The Last Words of Thelonius the Scribe - Part I
I am Brother Thelonius, last Keeper of Hidden Light, of the Scriptorium of Lunthyr. By the time these words are read, my bones shall lie dust-bound, and this world may no longer resemble the one I knew. I write by candlelight while the earth quakes and the skies groan, during what we now call the Great Cataclysm. The ground shudders with each passing day, and the heavens have turned their face from us.
This chronicle is not sanctioned by the Papacy. Were I younger, they might burn me for it. But their fires are dying, and so too is their grip on truth. They rewrote history in their own image, erased voices, shattered scrolls, and silenced those who remembered. Yet memory is resilient, and ink, though fragile, can outlast even empires.
Last eve, as I lay coughing in this crumbling stone cell, I was visited by a Fay. Not a vision. Not a dream. A presence as real as the stone beneath my back. I felt as though I stood before a storm, not wind nor rain, but something vaster, a force of nature wrapped in grace and sorrow. It knelt beside me and spoke not in words, but in truths.
"Keep hope, Thelonius," it said, "Demira's dream has not faded. Her sacrifice was not the end, it was the waiting seed."
And as it turned to leave, it paused, the light from its form casting no shadow. "Next time we meet," it said, "it will be your last day in this Creation, and the beginning of the era of the Scions."
And so I write, not for myself, but for them, for you, Scion. May these pages be the lantern that enlightens your path.
—Thelonius the Scribe Last Keeper of Hidden Light From the Scriptorium of Lunthyr, veiled in fog and silence, where the dead still dream
Written in the Winter of the Year 3999
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The Nine Creations Before
Before Paradise, before even the first breath of mankind, there were others. Many others.
The world we walk upon is not the first. This is the Tenth Creation, and we are its children, but not the creations firstborn.
Nine times before, the Divine shaped the tapestry of existence. Nine times, it unraveled. Each Creation was corrupted by a Deadly Sin, rising from within like rot in the root, and each was answered by a Heavenly Virtue, woven into the next. The First was consumed by Anger, and from its ashes rose the Dark Lord, the Great Deceiver. Another drowned in Envy, where Leviathan coiled through the waters of creation, ever longing. Gluttony bloated a world into silence, and another fell to Levity, laughter twisting it into mockery until even death became a jest.
The Fay, firstborn of an older grace, hail from one of these fallen worlds. They do not speak of it. Others among us, trolls, ogres, mermaids, kelpies, or wyverns, are remnants of shattered ages, shaped by time, sin, and survival. Not all were wicked at first. Not all are wicked now, for some were saved by the Fay and brought into their hidden realm. When the veil between worlds becomes thin, these beings may cross into our Creation once more.
The Divine did not always remove the old to make the new. Some Creations were buried, layered in spirit beneath our own. Their bones remain and among them memories, artifacts, forgotten magic. And through all this , gnashing demons gnaw.
Where sin takes hold in the world, it digs downward, clawing through the ruins of the past. It begins in the Rivulets, shallow and twisted lairs built by cultists of this very Aeon. Deeper still lie the Temples, where demonic influence swells and the air thickens with sacrilege and sodom. And lower still they go, defiling the remains of bygone eras and tormenting the remaining spirits, growing ever stronger, to the illusive point of no return, where Creation ends and Hell begins. These are the true domains of demons, not built but birthed, excreted, discharged by sin and suffering and shaped into shrines of their own foul design.
To fall into one of these depths is not merely to descend. It is to tumble through sins of history.
—Thelonius the Scribe
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The Age of Paradise
The story of this Creation begins with Protennoia, the First Redeemer, who gave birth to Humanity at the sacred heart of the world, where Axis Mundi would one day rise. Protennoia's gifts to her children were pure, plain and unadorned, birth, love, and light. In that first garden stood a wondrous tree, believed by many to be part of the Redeemer’s own spirit. Its golden fruits granting eternal youth and sustenance.
This was a time before complexity and before the concept of need. No hunger gnawed, no danger stalked. There was no fire, for there was no cold. No spoken word, for thought and feeling flowed as one. Humanity moved in silent harmony and grace with beasts, drank from chiming silver streams, and slept beneath a sky that never darkened.
There was only summer, the endless warmth of divine favor. The sun dawned, rose, and softened to dusk, but never vanished. There was no night. No death. No shadow.
But even stillness can decay.
Sloth was the first sin to stir, a dulled spirit content in passivity. Then came Lust, turning innocent joy into covetous craving. One among the Firstborn broke the sacred bond. With their kin, they idly plucked the sacred fruit not for need, but for power. In that act, the Divine Root was violated. The harmony of Paradise cracked. The great tree started to wither and waste away. The waters that had sheltered Creation began to recede, revealing a world unprepared for what lay beyond.
Night came. No one recalls exactly when, only that it came after the betrayal. And with it came the first chill.
Paradise was not taken from us. We abandoned it.
As tribes fled the dying garden, they met a world both vast and cruel. Sharp winds tore at them, hail and rain bit them. Wild beasts, once gentle, turned predators. The first one to die left no words, no rites, no songs. For Humanity, there had been no memory of grief and no course for sorrow or regret. They were children born for peace, forced into survival.
Those who endured were changed. Hardened. Embittered. They became the Wild Firsts, wrathful and feral, their bond to the Divine dimmed, their tongues unshaped, reduced to guttural chants and wordless humming.
And yet, not all strayed into shadow. A few, bearing still the memory of Protennoia's warmth, wandered far and founded hidden sanctuaries. These scattered lineages preserved glimmers of the old peace, traces that would one day resurface in the tales of Atlantis and in the sanctity of groves where vines still swirled toward heaven.
Though the Divine Root lies withered, and its fruit is no more, echoes of that first stillness linger in the Ley Lines. And sometimes, in dreams, or in the hush before dawn, we remember what we were.
And what we lost.
—Thelonius the Scribe
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Paintings used as headers in the images: Caravaggio, Saint Jerome Writing, 1605-1606 Botticelli, The Map of Hell, ~1480-1490 (Illustration for Dante’s Divine Comedy) Jan Brueghel the Elder, The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man, 1612