First Light
Dawn
Gondolen
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The Waking World
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The Folk
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Class Notes
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Map
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The world is waking from its Dream. Not so long ago, the first dawn rose on the plains of Gondolen. With a yawn and a shake, new life roused, and soon the plains were teaming with herds of aurochs and deer, stalking cheetahs, and blustering boars. The long grass shivered in the early wind as flowers turned dewy petals to the rising sun, and the sky soon filled with the song of birds taking first flight.
The sun reached its peak on that new day, and its heat roused the erephim, the first folk, and with them joy. The erephim frolicked amidst the life around them, and thus began to learn its nature. They also saw that other beings had awakened that day: the spirits. Though beast and plant could not speak with the erephim, the spirits could. The erephim and spirits took delight in sharing their stories with each other.
In time, the wandering erephim came to the edges of the plains, where they found that the world ended in the chaotic wash of the Dream. But all around them came the waking, and the Dream receded before it. Here the erephim welcomed many new things: a river, flowing proud with schools of glittering fish, and in its reedy pools, the mero, second folk.
Overjoyed, the erephim flocked to the shores of the river. By this time, where the erephim went, the aurochs followed, thus the mero learned to herd. From the mero, the erephim learned to swim and fish. So it has gone as the waking continues. After the erephim and mero came the orim of the hills and bosen of the mountains.
But there were watchers in the Dream, whose existence faltered before the encroachment of time, order, logic, hope. Perhaps they would one day awaken, or perhaps they would simply vanish with the Dream. They recognized that even such thoughts of shrinking possibility heralded the waking, which ended possibility in certainty.
Some of these watchers chose to enter the world, dreams taking form in broken shards. The first were the gael, who mirrored the early folk and cloaked their true nature in the glamor of beauty. They sought understanding of the waking world, to see it as either threat or friend. They were followed by the gobeol, who saw that mortals still glimpsed the Dream in sleep. Through it, they could influence mortal fate.
They were welcomed as new folk despite their strange origins, thus the Dream began looking back into its waking.
