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History of the People The history of this world is long and varied. Some of the highlights are outlined below.
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Very early on, this distant world evolved life. Primarily it took the form of six limbed vertebrates. One small, arboreal species became flight capable pack hunters. Over millions of years, they further evolved to live on open plains, hunting and feeding on vastly larger herbivorous prey. Eventually, they became primitive tool users, and the First Age began. |
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The Dawn of Sentience. During this Age, the first stone tools, and primitive pottery began to appear among the People. It was not universal, only a handful of clans, close to coastlines, ever bothered with anything more sophisticated than a handy boulder to bread open tough bones, and a large central bonfire for warmth.
There was no religion as such, merely superstition, and custom. As hatchlings were seen to be born from the small caves called creches, (mothers, from instinct, always built these, and placed their precious eggs within), most of the people held the belief that the rock, the Land itself gave them life.
This was the era of Obsidian and Sideromelane. |
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Nothing much is known from this time. Just that religion developed from the older superstitions, revering the Land, and that any mutated offspring were culled mercilessly. Stone and basic pottery were superseded by very poor quality copper and much better pottery. Song recorded the deeds of the great and told the legends of the past. This was the era of Idocrase.
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The best known, and longest Age. It began with the first bronze tools, and ended as iron began to appear.
This was the age of City States, wars, and the abolishion of the ancient Creche system. Hatchlings no longer had the chance to eat each other at birth, and as a consequence population sizes climbed drastically while physical body sizes, on average, shrank. Language, literacy, printing, poetry, art, all added new nuances to life, nailing down the most ancient songs and legends where they could be scrutinized. Religion, which had been becoming far too powerful in the eyes of many citizens, was toned back in the wake of a massive civil war in which the hierarchs of the Church had attempted to take control of the entire Land. In the aftermath of this, life returned to some more traditional ways, and among many communities, the old creche system was reintroduced, lessening the vast rate of population growth. This also began to reduce the number of illnesses, juvenile deaths, and increase physical body size again.
Law and Justice also arrived, and almost embodied, as this was the Age of Scoria Biotite. |
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The People have no specific beliefs concerning the afterlife. They hold, generally, that their souls return to the rock, to be reborn later in a creche. A subset of this, is that those hatchlings devoured by their surviving sibling, did not have souls to start with, and merely existed at all to give life to the one that DID. In later Ages, this evolved, with the belief that any hatchling emerging from the creche with some defect or mutation was in fact soulless, and because it had killed and eaten the hatchling that SHOULD have lived, it was by definition a murderer and was to be slain immediately. This was later the justification for ending the creche practice altogether, for some millenia, although the practice did survive in some remote parts of the Land. Some doctrines within the Church held that Obsidian and Sideromelane were evil, in fact, they were used for a long time as the people's equivalent of Satan, although 'Hell' in this case involved a one way trip to their vast, all devouring bellies. Such it was that when Scoria and Biotite was born, in a remote part of the Land, they were hailed as Obsidian and Sideromelane Reborn, and a somewhat violent cult grew around them, which included nothing less than sacrifice to this reborn 'god'. Of course, in the proceeding civil war against the church, the now massive hydra learned a great number of truths, and upon victory, went about the process of creating a strong, healthy and just society. After death however, Obsidian, Sideromelane, Idocrase, and SillyBuggers, have found themselves in apparent paradise. Why and how, is unknown, as they had all vaguely held the same belief that they would be reborn within a creche, to fight for survival and live among the People once more. Instead they find the various places they now inhabit, lands of plentiful, flavorful prey, and being that they consider themselves already dead, utterly immune to any harm. |