Nianze Myths – The Prehistoric Ages – Part IV

This is a series of a story-like history for Nianze. It’s meant to be written from the viewpoint of Yurin’s history books. Therefore nothing of this must be true. It’s only the common knowledge on the advanced level. Please read this text as its a story and imagine that this is a fact book and remember that your character¹ may not know everything I write here, but mostly this is the common view and this is what the skilled or school-trained person in Yurin knows. But know that only a selected few actually go to school in this world too, so most have a little wicked view of the history and therefore you can, as an example, twist this text and remove some elements if you want to play a character who you don’t imagine to have been around scholars or been to a school of any kind.

Chapter Four – The Stray Age
This age is also called “The Age of Heroes”, but it’s mostly fairy tales and legends of different kind. But some also call this age for “The Dark Dawn of Men”, and dark was it indeed. With Yurin scarred and severely wounded, the planet crumbled in pain. The skies were dark and glowing and fragments from the shattered planet sometimes rained down, destroying and killing even more. Lesser demons and their spawns were still straying around the planet trying to kill everything. Some of the Demians² still hunted them, while the Angels themselves had since long escaped from what they thought were a lost planet. Many animals, creatures and some of the races that still lived on were made extinct due to the meteor showers and the earthquakes, not to mention when the earth cracked open throwing up melted stones that destroyed even the mightiest of things. Needless to say, the planet was in great despair and chaos.

This is when heroes started to emerge. The Demians had suffered great losses in the end of the war but now the biggest threats had disappeared. Some of the bravest humans that had survived the havoc started to fight alongside with the Demians trying to cleanse the planet from the Demonic Abominations. In the beginning, it was only a few humans that tried to rid the planet of the abominations and monsters while most of the humans mostly ran around confused and unknowing about how to survive. When the biggest threat had been eliminated and most demons had fled, some of the humans tried to gather the other humans and lead them to safer places. In small groups they wandered the planet that had begun to calm itself, in search for safer places. But everywhere they went they just saw big indomitable mountains or strange watery plains³ impossible to cross.

This was when the gods finally revealed themselves again. During the Demonic Wars they had been very passive, mostly watching what was going on. The Demians and humans had never seen the gods before and didn’t know anything about them so when three glowing giants just emerged out of nowhere in front of them they believed that they were demons. They tried desperately to fight only to discover that all their ability to fight had gone. All thought that this was the end when the gods finally spoke. They calmed down the humans and said to them that they had saved the planet. As their gratitude for this, the planet was now theirs to rule on one condition, that eight of the greatest humans would be a medium for the gods’ wishes for the planet. They all agreed to this and were given a mission to collect all humans and find eight different locations to settle down.

But this task wasn’t as easy as it sounded. When all humans where collected a great number of conflicts arose. Who was the most powerful and greatest of them all? Who would lead who to where, and why should that person lead when some where perfectly capable to take care of themselves? The skies were clearing up and the monsters had gone from the planet, so why should they even bother to listen to those big demons that tried to control them? This ended up with all humans going everywhere in every direction trying to survive on their own, completely neglecting the gods and those who wanted to believe that the gods would help them. The few who where left with this belief, both humans as well as Demians, then decided to go hunting but this time they would go hunting humans and try to make them believe that this was the only way to survive.

What follows and how it was done have a great many versions that are much disputed and with tales and legends to compete with too. However, somehow some humans or Demians succeeded to convince the humans to stick together and build up places to live on. During this period they also met the elves and discovered many creatures that had survived that they knew nothing about. The world was completely new to them all and they knew nothing about it but they learned as quickly as they could to manage to survive. But in the end they had all settled down and starting to build things to ease their living. In the end of this age eight great leaders where selected and given celestial powers, these they called half-gods. Some of them where demians but not all of them, some weren’t even humans at all and these eight where only the first to come…⁴.

– Summary from the fourth chapter of the Universal Magistrate Record of History, Magicka, first edition Year 87 according to the Magical Calendar

1. If you are a player ↩

2. The name the humans gave the Demi-Humans ↩

3. Oceans, which didn’t exist during the Demonic Ages ↩

4. For more information about the end of the Stray Age, read The Book of Legends or the supplement chapter The Celestial Raising ↩