Older than the gods — older, perhaps, than the world's own memory of itself — are the Great Spirits of Fire and Ice. They are not gods in the way the Elders are gods. They have no faces they were born with, no thrones, no commandments. They are the living principles of fire and of cold, vast intelligences that dwell at the deep heart of the world, and the wisest priests admit that even the Elders could only befriend them, never command them.
"The gods we may pray to. The Spirits we may only hope to be spared."
When the star-born Elders first came to Kworgale, they found the Spirits already here, already ancient, already burning and already still. The two could not be unmade, only bargained with — and the great pact that allowed mortal life to flourish in this world was struck not only among the Elders but with the Spirits as well. Every flame ever lit in a temple of the Ruby, the faithful are told, is a borrowed ember of the first fire itself.
The Great Spirit of Fire dwells in the Pyreheart Nexus, the molten core-sanctum where creation and destruction are the same act; her counterpart, the Great Spirit of Ice, keeps the Everfrost Sanctum, where all things are preserved, structured, and held against decay. Fire is passion, energy, growth and ruin; Ice is patience, order, preservation and engineering. They are opposites, and yet — unlike the gods, who warred — the two Spirits have never stood against one another. Their balance is the quiet hinge on which the whole living world turns. The fire-spirit's nature, and the long shadow she casts over the present age, is told in full on the page of the Great Spirit of Fire.
Yet fire can be made to weep. In the frozen north, the Glacial Dominion has fought a war without end against tides of demons that pour from a wound near the Pyreheart — for a great imprisoned power festers there, and its torment agitates the Spirit of Fire into spasms of creation gone wrong. The Spirit is not the enemy in that war. She is its first and oldest victim — a primordial warmth made to birth horrors by the thing chained beneath her, while the children of the world stand against the tide she cannot stop herself from raising.
CharacterThe Great Spirit of FireOlder than the gods, older than the kingdoms and the kings who pray to them, the Great Spirit of Fire is no mere deity — she is fire itself, given will and shape. She is the…
RegionThe Glacial DominionA vast frozen realm spanning much of north and northeastern Kworgale, ruled by the immortal Frost Queen Glacya from the Iridescent Throne within the Crystalline Palace of…
LoreThe Religion of the RubyThe Ruby is the most beloved and most feared of the gods of the human south — and of all the divine powers of Kworgale, she alone is worshipped not as a distant maker but as a…
CharacterMeryniaBorn into royalty and crowned at sixteen, Merynia once ruled as the Radiant Queen of Risbern — a beacon of divine light in a world shadowed by corruption. But fate is cruel to…
CharacterGlacyaLast of the First Iceborn and sovereign of the Glacial Dominion. An immortal Elehath born of the Warden of Stillstars and the Ruby of the Wilds, Glacya commands unrivaled mastery…
CharacterSalyriaSalyria is the Flamekeeper of the Emberguard — the sacred order that tends creation fire, the living flame that heals and renews rather than destroys. Red-haired and green-eyed,…
CityFlammundThe lake-kingdom where the Infernal Creed was first proclaimed — an independent Suvanar monarchy of eighty thousand, holiest city of the faith, and the respectable face of the…
RegionNorth-Eastern KworgalyaThe continent's far north-eastern corner, charted at a single lakeside garrison in the taiga — Ausavat, easternmost holding of the Glacial Dominion.
