In the lore of the Triempery Revelations, it all started here. This origin story is in the series but it is present in bits and pieces, in epigraphs and words spoken by the few, like Marenthro, who still grasp even a little of how it began.
Order and Change
In the beginning the Void spawned increasingly chaotic versions of Itself. These yearnings manifested as anarchic energy and matter and things unnamed. The Void was not—and is not—a god; it is a yearning. It yearned to expand... and so it did. It yearned to be... and so the Universe became. It yearned for order... and so Order descended upon the Universe and stilled its throes and silenced its madness. But still the Void yearned. It yearned to expand, but it could not... it yearned to become but could not... it yearned to transcend Order but Order blocked all yearning.
And so the Void spawned Leur.
Leur is the Child of the Void’s yearning and the name itself means “Change.” There were no words until Leur—Order and the Void had no need for language, they simply were—but Leur invented the naming of things. The Leur name for Order is Vllyr.
Leur is pure omnificence—the ability to create all things, including Itself. Leur contended with Vllyr, which sought to keep the Universe permanently unchanged, in stasis, but the Void welcomed Leur and within the emptiness Leur created Time. With the emergence of Time the Void’s yearning became manifest. Though Vllyr was powerful and sought to extinguish Leur’s work, Change (Leur) vied with Order (Vllyr) to shape the Universe we know.
Though the advent of Leur granted Vllyr some rudimentary ability to grow (Vllyr is not immune to Change and Leur must answer to Order), Vllyr was a fixed entity. The body Vllyr inhabited was inorganic—all things organic are creations of Leur—and resistant to change. But Vllyr possessed awareness and intelligence; Vllyr detected the changes Leur wrought in the Void and wherever possible forbade Change.
The Creation
Leur did not stay in the core of the Void but left to perform new creations where Vllyr could not yet reach. Having created Itself, Leur sought new expressions of its own being. This Leur did in a great Creation: a grand design wherein Change would lead to wondrous new things. World upon world Leur created and nurtured and watched fail, until Change resulted in Life—and Life so fascinated Leur that Leur created the World.
The World and all that was necessary for Life existed within the Creation. Though Vllyr too existed within it (as did all things spawned by the Void), Vllyr was not proximal to the core of the design. Indeed, Vllyr was quite far away. But Vllyr’s influence was not great and was mostly present in that nothing in the Creation, save Leur, was eternal. Only gods directly spawned by the Void were so.
Leur loved its Creation and chose to participate directly in its unfolding. To populate the World, Leur fashioned beings as like to Itself as was possible, beings who might perceive the World’s beauty, love it as Leur did, and be moved to expand upon it. The prime drive of their lives was the core Leur gift: the desire and ability to create and change. These beings became known as human.
Leur channeled Itself into bodily forms of human flesh—expressions—and to house these expressions built for themselves a great City on the delta of the World Prime’s lifeblood river. This City was Îs and it was wondrous: water-blessed, shimmering and alive, with white sky-piercing towers that were visible from land and sea.
The Aryati
With Îs as their nexus Leur’s many expressions spun new parallel worlds to allow different variations of the primary World to grow and change in frightening and sometimes wonderful ways. Most expressions remained with the primary World, however, and attended the flowering of human creativity. Leur fostered the rise of the Aryati and their technology, which came to approximate Leur omnificence in power and scope. Leur expressions, while a singular godhead, were not uniform and some expressions felt unease with their Aryati creations.
Leur’s unease, however, was but a flutter upon a wind and Leur approved that its creations desired to push toward greater mastery of the Creation’s gifts. To this end Leur gave the Aryati four great Cities akin to their own. Sordan, they built first of all, upon the rich plain of Kuan. Next was Mormantalorus in the Mountains of Fire. Third was Mulsor upon the great sea Halassegos. Last they raised Permephedon, tallest and brightest, upon the center of World Prime, the place from which Leur had first spun their World.
The partnership of Leur and the Aryati yielded many treasures. The Aryati were shown access to the manifold other worlds of the Creation. Leur created a means of folding space by merging creative vision (i.e. magic) with technology—though this meant Leur must be present. For Leur there were adventures as many of its expressions accompanied the Aryati to the stars. A Leur expression created—and became an original component of—the Rill unified transportation system. Leur watched the evolution of human intellect and art, examined philosophy, witnessed how life found ways to grow, change and reproduce. Change, ever the impetus, radiated from the World Prime. It also led to its peril.
Lokenalys and Amynas
The Aryati soon coveted the godhead of Leur. To become gods themselves. Immortality, they believed, lay within reach of their technology. This was not possible unless they became Leur—or Vllyr. Still they sought to force this change upon their race.
In one of the worlds created by an expression that had chosen the form of a human male, they used technology to create a disruption that paralyzed and blanked the god-expression. This expression the Aryati captured and took to Sordan where they instilled him in a stasis chamber so that they could study the god.
One of the effects of the Aryati stasis and blanking was that Leur did not know precisely what had happened to its expression or where it had gone. Leur continued to interact with the Aryati but less than before.
