Origins
Before there was a Beginning, there was Madness, Gemaed, an infinite melange of impossibilities. And yet, even from Madness, accidental meaning may sometimes arise. From the chaos, long ago, something with Order was born. She knew herself to be different from all that surrounded her. And she was lonely. She measured and counted, culling more Order from the Madness, and Order, as is its way, replicated herself. As Order expanded, she culled more meaning and sense from the Madness, noting pattern and shape, intention and dedication. Her ranks swelled and she worked tirelessly, creating more and more structure to oppose the chaos around her. Slowly, and with great pain, Order stretched away from Madness.
Her name in the old language is Cierren. Time.
As Order and Chaos pulled ever farther from one another, they reached a point where the tension between them became too great. And there, at the point of greatest stress, where order lost its battle to entropy all while recreating itself from the decay in an endless cycle, the World was born.
At first the World was a barren place, but the swirling dance of Order and Chaos gave birth to Nature, Anian. Anian longed for Order, found her beautiful, and strove endlessly to make her gifts. He decorated the world and created children, all, like him, yearning for Order but cursed with equal parts Madness, all of them caught in the endless cycle of creation and destruction, of sense and senselessness, of function and impulse.
The Moons
Madness ever hates stability. Growing restless and tired of the ceaseless cycles of the world and his stand-off with Cierren, Gemaed threw all of the energy he could muster in the World into one small part of it and then ripped himself free, hoping to shatter the fledgling planet and destroy upon it. The plan would have worked, too, had not Cierren caught it. Though it quivered with malevolence in her hands, she smoothed it into a perfect ball and set it into an ordered orbit around the World. Men have since called it Grhain, hatred in the Old Language, for though her act saved Anion and his children from complete annihilation, a great many perished. And Gemaed's influence was not diminished.
Many years passed and Anion once more decorated the World and spread his seed. Creatures half-mad sang praises to Cierren, even while slaying one another under the blood-red eye of Grhain. Again, Gemaed grew restless, and again, he focused himself on one part of the world, this time using the pull of Grhain to strengthen his power. With explosive force he ripped free more of the planet. Cierren moved to catch the piece while Anion screamed in pain at the death of his children, but this time Gemaed was wiser. As Cierren's hand moved over the bit of shattered planet, he let forth a great cry and split the shattered piece again in twain.
And again Order made sense of Madness. Cierren formed two small orbs of the shattered halves and set them, too, into orbit around the World. Today men call them Heaglos, fear, and Aetlanas, desolation. All of Anion's children were slain in the event, and nature himself was almost destroyed. But the World continued to spin, turning its face in equal parts to dark Madness and brilliant Order and eventually, he healed himself. Broken-hearted, Anion worked to beautiful and repopulate the World. And this time, he sought to create among his children some who loved Order as much as he. Man was born and placed at the pinnacle of the natural order.
And yet, Anion could not escape the madness that is half of his soul, and so man is imperfect. Even as he yearns for order, he succumbs to chaos. And even as he is born, he begins to die.
The New Order
After his last effort to destroy the World, Madness was mostly trapped in the three moons. The World settled into a more ordered place. Man began to thrive, worshiping order and punishing madness, creating in the light and hiding from the dark. Once a place where Gemaed regularly raised and leveled mountains, dug and drained seas and threw continents together, the World became more reliable. Cierren was not fully able to eliminate madness from the world. Nor, in her heart, did she wish to, for she had come to realize that Anion and his children would cease to exist without it. And so chaos continued to spin the world and the cycle of life and death, creation and destruction, rolled on.
Now, however, the moons made their presence known. Every nine years, Grhain swings particularly close to the planet and madness asserts itself. For most of that year, growing in intensity during Planting, peaking during Priming and ebbing during Fallow, the effects of Madness on the world are strengthened, children born in these years are more likely to have deformities or suffer mental or emotional problems, crops are poor, deals fall apart, strange creatures appear. These ninth years are known as Anogrhain, years of hatred.
Worse still, every 81 years, Grhain and Heaglos align, and an Anoheag, or year of fear begins. Years of fear work much like the more common Anoghrain, only the effects of madness are magnified. Men caught in madness infested lands during such a year mutate nearly beyond recognition, driven mad by hallucinations and delusions. Almost all children born in an Anoheag are deformed or deranged in some way. Crops fail, fights and wars break out over the simplest of matters and nature Himself thrashes restlessly, mindlessly hurting His children.
Worst of all, every 729 years, all three of the moons align, creating an Anoatlan, year of desolation. Civilization as man know it does not survive these conjunctions. War, famine, plague arrive in wave after wave, crashing against the bulwark of government and tearing it down like a castle of sand. Countless men and women die, no children are born and the land seems to eat up the very vegetation it grows. Brother turns on brother, books burn and the seas run with blood and change their position on the World. When at last the year has passed, those who have survived with enough sanity to regroup look in wonder upon a world they barely recognize. They band together for protection and the cycle of civilization begins again.
No one knows how many cycles have passed in this way since the mad moons were born.
The Elhorran Cycle
The Elhorran Cycle is comprised of the 729 years prior to the last year of desolation and is significant in many ways. The two most important, however, are the birth of the Church and the rise of the cities that have survived into the Draedic Cycle.
