Elder Gods

The Elder Gods are barely even whispered in myth in the modern world of Shadowfire, yet their influence has reached down through the long ages since the creation of the world. Only the Lords of Fire, the Deepkin of Novalucca and the Undying of Ophilias retain any memory or records of them. Some obscure references can be found within the tomes of pre-Destruction lore held within the library of The Academy at New Lafaelle, but The Church of the Faceless dismisses these as little more than fables.  

From an unformed chaos

At the beginning of time, the cosmos was nothing but magic - an infinite and unformed chaos of pure potential. No-one knows how or why the Elder Gods came into being, if it was just a random by-product of this chaos, or if there was some cosmic design at play. The Elder Gods themselves did not know.   Some believe that the magics of creation responded to the one underlying truth of the cosmos - that everything must balance. For every spark of light, there is a mote of shadow, for every birth, there is a death and for every moment of growth, there is one of decay. Perhaps it was this need for balance that brought the Elder Gods into being.  

Beings of hunger

The Elder Gods found themselves within the endless magics of creation. They swam like vast leviathans of nothingness through the bright chaos and they fed upon the energy around them in a writhing exaltation of primal bliss.   Eventually though, these Elder Gods craved for more to satiate their appetites. They realised that with the power of their hunger and desire they could manipulate the forces around them, so they set about bringing order to the unbridled chaos. They could craft and mould, manipulate and cajole. They made themselves masters of the cosmos and began to use the magic to create the stars and the worlds on which they could experiment with their desire, to find new and varied ways to satisfy their hungers.   The Elder Gods would create new worlds from the chaos, coalescing the energies before sending them spinning and dancing across the ever growing void they left behind. They would seed each new world with their desire and wait for the ripening before descending to devour what they had made.  

The seeding of the world

They did this for what may have been an eternity before boredom set in. The pure chaos of creation had changed. What was once endless brightness and infinite potential had become an ordered dance of the heavenly bodies the Gods had created. it was predictable and known. The Elder Gods desire could no longer be satiated, and some craved now to experience novelty. To feel that satiation of their hunger again, as if for the first time.   And so a few of the Elder Gods created one new world, the one that would later be known as Shadowfire. The created it like all the others, but upon its ripening into life, they did not devour it whole as they had always done. Instead, they split their own selves into uncounted physical manifestations - the first of the Elder Avatars - and they seeded these onto this new world. Each Avatar was but a fragment of what they once were and retained little memory of their previous existence. They strode across the earth in their thousands, evolving into new forms, varied and terrible. And as they strode across the land, they subjugated and devoured as they went.   In the myths of the Deepkin, this is known as The Harvest.