Prologue: MirMarnia
“Ysildras”, coloured pencil on paper by Chaiga T Cheska.
Prologue
In the vast unbroken quiet of the Cosmos, where darkness pressed in upon itself and silence was deeper than memory, a sentient being drifted. Time. She moved through the emptiness with patience that preceded stars, searching for meaning in the unbroken night.
Time pondered the riddle she could not solve: the secret of love. With a yearning as old as the void itself, she drew her essence together and shaped a child, a being who in these first moments of life named himself Faolin.
But love, that elusive blossom, could not be summoned by will alone. In her act of creation, Time found the concept slipping through her grasp like water through cosmic fingers. She could not hold it, could not comprehend it. With quiet regret, she sent Faolin spiralling outward, her question cast adrift, seeking an answer in the wild expanse.
Faolin knew only the pain of rejection. His journey was a dance of exile, spinning through nebulae and star-flecked chasms. Yet as ages passed, a glimmer caught his eye, a sapphire spark trembling in the darkness. Closer and closer he drew, pulled by gravity and longing, until the blue light bloomed into a planet that called itself Earth.
He entered the world as it stirred in primordial dreams. In the oceans' cradle, Faolin watched cells entwine and awaken. He traced their evolution from silent tides to life overflowing with the promise of land. Through uncounted ages, he was the silent witness, suffused with longing for connection, for meaning beyond observation.
At last, the desire to belong overcame him. No longer content to spectate, Faolin reached for the life that surrounded him, choosing the first form he saw: the dire wolf. In fur and fang, muscle and breath, he learned the rhythm of the hunt, the warmth of the pack, the ache of loss. He learned the wild, unspoken language of love.
He loved and lost and fought and fought. When dire wolves faded, Faolin chose again and again to take the shape of a wolf, living and reliving, seeking something or someone. A distant presence drew him forward through the layers of time. He waited, sensing that fate would eventually reveal the one he was destined to wait for.
As aeons folded into themselves and the iron grasp of frost relinquished its hold upon the Earth, Faolin stood sentinel beneath heavy skies. The ice age waned, not in a single breath, but with the unhurried sigh of continents reshaping. Glaciers retreated before the warm hand of new dawns. He watched as the chill receded from the valleys and ridges, revealing dark soils and trembling shoots that yearned for the light.
Upon these thawing landscapes, life unfurled itself in myriad forms. Faolin beheld the emergence of mammoth and mastodon, the mighty aurochs stamping their mark upon new grasslands, the fleeting dance of sabre-toothed cats through the shadows of budding forests. Herds swept across the plains, each species etching its brief signature into the tapestry of existence before fading, as all must, into memory.
He glimpsed the delicate passage of birds, their wings painting the air with the promise of migration. Insects stitched intricate patterns across the canvas of wildflowers. The world teemed, pulsed, and changed. Each cycle was a story of creation and dissolution.
Faolin remained a silent witness, his lupine form blending with the silhouettes of wolves that howled beneath the silver moon, his spirit attuned to the pulse of time itself. Yet for all the splendour and sorrow he observed, the birth and burial of dynasties, the rise and ruination of kingdoms, Faolin's heart was bound by an ever-tightening thread of longing.
With each passing millennium, an instinct sharpened within him, as if the weight of eternity compressed purpose into a single point. He discerned, in the shifting winds and the whispers of rivers, that the one he was destined for lived not upon this world, but in some far-flung constellation. Her lineage's roots were twined in soils untouched by Earth's sun.
Across the gulfs of space, beyond the reach of his senses yet vivid in the layers of fate, her ancestors walked upon a planet strewn with unfamiliar stars. Faolin felt them like echoes reverberating through the marrow of creation. He knew their existence not from sight or sound, but by the subtle resonance that set his soul aflame.
He waited, not with resignation, but with the patient certainty of one who has glimpsed the red thread that binds souls across cosmic divides. As epochs spun and species flickered out, as glaciers retreated and forests grew dense and ancient, Faolin remained ever watchful, ever yearning. The ache of anticipation was keen as morning frost, sharper with each revolution of the heavens. He knew, with the unerring intuition of primordial spirit, that she was drawing nearer.
Time itself seemed to bend, guiding her path across impossible distances, weaving together destinies written before the birth of stars. He sensed that soon, very soon, a young woman would speak his name, the name he had chosen in those first silent moments. Faolin. In her voice, he would hear the answer Time sought, the promise of love and belonging conceived in the stillness of the Cosmos.
