Part One: The Archaic Era: The First Fire

【Overview of the Era】 The Age of Embers is the collective term used by modern historians for the earliest stage of archaic history; neither its beginning nor its duration can now be determined. The oldest known ruins are widely distributed across life-bearing Stars, Primordial Realms, primordial Lands, and primordial Interspaces. No known connections existed among them, yet they exhibit several similar features: life began to form groups, groups began to form societies, and societies began attempting to explain the world. Modern historians therefore generally regard the Age of Embers as the beginning of the history of intelligent life and the earliest source to which later civilizations, faiths, extraordinary systems, and schools of philosophy can be traced.

【Ancient Creation Myths】 Different civilizations of archaic times offered a great many mutually contradictory answers to the question of where the world came from. Most of these answers cannot be verified, but they possess significant historical value in themselves because they reflect archaic life’s earliest understanding of the world. Legends later summarized by historians as the “stars kindling fire” account are especially common among ruins on many life-bearing Stars: in the beginning, the world was a lightless darkness; then the first star ignited, giving birth to the myriad stars, while life arose from sparks that fell from them. Similar accounts also appear in a small number of ancient Realm and Land-and-Interspace ruins, though they circulated more widely among civilizations on life-bearing Stars.

Accounts of the “world giving birth to its children” are preserved with particular completeness in the ruins of the Primordial Realm: the world was understood as a living whole, with mountains and rivers as its bones, waterways as its blood, and all living beings as the children it had nurtured. Similar conceptions of the world as a mother also appeared among several life-bearing Stars and civilizations of drifting Lands, then gave rise to wholly different pantheons in different environments.