The Elhorran Cycle is named for the empire which it birthed. The Elhorran Empire came to span most of the known world by 400 EC. A matriarchy, it was ruled by an empress, the crown passing to the ruler's eldest daughter. Rooted in tradition and intensely organized, its rule spread quickly and, unlike kingdoms in the cycles past, it managed to maintain control of lands it conquered with practices of assimilation and tolerance.
At the height of the Elhorran Empire's power, there was no formalized way of worshiping Cierren. For centuries, people had simply worked to maintain order in their own lives and those of their family's, offering words of thanks for a bountiful harvest and seeking out signs of disorder to cull in the event of misfortune. This laxity in religious practice ended up dividing the populace in fundamental ways. The majority of the Empire's citizens gradually started to feel a certain apathy about religion, chalking it up to myth. This group considered itself enlightened; they believed that the true message of the old texts and oral traditions was to honor contracts and laws so that man might live amicably in society one with the other. The God of Madness, Gemaed, was largely dismissed as a metaphorical figure of lawless disorder. The second group, much smaller, believed intensely in the warnings of the old words and held certainty that Cierren, Anion and Gemaed were very real. This second group sought to create a codified way of not only worshiping Order but of spreading her influence in the world and banishing Gemaed once and for all. This movement, and its people, gradually came to be centered in a city called "Pallenhad".
In 468 EC, the leaders of the new movement held a great council that is now known as the Circadean Pellenpate. This council set forth the hierarchy of the new Church, established its core beliefs, set forth which of the old texts were to be compiled into its Holy Book and declared its evangelical intention to save the world from Madness. The Church named itself the Circadean o'Conn, or "Great Council of Order".
At first, the birth of Circadean o'Conn was barely registered in the imperial palace, but the Church rapidly grew in size and influence. People were inclined to think well of order anyway, and, ever desirous to beat back misfortune, a great many swelled its ranks. More, the Cicadean o'Conn offered something more: a guided path for achieving eternal life through unity with Cierren herself. Perhaps nothing compels man more than his need to survive, and people dedicated not only themselves, but their property to the cause.
It was this last that brought the Church into direct conflict with the Empire. Lailas, the Empress in 593 EC, declared the Cicadean o'Conn a subversive political movement disguised as a religion and outlawed its practice, actively persecuting members who gathered publicly. The growth of the Church was curtailed, but its members continued to meet in secret and, during the last one hundred and fifty years of the Elhorran cycle, the nine great priests (Elspa, Genner, Opho, Dagfor, Nesh, Anuth, Fantha, Tarn and Sora) were born. Dagfor and Elspa were both martyred to the cause, killed by Imperial forces in 648 and 682 EC, respectively.
729 EC brought the Anoatlan, a year of desolation, and the Empire crumbled.
The Pellendric Cycle
A curious thing happened in 729 EC (or, 0 PC). It seems the priests of Cicadean o'Conn were onto something, for though there was still mass upheaval and terrible carnage, those cities in which the Church had a strong presence, particularly Pellenhad, were less damaged than others. Some small fragment of the Church and much of its writings survived. It was as if the devotion to Order had, in some small way, shielded the faithful from the full impact of the Desolation. Though the cities were largely decimated, none of their buildings left standing, the survivors remained and began to rebuild rather than fleeing to the wilderness as in previous cycles. Here and there, across the known continent, half-demolished settlements remained.
With the empress and her line dead, and much of the infrastructure (roads, bridges, aqueducts, cannals, etc) destroyed, these settlements did not seek unification, but rather gathered their own leaders, created their own sets of laws and distinct identities. These city-states, as they have become known, now dot the landscape of the continent. Though many of them are ancient cities dating from the Elhorran empire, there a few new ones have risen as well, and none of them consider themselves a part of any defunct empire except perhaps the survivors of Ellorhad itself. The Theocracy of Pellenhad shines perhaps the most brightly of all of these jewels, the seat of a newly restrengthened Church, no longer hidden from the laws of an ancient, secular empire.
The Cicadean o'Conn now openly spreads its influence through churches in every city. Many, particularly of the masses, have welcomed the Church with open arms, inspired by the success of Pellenhad in the last year of desolation. Still, some old distrust remains; many leaders watch the growing strength of the Church with unease, for though it is a religious institution it remains a political one as well, no longer afraid through throw its influence around and demand repayment of favors.
Much of the wild lands beyond city walls still show the strong influence of madness and there are spots which seem to be particularly volatile. To these areas, the Church sends its monastic orders for it is central to human belief now that controlling madness reduces the damage of its outbreaks and that madness left unchecked will spread. Indeed, one city state in particular, rejecting the teachings of the church, now lies in ruins, succumbed to madness in the year 567 PC. Shannath. While most monasteries are composed of a single sect of monks, Connovar, the monastery near the hot spot of Shannath's Ruins, is a new experiment: a community of monks composed of each of the Church's nine monastic sects.
The Present Day
It is currently year six hundred and forty-three of the Pellendric Cycle, notated 643 PC.
The city states of the continent form a myriad of shifting constellations, an ever-changing diplomatic network of alliances, wars, trade agreements, inter-marriages, and betrayals. Over all, the Church holds strong sway, its influence on the masses essential for maintaining order.
Beyond the great walled cities, the monastic orders do their best with few resources to combat the growing effects of madness. And one area in particular seems particularly volatile: the Ruins of Shannath. Some even claim that Gemaed himself inhabits the ruins, growing his power to once again attempt shattering the World. There, at the monastery of Connovar, the brothers and sisters of the Church wage a desperate battle…
