The Primal Discord

A facet of the Old Reckonings: the war before the gods swore — the primordial violence the world was fought out of. Creation, the doctrine held, was not made in peace but wrestled into being, and a deep unrest was left in the ground of things when the fighting stopped. One dead college's origin-myth, disputed like the rest.

The Old Reckonings do not say the world was made in peace. They say it was argued into being — that before the Sworn Gods swore, there was a discord so large that existence and un-existence contested the same ground, and a deep unrest still runs under all things as that argument refusing to end. The gods swore, the doctrine held, because they had to: a compact of exhaustion after a war of making and unmaking that left the cosmos bruised into its current shape. The word 'Sworn' has always carried this — an oath taken in the aftermath, not the beginning. What they swore to stop was each other. This is what the Vyr are said to know and say obliquely when they call that unrest a 'held breath': it is not meditation, it is ceasefire. And the Sundering — Vallen's breaking — was not a unique disaster but a recurrence, the reckoners taught, the discord re-entering at the smallest scale the world can hold it: one god, one work, one man-made shrine. The doctrine allows no exceptions. It has only scales — which is, its critics note, exactly what a doctrine says when it cannot be disproved.