This is a book in the "Riverhaven Academy of Learning" library.

ORIGINS OF THE REALMS
- Amritam Gweththew

CHAPTER 1:  THE ORIGIN

Of the origin of our world there is little dispute (save for some heterodox sects of usurpers in the previous millennium). It is as it was written in the Annals of the Timeless Ones, compiled by the Elothean Lorethew, Elisanoria:

At first was the Void, neither light nor dark, neither full nor empty. Such nothingness as is too dreadful to imagine. Into this Void, came the One who took the Void to wife. From the Void he caused to be conceived offspring, as the she-serpent carried in its body siblings, but all separate and alone behind hard shells, only to bring forth living things that are forever separated and unjoinable. So the One and the Void produced the Planes, separate realms of world and being divided by irrevocable boundaries of time, space and essential forces.

When she realized that her children were destined by the Father to be ever separate, ever alone and ever full of woe, the Mother Void began to weep. Her tears flowed and flowed, and landing on the Planes, each tear produced a being of great power, born of pure Void.  When he saw what his consort had created, the One became enraged, and into each of those eternal beings of pure Void, he imparted some of his own substance, until he had not enough to maintain his own being.  With that, he was no more, and the Void, now containing within it a myriad of Planes and Immortals, ceased to exist.

And it is so that the Planes were under the Dominion of the Immortals, and the Immortals ever fated to strife and conflict and overweening desire.

As to how this Plane, and our world of Elanthia came to be wrought and populated, the venerable Lorethew is less definite:

The Planes had been born, separate and complete, whole unto themselves, and yet, as newborns experience much growth, so did the Planes. The Plane of Exile, the Plane of Abiding and the Plane of Unknowing all did evolve in separate ways, as did all the infinitely numbered Planes. Ours, the Plane of Abiding, contained the Thirteen Immortals who created the 13 worlds.  Our world being the last, was the most perfect and complete, and yet the sum of all the strife and discord among its creators.

Elanthia was a mass of fire and ice, vapor and seas, from which the Immortals fashioned continents to shelter and provide succor for the First Beings, low creatures of all ilk. From the First Beings came the races. From those with scales that crawled or slithered upon their bellies through swamp and desert came the S'Kra Mur; from the brutes who walked bent over upon their knuckles in savanna and upland were descended the Gor'Tog; from those small, furry, clever creatures that darted among the roots of trees, the green glades and the bases of rocks came the Halflings; from the strong, stout beings that supported the very ground itself upon their backs and dwelt in the maw beneath the earth, came the Dwarves; from the sturdy, crafty beasts of the fields and plains came the Humans; from the blithe beings that mastered the currents of air and water in wildwood and cascading rill, came the Elves, and from the pure thought and will of the Immortals themselves, came the Etholeans.

## The account ends abruptly here ##