next four thousand years, the four factions fought each other, each one nearly being completely destroyed several times within that time.

The Body Practitioners would become warriors of unparalleled prowess. The Kingdom of Anima would become unmatched mages. The Soul Seekers would become enigmatic soul users. And Students of Horaen would become masterful warrior healers.

However, during the millennia of constant wars, a fifth faction would form, those that rejected the bloodshed and war. They didn’t call themselves by any name, as goblinfolk from all factions would join them. They saw their history of constant bloodshed and wanted an end, and so the faction of peace would be formed in later centuries of this era.

However, peace would not come from a meeting at a table but by remembrance of the faction’s true goal. A woman, who had joined the faction of peace, named Aea, The Ascended, would discover the way to finish what Horaen started and merge all four aspects of the elements of life. The Body, Vitality, Soul, and Anima would become one, and she would not just become a legendary being, but a being one could call truly immortal. 

Aea brought all the leaders together and threatened to slay them if they did not immediately agree to a permanent peace, and if they did so, then she would share the secrets to immortality and enlightenment.

Naturally, the leaders agreed. They set aside their differences and vowed to never again go to war, and this time, peace between the goblish people would stay.

Over the next several centuries the goblish people would unite and their morals would shift to match the vow of peace. More people would ascend and reach true enlightenment like Aea, although it was monumentally difficult to do so. However, the era of peace would not last as a calamity was beginning to approach. Year after year, the season of darkness lasted a little longer and became a little darker. Year after year, the people of the world would become more worried. Travelers from other continents shared that this was not a local phenomenon, but a global one.

Eventually, a team of ascended would brave the ruins and slay the Cursed beings dormant within, all to search for an answer to the encroaching darkness, and they found the prophecies foretold by Taelan, the Oracle: The continent would be devoured by the strongest dragon; and the coming of travelers heralding the darkest night and the disappearance of the Dark Moon.

They didn’t know who these “travelers” were or what would cause the dark moon to disappear, but something with the moon was not right. Fortunately, a decade later, they would have an answer to one of their questions.

A vast portal would open and Orc refugees would cross over. The Orcs were children of the moons, and they shared stories of how beings of impossible power appeared. Beings that even the most powerful of legendary warriors could not even hope to harm. But, even more concerning was the news of the black Orcs, the ones originating from the Dark Moon.

They spoke of how their very moon was coming alive, that it was becoming a being even stronger than those the other orcs had spoken of. But, even as powerful as it was, it was still gestating.

The goblish people accepted the Orc refugees into their society and they gathered their greatest minds to find a way to stop the birth of whatever was gestating in the Dark moon.

The ascended would travel to the Dark Moon, and there they would find out the true nature of the nascent life within. An elemental of darkness that held power so immense that, even in it’s fragmented state, it held power to destroy the world and all the moons many times over. And indeed, it was fragmented, shattered into a trillion pieces. This was just one piece. 

The Dark Elemental was dead already, yet it was alive, perpetually in a paradoxical state of existing in the realm of the living and also that which lay beyond.

The ascended returned to the world and shared their findings. The Orcs knew enigmatic rituals that could achieve almost anything; and while many would not go right, the potential of rituals held promise. And with the mastery of the very essence of life that the goblin ascended had, they came up with a solution to save the entire world.

All except one ascended would go to the Dark Moon, and ritualistically sacrifice themselves so that when their ascended essence passed to the Soul Sea, they would drag the fragment of the Dark Elemental with them and return it to death. Only one Ascended would remain to pass on their teachings.

Hundreds of legendary tier ascended returned to the Dark Moon and enacted their grim duty. But they failed. Maybe the ritual failed, as they so often did, or they were not strong enough to subdue the soul of the gestating elemental. As the years became ever more enshrouded in darkness, to the point that only the season of Light brought any amount of light, hope became nearly lost only holding onto the flickering hope that perhaps the ascended were not successful yet. Maybe they just needed time to subdue the elemental, afterall, the prophecy did say that the dark moon would disappear. 

