In the beginning there was the Choosing. The gods — who are never seen, only felt in what they set in motion — chose the site for a new world, and sent their most powerful beings to raise it: the original warlocks, makers of the first craft, who built Erevan as an experiment in perfection. They set the mountains as sentinels and sequenced the rivers, and cut the first city from the cooled fire of creation itself, in stone the colour of dawn, in twenty-eight sacred shades — one for each letter of the first alphabet. The light of that world was never the same twice, and it did not need to be. It was in harmony. It was, for one age, exactly what the gods had asked for.
And at the heart of the harmony stood Gallantria — not the Gallantria of this age, but the first one: white stone and open space, clean and beautiful, a sanctuary of light. There, in a single hall, the makers kept the stones — one for each of the original warlocks, cut from the creation itself, each carrying the essence and authority of the being it stood for. They were kept together because there was no reason to keep them apart. Any sophont could stand before them. That was what trust looked like, when the world was whole.
Draveth was the harmony’s proudest work. He was not born greater than the others — he was given more: the best student the world ever produced, taught openly by every tradition in an age when there was no reason to withhold anything. He alone learned every source of power — the study of the wizards, the blood-craft of the sorcerers, the pact-ways of the warlocks, the old wisdom of the witches — lesson by lesson, from teachers who loved him. And in holding all of it, he came to see the whole architecture of the world’s magic. And whoever sees the whole architecture begins to believe he should be its architect. His turn to darkness was not a fall. It was a conclusion — reasoned, gradual, each step defensible — and by the time the world understood what he had concluded, the Old War had already begun.
It was not army against army. It was everything against one. All living things joined — the makers and the bloodlines, the witches and the scholars, the weavers of the deep tunnels, the river peoples, the kingdoms beneath the sea, the dragons, the very trees — because a world made in harmony discovered, at its darkest hour, that harmony itself is a weapon. But a being who holds every source cannot be unmade by any of them. He could only be broken, and banished. At the war’s end they killed the body of Draveth — and could not kill what wore it. So the victors did the only thing left to do, and the doing of it broke the world.
The world was split in two. Beneath: the shadow underlay — the dark mirror of every living thing — into which Draveth’s new form was sent and sealed, a prisoner beneath the floor of existence. Above: the new world, saved and scarred. Every broken thing in Erevan is a wound of the Old War. The Shattered Peaks are shattered because the splitting cracked them. The fire world of the Dragon Peaks burns because the making-fire was torn open there. The islands of the far east float, broken free of the earth, because the world’s edge could not survive the sundering whole — and a keeper of light stands at that boundary still. The white hall of Gallantria fell with everything else: what was open space and light is now a dark warren of smaller broken caves in a wounded mountain — a cathedral’s rubble, inhabited as a home. Nothing in Erevan is ruined by accident. Walk anywhere the land is beautiful and wrong, and you are standing on the war.
And the stones — the makers’ stones, that had stood together in the light — were scattered. Deliberately. Hidden across the realm in keepings whose locations became the world’s deepest secret: in fire, in earth, in deep water, in the broken sky, and the last — the keystone, answering only to one true blood — moved from hand to trusted hand across the ages. For the victors understood the final terrible truth of their victory: Draveth’s new form cannot regain his body unless the stones stand together again, as they stood in the white hall. The scattering is the outer lock of his prison. And every dark thing that has moved in Erevan since — every corruption, every manufactured hatred, every trusted man hollowed out from below — has been the prisoner, patiently, from beneath the floor of the world, trying to gather them back.
Draveth cannot escape. But the underlay touches everything — it is the underside of every real thing — and so he influences: leaning on the world from below, whispering through the broken places, feeding on every cruelty and every division the surface produces, cultivating those who will, reasonably, gradually, each step defensible, seek the stones for him. The realm has a name for these influences.
The Shadows of Erevan