Chapter 1744: The Elythrii A million years had gone by, and the Origin Ouroboros Serpents had settled into their nature as the giver of life and light. Their enormous bodies that continued growing alongside the Origin Land created a shockingly beautiful line across the heavens. Occasionally, it was possible to hear the voices of the serpents when they chose to discuss amongst themselves, but you needed to be extremely high up in the heavens to do so, even higher than the burning stars. The light from their bodies shone below to a realm of breathtaking beauty and savage danger. After more than a million years of the realm being moved and reshaped by the hands of the Archai and the Bloodline Avatars, five massive continents surrounded by oceans had arisen from the Origin Land. Each continent hosts every biome from crystalline deserts to fungal jungles where trees hum with latent energy. The Origin Land was rich in a resource that would later be understood as Ether—the latent potential of this Reality, the substrate upon which the Archai work, bleeding through into the Story-Space that mortals would come to inhabit, which was represented by these five continents. In the first half of the millions of years that had passed, the Fragment of Potential stirred. It had lain dormant for more than five hundred thousand years within the first self-replicating proteins, in the ancient amphibians that crawled onto land, in the mighty reptiles that ruled the continents, and in the small, clever mammals that scurried in their shadows. It was not a soul, not yet. It was a directive, a compulsion encoded in the very quantum fields of their being: Grow. Understand. Become more. Rowan could have easily made every mortal spring into life fully formed, but that would have placed too much of his hands in their Destiny. The potential for greatness was already within them, and all the tools needed to achieve that greatness were within their reach. Of course, if he had placed such seeds of potential in a normal realm or dimension, it would have taken a longer time for them to sprout, but in the Origin Land, five hundred thousand years was all that was needed for the first seed to grow. The slow but steady engine of evolution revealed itself as a sharper claw, a keener eye, and a more complex social structure. With this process, a species emerged that named itself the Elythrii. In them, the Fragment ignited into a flame. This was what had awoken Rowan from his million-year slumber. His children had made an incredible creation outside the intervention of his Will. The name Elythrii that arose from the mouths and the hearts of the mortals broke the limits of space-time and awakened the consciousness of Eos. Rowan’s perception came to settle on the mortal, and their new form delighted his senses. The Elythrii are humanoid, with skin that subtly shifts color with emotion and eyes capable of perceiving a broader spectrum of light. Even as mortals, their bodies possessed a strength and beauty that would shame most immortals. He observed that they are tribal, fierce, and deeply intuitive. They live short, brutal lives, but they are storytellers and mystics. Their “short” lives were a century, but it was hard to see those who lived to an old age. Before the Elythrii rose, countless beasts had made these five continents their home, and they were powerful and savage, causing the Elythrii to live in a world filled with both dangers and opportunities. At this time, the Elythrii were slowly conquering a single continent, either killing off or taming the countless beasts that filled the land. Yet, even in such a savage domain, the growth of their society was nothing short of amazing, and it was not long before a name was given to this beautiful realm they came to inhabit. They called the land Elython. The name came from the depths of their consciousness, and it stemmed from the sights that most saw when they were near death. It was said in the distance, beyond the light of the six oceans of light above—which was the name of Origin Ouroboros above the realm—they could see a presence so large that their entire realm must surely rest on its single finger. This presence had been confirmed by the mystics and shaman to be real, and in order to venerate and understand this mysterious being, a name was given to their land, Elython, which meant the Finger of the Creator. Rowan saw the development towards mysticism by the Elythrii and was not surprised. Magic was the Fragment of potential’s first gift and not science. This was a deep, instinctual connection to Ether. At this stage of their development, the Elythrii do not cast spells; they will things to happen, and the Ether, responsive to consciousness, sometimes complies. This is Proto-Thaumaturgy. If any immortal from outside the realm could enter this place, they would be struck dumb with amazement. The act of forcing Reality to bend to the Will was the power of higher-dimensional immortals. Even gods could barely master this power and had to learn Intent before slowly pushing towards Will. Yet, the Elythrii, mortals instinctively knew how to wield the power of Will, with their greatest warriors and shamans slowly refining this process as the centuries rolled by. The beasts on Elython were born under the blood of two Primordial Entities, and as adults, they could easily rival a higher-dimensional immortal. For a group of mortals to fight against such power and slowly begin to claim a single continent in such a short time was a testament to the sheer power of their potential. Curious about the process they used in wielding their Will, Rowan watched closely. He saw a shaman from one of the numerous tribes; this shaman was of the Sun-Stalker tribe, chanting and dancing under the light of the largest and gentlest stars, which resembled moons, so he could encourage the rains to fall. He doesn’t know meteorology; he feels the tension in the air and, through ritual, persuades it to break Elython was a higher-dimensional realm whose weight equaled a Primordial Realm, and for anything to influence its path, it required a ridiculous amount of power, yet one shaman here was commanding rain to fall across a hundred miles of farm land. Rowan saw a hunter, cornered by a great saber-toothed Felix the size of a small hill. The hunter doesn’t just see the beast, she sees its life-force as a roaring red aura. In her terror, she projects a wave of pure fear. The Ether around them resonates, and the beast flinches, allowing her to escape. She has performed a primitive psychic strike. He saw a Stone-Singer artisan who was humming certain resonant frequencies that soften rock, allowing them to carve their cliff-city homes with astonishing precision. This is an age of magic, but it is unreliable, exhausting, and poorly understood. It is attributed to spirits, elementals, and gods. The Elythrii have created pantheons that unknowingly are personifications of the Archai. As extensions of his Will that ensured the smooth running of the realm, the touch of the Archai could be felt by the Elythrii, and they were amazingly able to accurately capture their essence. The first of the Pantheon was the Great Weaver, who was the Goddess of fate and destiny, depicted as a woman spinning a tapestry of stars. The second was the Stone-Shaper, who was the God of law and foundation, a stern, unmoving figure of mountain and crystal. The third of the pantheon was the World-That-Walks, represented by a dual-faced god of destruction and renewal, said to oversee the seasons and volcanoes. The last of the pantheon whose status was still fiercely debated across many tribes was the Thousand-Eyed Watcher, a quiet, overlooked deity of knowledge and memory. Rowan quietly watched a Life-Warden for Elython, who was an Archai representing the Maelstrom of Destruction and Rebirth, observing them from a distance. The form of the Archai shimmers in the upper atmosphere, vaguely feminine, after being slowly influenced by the worship of the mortals. A powerful and perceptive shaman might be lucky to view her form in the heavens, but this was most unlikely unless she allowed it to happen. She sees the Potential flickering brightly in this species and gently deflects a comet fragment that would have caused an extinction-level event 50,000 years in the future, giving the spark more time to grow.