The years grew ever darker and when light could not reach the world any longer, the Dark Moon vanished, as did it’s overwhelming darkness. Maybe the ascended finally succeeded, maybe it was someone else, or maybe this was destined to happen all along. Whatever the case may have been, the Dark Moon would from then on arrive only every one thousand years for the dark season before disappearing again.

Part Three

36,000 years ago

With the calamity of the dark moon over, life soon returned to normal. The Goblins maintained their peaceful ways, and even many Orcs joined them and adapted to their culture, but not all. Orcs are generally ambitious, and they found their way into ruling positions after only a couple hundred years. 

Orcs naturally gravitated toward rituals, even despite knowing the risks, and there would be more than one city reduced to ruin by errant minds foolishly attempting to control magic. Rituals would, of course, be outlawed, but there are always those to go against laws.

Once Orcs rose to power, wars would ravage the land. Not by Goblin hands, they stayed true to their vow of peace, but by ambitious Orc hands.

For three thousand years, kingdoms would rise and fall. Rituals would curse the land with disaster or bless kings with greatness. Of course, the insidious cursed items created by failed rituals grew more abundant with each passing century, leading to yet more conflict.

One day, the Orc King, Or’Odaln would cast a ritual in hopes of creating a lake of mana in which he could create items of power to fuel his war. However, he would gain more than he could ever want, and doom not just his kingdom, but also the neighboring ones. Mana from distant continents would find its way to his location, a flood of mana so great and dense it would kill all life in a third of the continent as a newborn Nexus formed.

This became the greatest disaster the continent would know, and would be remembered as “Or’Odaln’s Folly.” That much mana would spawn legendary tier beings such as Elementals, Rocs, and even Dragons.

The ascended, being legendary themselves, would manage to slay or drive off these spawned monsters, and in time, the nexus would be seen as a boon. Not only would they get powerful materials to craft legendary items with, but the ascended would grow even stronger.

The ascended, however, would be reminded that all living beings can die. Their immortality and seeming unkillability did not mean complete invulnerability. If multiple legendary beings gathered, they can team up and kill an ascended.

The next several centuries would see most of the remaining continent unite with only a few kingdoms of differing ideologies. The king of the largest of these kingdoms would hire ascended to capture living legendary beings so he could experiment on them. He sought a way to alleviate his citizens’ struggle with farming and mining, with only good intentions, but rituals care not for good intentions.

It was at this time that a young water Dragon would spawn. She, being created at the pinnacle of power, would be overly arrogant, thinking herself greater than all others; a foolish attitude that killed most spawned legendary beings, for they lack experience. The dragon fought against several ascended beings, and under normal circumstances, her life would have ended if not for the kind king seeking to create chimeras.

The dragon was captured and imprisoned, a powerful lesson in humility. Every day, the King would take her blood to experiment with. And for years, the Dragon tortured herself for her foolishness and plotted her revenge. Her opportunity would come when a ritual backfired.

The king fused the dragon’s blood with digger worms, large worms the size of an orc’s leg that ate raw stone and ore and excreted processed metals. The ritual, however, turned these worms draconic and they became so large they rivaled towers. Fueled with an endless hunger, these chimeric draconic worms began to devour the continent and allowed the dragon to break free.

The dragon, now wisened by her imprisonment, used the abominable worms to distract the ascended while she slew them one by one. But the worms only lived for a season, so she had to wait for other opportunities or wait for the worm’s eggs to hatch, which only occurred once every century.

The dragon had patience though, so she waited and got revenge whenever there was an opportunity. Two hundred years later, she would slay the last ascended, and the draconic worms would devour the last of the continent.

The orcs and goblins would escape to other continents, running from the worms, but their continent would not be the only one devoured, many of the surrounding ones were. In time, the largest ocean would form where these devoured continents once were, with a nexus at the center. The ocean would come to be named the Leviathan Sea, for all the powerful, legendary tier sea creatures that would spawn there.

The young dragon would be named Safyr, and she would travel the world in search of power, for she knew and feared her own vulnerability. Twenty thousand years later, she would find out that the elves below her nest had captured a young dragon to tame. Enraged, she would annihilate the elven kingdom and free the dragon. She would return to her birthplace, having become one of the strongest beings in the world, to that Nexus in the heart of the Leviathan Sea where she would remain to this day.