In the beginning, so far back that all have forgotten, there was nothing but a dead rock floating through space and, at its heart, burned a small flame. Small but so hot the rock cracked, and in those cracks, fire and air mixed and gave birth to Dragons.
Winged beasts of incredible violence and power, with scales that glittered like stars and breath as hot as the heart of the rock that birthed them. In the Years of Creation, they took to the skies and breathed fire and destruction and life into the rock.
The great battles between dragons rent the rock and filled the sky with smoke and ash. Slowly, they reformed the world. They scarred the rock, created mountains and seas, and the crevasses that would one day become rivers.
As the rock broke and changed life came to another creature, Giants. Made from stone broken away from the mountains, their footsteps left lakes and valleys in their wake, and they began to erect great stone halls. They began to shape the rock as they wanted and one day, decided that as they were made from the very stone that was the world, they should rule it alone and began to hunt the Dragons.
The Giants turned on the Dragons and ripped off their wings. The Dragons and the Giants fought for a thousand years until the greatest dragon, Gallassia, mother of the dragon Gallagaroth, who would be so important to the Children of Arrawn, learned to breathe fire so hot it made the very rock of the world explode. The Dragons turned this fire on the Giants, causing explosions so great it changed the atmosphere of the world and brought on a hundred years of rain.
The rain filled the oceans, then the lakes and the rivers. Water mixed with the blood of dragons killed and from this mix came the first living things to walk the rock. The first plants and creatures of all size and appetite and they spread across the rock. They grew and grew and grew, until there were too many of them for the world. But they kept growing, because there was no death then. Fearing they would be consumed by these growing things, the Dragons burned the whole world and left nothing but piles of ash that became deserts and mountains and hills.
The rock began to deteriorate with the loss of the living things, but the Dragons were not so foolish as to make the same mistake twice. Gathering the ash of the living and the bones of the giants they covered them in their blood and breathed fire and from this storm came death and they called him Arrawn, who walked on two legs and was the end of all things.
For many years, the only living thing on the rock was Arrawn. In his loneliness, he created life, but as before, it grew too large too quickly, and they ravenged the rock. Starving, they turned on the Dragons and decimated Gallassia's children until her youngest, Gallagaroth, led the last of the Dragons in the First Great Burning. The Dragons forbid Arrawn from creating life again, but from the bodies of the rotting Dragons come new forests and vegetation.
The rock flourished for a thousand years until the Great Dying began and Arrawn created life once again, insects and animals that renewed the vegetation.
In thanks, the Dragons permitted Arrawn to create humans again, provided he did not release them onto the rock.
Arrawn pulled twenty of the brightest constellations from the sky and put them inside forms of clay and stone and then the dragons breathed fire, and they became alive. Arrawn's twenty children lived with him in the World of the Dead, but they longed for the World of the Living. Watching life flourish and grow through the veil that separated the two worlds.
They longed for the storms, for the grass and dirt beneath their feet, for the mountains towering above them, for the mysteries and curiosities and dangers of life that did not exist in the never-changing underworld. They are all terribly curious, for Arrawn created curiosity and will when he created his children so that they would never be mindless or bored, and once they have discovered all there is to know of the unchanging World of the Dead, they turn their attention to the ever-changing World of the Living.
But they were forbidden from crossing the veil.
Until Arrawn's oldest, Llewellyn, discovered a way to tear the veil and led his siblings through to the World of the Living and into the sunlight.
In exchange, the Dragons demand life on the Rock to balance out mortal humans, and Arrawn grudgingly created Elves, Dwarves, and dozens of lesser races but refuses to allow them into the Underworld, dooming them to eternal lives on the rock. Arrawn retreated to the Underworld, and the Dragons retreated into the Wilds, leaving the world of Byd Seren to their creations.
Llewellyn negotiated a truce with the Dragons, allowing them to remain in the living world, but Arrawn, enraged at their betrayal, banished them from ever returning home. Due to the tears in the veil created by their escape, the mixing of magic of the dead and the living created the Thrall, monsters that did not belong in either world and would devour both if left unchecked.
Arrawn cursed his willful children, before they could ever find peace or their home again, they would first have to repair of their tears in the veil and defeat the Thrall.
Despite Llewellyn and his siblings flourishing on the Rock, from them descend all the lines of humans we currently know, none ever found peace under their father's curse.
One by one, they desired to return home but were barred from doing so until they completed their tasks.
~ tbc