Until that moment, he waited, endless and enduring, beneath the watchful gaze of ancient skies, cradled by the song of worlds both lost and yet to be made.
Far from Earth, Time felt her son's absence as an emptiness, a hollow sound echoing through her immortal being. The stars mourned for her. The void sighed with her sorrow.
Yearning to heal her soul, she gathered her sorrow and hope, compressing them into a single, radiant seed. She nurtured this fragile kernel in the dark until, at last, a seedling unfurled, soft, tenacious, and green. Time named her Yew.
This child, the yew seedling, was sensitive to her mother's longing and loss. She grew with resolve, vowing to become more than mere solace. She would become shelter. The little yew stretched her branches until they spanned the Cosmos, her roots threading through worlds, her heart beating with the promise of new realities. She became Ysildras, cradling planets and realms within her embrace.
At the core of her expansive, arboreal heart, she crafted MirMarnia, a world woven from dreams where Time's deepest longings for vibrant life could take shape. MirMarnia flourished with beings full of wonder, travellers who bridged realms and lived out destinies conceived long before stars were born.
As Ysildras's branches reached ever outward, she witnessed Time create yet another yew seed. Ysildras, filled with gentle pride, sent her love with this new sibling and nurtured it amid the cosmic winds of the Tiorial Nebula, high in her celestial crown. There, the seedling took root and grew into the Yew planet, Tioria.
From Tioria's radiant berries, the Lightweaver beings were born, creatures of paradox, both healers and destroyers, woven of light and shadow.
Thus, the darkness of the Cosmos became not a void, but a cradle. Time's longing gave rise to Faolin, and her grief gave rise to Ysildras. Through them, love, so mysterious and longed for, unfurled in countless forms and stories yet to be told, echoing eternally through the branches of creation.
The Viking Settlement
Long ago, Vikings hungry for more than icy seas pressed their voices into the silent black beyond Earth. Each cry echoed across the emptiness until one sunrise, a gentle rhythmic humming responded, weaving threads of light through the shadows. That whisper came from the MirMarnians, unseen hosts who beckoned weary travellers into a realm of emerald skies and sharp stone peaks.
Hearts pounding, the Vikings crossed ley lines instead of waves, longships gliding on currents of pure energy. The first dawn in MirMarnia cracked like a green-gold egg over the Emaris Mountains. Frost-tipped peaks burned with gentle warmth, and at their feet the Emaris River sparkled like spilt starlight, carving ribbons through meadows seeded with alien blossoms.
The Vikings tumbled ashore, their boots sinking into moss that thrummed beneath their feet. Oak and pine seeds, treasures from home, began to take root in this enchanted soil, sending up seedlings that pulsed with unseen magic. The air thickened with the resin scent of new forests and the distant roar of water tumbling over ancient stones.
By the 422nd year, runes carved on sharpened branches glowed beneath sentient skies. Wheat swayed in fields woven by Viking hands. Fish shimmered in crystal tributaries. Every shadow promised discovery. Old hunger for conquest faded with each sunrise, replaced by wonder as they wove MirMarnia's magic into their rites. Longships traded salt for starlight, charting courses through living winds rather than churning seas.
In the high valley of Emaris, fasting trials and icy endurance forged new gifts. Warriors whispered fate-weaving runes during battle, each strike bending the fabric of reality. Truth-bind sigils snaked across oaths, prepared to scorch traitors with the land's own fury. Tattoos on skin shifted like dawn clouds, glowing bright for honour, dimming for doubt. They listened to the sky's shifting hues as divine guidance, tending guardian beasts whose breath misted in the early light.
Rituals wove personal sacrifice into the very roots of the world, each heartbeat keeping MirMarnia balanced.
Clans blossomed into a mystic council: warriors, scholars, peaceweavers. Each soul was a living keystone in the realm's great design.
But beneath this carved harmony, a slow drumbeat of unrest stirred. A few Berserker hearts still throbbed to the old drum of blood and steel, their silent dissent seeding shadows in the luminous green. Even in the land of wonder, the pulse of discord awaited its reckoning.
The River Emaris, born of snowmelt and thunder high in the craggy bosom of the mountains, became the heart's artery for one great kindred: the Drakkensund Clan. They made their lives along the river's mighty, spiralling course.
