Something must have come before, although none have been able to see it. Even the oldest seers, those with the longest sight, those that have peered back into the murky depths of the beginning; they have seen nothing but ash, water, and darkness.
Something must have burned, so hot and for so long that only ashes were left behind; thrown impossibly high into the heights above. What remained was an dark and endless void of water. For a time it was quite, still, unchanging in it's own aspect. Nothing remained to distinguish the water from the void that surrounded it, an endless black abyss.
Time passed, an endless stretch of time, prior to time having any real meaning. Into that stillness white-ash, thrown impossibly high and drifting for an age, began to fall. The bones of the world-that-was returned to the primordial waters, the onyx void below. This white-ash accumulated. It fell and sank into the water's depths. In places it accumulated on the surface in patches; muddy and soggy at first. Mounds of the stuff built up in those depths and inevitably, breached the surface.
Those accumulations of ash grew, and spread, and also grew dry over time, the white-ash packed down under it's own weight. It grew dense, hard, becoming stone and earth; growing outwards and eventually becoming the land beneath our feet. In some places the pressure became so great that embers sparked and formed, fire. Another new element born into the void and with it heat and light.
The flames grew and spread, and with their existence the air itself began to stir and shift. Hot plumes rose into the sky bringing along with them swirling trails of moisture. Something like clouds were birthed above the burning landscape.
Water..., ash and earth, fire, and now wind and moving air flowed through the void, mixing and churning. Crashing together and bursting apart all four elements exist, what was set in motion could not now be stalled.
From that primordial soup, those perfect moments of crashing violence, mixed with impossible stillness, all mixed together to give rise to something new. Collections of raw power that emerged with minds: Dragons, Primordial-Elementals, Titans, Spirits, and... Gods.
Power attracts power, {but also strikes sparks on others}. An age of conflict, maneuvering, battles, and politics in a world of swirling raw power followed for an eon. Eventually, it was clear that the tide of battle would not stop on its own. On the slopes of the first mountain, ash and embers still falling around it, a council of the powers was called to order.
For a year and a day they {conversation} on that mountain, it was not the most powerful, nore the most warlike, or even the most intelligent that proposed a solution that a majority could agree on.
It was not the powerful warriors, the
And as the blood of the fallen and ruins of their domains sunk into the swirling ocean below, something other began to emerge. Dark things, things of sharp angles and blades, oozing things of enormous size, shadow things of lighting quick speed, a tide of chaos and darkness surging up from that void below.