An Aryati colony ship traveling toward a planet at the edge of their space encountered—or was discovered by—the corporeal entity of Vllyr. The Leur expression traveling with the ship recognized the god immediately before Vllyr destroyed the vessel. All lifeforms on the colony ship perished. Leur, being immortal and eternal, was not destroyed... though the expression was.
Leur warned the Aryati to cease their attempts to seed that sector of space, that Vllyr would be implacable and destroy all traces of Leur and its Creation, of which the colonies were a part—a part that could be pulled back, away from danger. The Aryati deemed their colonization effort paramount. What interested them far more was that they had encountered another god—one possibly more powerful than Leur, from which they had yet to glean godhood for themselves. Maybe this new god could be captured or dismantled to fulfill that goal. Their attempts to do so, however, merely pulled Vllyr’s attention more fully toward destroying them.
An Aryati prince named Amynas—a clone of the Aryati Hegemon Pankratos—became aware of the Leur expression Aryati biomages held captive, being experimented on in Sordan. Moved by pity for the captive god, Amynas devised a way to free him.
Much is told about how they fled Sordan and found passage to the outer colonies, where the Leur (named Lokenalys) teamed with a higher-level expression of Leur, Yfaryn, to forge a weapon that could work Change in Vllyr.
Lokenalys and Yfaryn forged the Leur Sword (later to be known as the Sword of Amynas) in the core of a decorticated star, in the process reigniting its outer shell. Yfaryn’s omnificence went into both processes and so Yfaryn’s expression ceased. The reignition of the star alerted Vllyr to Leur’s presence. Vllyr moved against the Aryati null ship aboard which Leur, Amynas and an attack force waited. Though Vllyr focused on Leur, who changed asteroids to shields and weapons against Vllyr, it was Amynas—sheathed in trans dimensional armor—who used the Sword to separate Vllyr’s limbs and neural core so as to render the god immobile. In that static state Vllyr could be dismantled.
Leur—expressed by Lokenalys because Yfaryn had transformed its omnificence into the Sword—warned the Aryati to destroy all parts of Vllyr. Vllyr remained a divine being, spawned by the Void, immortal and universal—but destroying its body would greatly limit its ability to interact directly with, or attack, anything physical. Despite this warning, the Aryati considered Vllyr sufficiently slaughtered and kept intact the spine and one of the god’s eyes. These they brought back to the Hegemon on World Prime. Pankrator used the god materials to create unbreakable ceremonial blades and the Undying Crown, which housed Vllyr’s Eye. The Undying Crown became the state crown of the Aryati Hegeistate and it bestowed great power upon its wearer—for Vllyr’s godhead, even in so reduced a form, radiated Order: obedience, conformity, and repression of other forces.
The powerful oppression exerted by the Aryati Hegeistate extended to the starfarer colonies, where it aroused resistance. They sent a fleet to threaten and negotiate. The Eye of Vllyr, however, drove Pankrator mad and craving only destruction; in his madness Pankrator and the Hegemons strove to destroy the rebels by sending the core power of Mulsor, the great City that was their capital, against the fleet. Many tried to stop the Hegemon, including Amynas, who the Hegemons had been holding captive, and Lokenalys who despite the danger would not leave his friend’s side.
Lokenalys and Amynas witnessed Pankrator’s madness and were able to seize the Sword, which Lokenalys had forged for Amynas’s hand. Another clone of Pankrator, Deus, carried off the Undying Crown after Mulsor erupted in violence. Many Hegemons and Aryati fled to the other worlds created by Leur expressions. Amynas and Lokenalys were separated. Deus ran off to Olympos with what remained of Vllyr.
Devastation
Mulsor’s destruction unleashed a cataclysm that destroyed the World Prime.
Leur’s thousandfold expressions realized that their Creation was doomed. One expression, Daln Time Welder, saw a way to salvage the great work—and Leur with it. Daln retrieved all expressions from all the worlds, including World Prime, in a great summoning of powers. By this uniting of all the expressions, Daln used the whole creative power of Leur to sunder Time, separating the Creation into temporal events. The former worlds—including those in space—now existed only in the Past, archived and no longer possessing Time or capacity to change... the Devastation was an event that was forever ongoing, never completed... and the Creation continued in a new, but wholly singular, World in which Time, Change, and Leur continued to be.
The Archived Worlds would be known as the First Creation.
The Devastation is called Gsch.
The continuation of Leur, Time and Change is the Second Creation—or simply the World.
Daln and thousands of other Leur expressions sacrificed their cognizance of godhood; their omnificence exists solely in barriers separating the Creation in Time. However, one cognizant expression of Leur remained: Lokenalys, who had fled to the safety, but stasis, of the Archived Past.
Exile
Vllyr was not yet vanquished. Leur survived, as did the Creation, but both were Changed and weakened.
Lokenalys, as the last remnant of the godhead, had many adventures in the Archived Past, a period known as Exile. So too did his friend Amynas. After finding each other again Lokenalys detected that Leur had produced a Second Creation. He and Amynas set out to find it—and so the story of the Return begins.
So too does Lokenalys’s design to replicate Leur gifts in preparation for Vllyr’s inevitable reemergence. As the Leur said to Amynas, “Being alone against such power is a terrible thing. We have to do something about that.”
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