Its source glimmered in icy bowls beneath the peaks. As it rushed tumbling through stone and cloud, it gathered spirit and sound, frothing with wild promise. By the time the Emaris spilt into the valley, it had become a roaring, muscular force, an unbroken song of water that called to the souls of Drakkensund.
They built their halls and hearths close to its banks, their lives entwined with the river's moods and music. Each summer sunrise, the clan's children would wade into the shallows, their laughter trailing like silver minnows through the mist. Elders traced runes on smooth river stones, blessing the flow and vowing always to honour the land, the mountain, the river, the sky, and every being cloaked in leaf or shadow, fur or wing, which called MirMarnia home.
The Drakkensund hearts ripened with reverence, having made peace with the sorrows and hungers that had driven them from their old home on Earth. Their rites grew gentle, woven through with gratitude, a promise to listen, to heed, to serve the wondrous world that had taken them in.
Yet not all who came to MirMarnia heard the same song.
As the Sentinel Forest, grown of seeds borne across the stars, rose in stately green, another half of the settlement sought their future beneath its ever-thickening branches.
There, amongst oak and pine whose roots spoke the dialect of ancient earth, farmsteads blossomed in scattered clearings. Each family claimed its own pocket of moss and dappled sun, and so the old unity ebbed.
The forest-dwellers lived apart, their lives stitched together more by rumour or distant fires than by neighbourly embrace. With the forest's growth came a certain quietude, a dispersal of voices, a thinning of the thread of kinship. Where once laughter had rung communal beneath the same roof, now only the wind carried news from glen to glen, from one isolated homestead to the next.
Deeper still, in those wildest precincts where the undergrowth grew tangled and the stars themselves seemed to hesitate above the trees, a third people made their lair. These were the hunters and berserkers, those who had always danced closest to the old drum of chaos and hunger.
They shunned the new beliefs, scorning the Drakkensunds' pieties and the scattered peace of the forest clans. Instead, they lived by tooth and talon, raiding farmsteads under the cover of moonless nights, their names cursed around trembling hearths.
Over generations, this dangerous band became synonymous with one line, a name spoken with a mixture of dread and reluctant awe: Ulfgar.
It was said that every son, every grandson, every great-grandson took that name, as if by bearing it they bound themselves to the legacy of wildness and wrath. Ulfgar the First was a shadow-king amongst wolves, but it was his great-grandson, Ulfgar the Fourth, who was both feared and whispered about in legend.
In his youth, he had sat by the fire and listened as the elder Ulfgar told the tale of a creature not of this world: a Tiorian Lightweaver, born of shimmering berries on a world beyond Ysildras, a planet called Tioria. This Tiorian Lightweaver was a wanderer of cosmic winds, a weaver of constellations, whose arrival in MirMarnia was marked by sudden auroras and the quietude of animals in the glades.
Each generation of Ulfgar's line had tried, and failed, to ensnare this radiant being, laying cunning snares and traps of iron and rune. But it was Ulfgar the Fourth who succeeded, by guile, by patience, by a heart that burned with the cold blue of ancient ambition.
He waited by the river on a night when the stars themselves seemed restless. When the Tiorian Lightweaver, cloaked in the feathers of the cosmos, descended to drink from the Emaris, he was ready. With swift hands, he stole her constellations, plucking them from her wings as a thief might take jewels from an open casket. With them, he bound her to him. He wore her constellations around his neck on a chain to show his strength and remind Lisera of her moment of weakness.
From that moment, Ulfgar the Fourth was changed. The forest grew wary of his tread. The river stilled at his approach. The clan's folk whispered of curses that deepened with each passing season.
Ulfgar built his stronghold deep within the Sentinel Forest, where the sun seldom pierced the ancient canopy. There he kept his captive, her light dulled to a gloomy blue glow, her magic twisted to serve his dark purposes. All who valued peace and kinship kept their distance from that haunted place, for it was said that even the roots of the oldest trees recoiled from the grief and power that knotted there.
Lisera was held captive and forced into human form, bereft of her beloved constellations. This bound her to the territory of her captor, unable to return home or even speak.
And so, MirMarnia's mosaic grew more complex, a realm where harmony and discord, reverence and rebellion, were forever entwined. Every dawn brought the promise of new wonders and new perils, waiting to be sung into legend.
