SECRET ORIGINS: THE BOOK OF CREATION
View from the Inside
The first time I saw the world, it was from behind the pages of a book. Every chapter filled my head with impossible wonders. Worlds unseen, each with their own unique mysteries to unfold. Creations of such awesome and terrible beauty that I never bothered to look up.
Even as my mom dragged me by hand, from country to country, I only had eyes for the fictional. Imagine my surprise when years later, I finally put the books down. Turns out, many of the crazy and magnificent things built with lurid prose in my mind’s eye happened to be real.
MYSTERIOUS ARCHAEOLOGY
The Book of Creation is a myth. It would have to be, as none here have ever seen it. Still, legend tells of a giant living tome chained to the foot of a tree on an ancient world, far far from here. A living book slumbering away beneath a canopy of shadows. Its ink-stained pages concealing the unfulfilled dreams of God.
Not that someone could ever access its contents. The book is a feral thing, deadly protective of its secrets just as those used by Taleweavers on Achades. Something impossible to tame.
“…ink-stained pages concealing the unfulfilled dreams of God.”
The story goes that in ancient times, the first Taleweaver approached while the book and its God slumbered. Knowing neither would ever share their secrets, they took a different tack. As the book breathed, the pages would swell and contract, and occasionally a page corner would separate ever so slightly from the rest. That’s when the Taleweaver would strike, tearing it free from the rest and fleeing into the night while the book was still groggy from its slumber.
Shades of a Different Dream
Not that real made things indisputably better. The world around me was just different. Where my colors may have been more vivid, or my beasts more vicious, the people I met shined with life and music and passion.
All I wanted to do was show them the strange menagerie of monsters and heroes I’d locked away in my spiral-bound notebooks.
THE ETERNAL REFRAIN
The first Taleweaver used that page to conjure from their own dreams. As time went on, it multiplied, transforming from a single page, into a loose arrangement of pages, then finally into an Agrippa of its own. Another living book in a long line of hungry tomes imbued with all the traits of its distant progenitor.
It wasn’t long before the first ‘weaver; now, a Master Weaver was carving blank pages from his own Agrippa to pass along to Fictors, initiates in the order. That they might one day master a living book of their own. If only they survived that long.
Now, centuries later, original the Book of Creation has become legend, even as its descendants are rampant in the world.