The Second World and the Aspect of Fire
The beginning of our world had a fundamental flaw. When the gods began the process of fabricating the universe they created two worlds, reflections of each other but only in the most ephemeral sense. To imagine the nature of our universe, imagine a woven quilt hung from the ceiling of the room. One side is the pretty side, full of ornate embroidery, sequins, and complex tessellated patterns. The other side has no adornments at all except for the ugly stitches that hold the designs of the other side together.
Our world exists on the underside of the quilt. We know little about the other side outside of our knowledge that it exists. While that other side is lush and rich with all the potential energies that drive motion, ours is poor in those things. While growth, life, and death all existed, said processes were the most that ever happened.
That was the state Aklis, caretaker god of the second world, found our ancestors in. Those poor creatures would be recognizable to us from how they looked, but they wore no clothes and built no homes. Bereft of warmth, they clung close to the ground and huddled together in shivering masses. Aklis took pity on them and resolved to do something to give them warmth.
While it wasn’t possible for him to change the inherent nature of our world, Aklis discovered that he was able to reach into our ancestors themselves. When he presented his idea to the other gods, however, many were skeptical. Enhin didn’t like the idea of his designs being interfered with and modified regardless of whether they were flawed or not. Kalaya, perhaps jealous of her brother’s idea, forbade him from manipulating the Aspect of Fire that she possessed.
Aklis wasn’t deterred. Shrugging off his sister’s order, he snuck away with a part of the Aspect of Fire and went down to our world. He didn’t have much time before Kalaya would notice what he was doing, so he --
Source 1
[scoured the planet and found certain individuals and lineages with strong potential in the ability to penetrate the layer between worlds and harness the Aspect. He whispered in the ears of these exceptional ones as they slept, instructing them on how to reach through that layer.]
Source 2
[rushed down to the planet. Kalaya was already waking up so he hurried his way across every continent and every archipelago, spreading the ability at random to whoever he happened to see first before he sped away to the next destination.]
This was how our ancestors attained the Aspect of Fire. Things changed almost immediately. By summoning fire they were able to keep themselves warm at night and in the colder seasons. They could cook their food and derive better sustenance from it, allowing them to grow larger and travel greater distances. Less concerned with avoiding death by exposure, they could turn their minds towards matters of more material importance like inventing and creating tools, which in turn improved their conditions even moreso.
The summoners who possessed the gift became the focal points of their tribes. In some places they traveled to each family’s home every morning and evening to make sure their hearth was lit. In other places they built a mountain of fuel in the middle of the village and let it burn throughout the day for anyone to use. Regardless of how the fire was distributed every tribe provided the harnessers of the Aspect with tribute and an elevated status, especially when they discovered that Aklis had been clever enough to make it so that the Aspect was transferred down bloodlines. By receiving gifts and honors for their services to the tribe, summoners in turn could consolidate their social standing.
Gifts become tribute and positions of honor become ossified and hereditary. Many summoners became the de facto chiefs and queens of their tribes. Others preferred to retain spiritual titles like Priestess of Kalaya. Regardless of the title the sum effect was the same: summoners came to rule the tribes in which they lived.
It didn’t take long for the summoner clans to realize that their power came from the distribution of fire as much as the Aspect itself. By withholding fire they could demand more in tribute or punish clans who opposed them on this or that matter. By being more generous with fire to one clan instead of the others they could reward their allies and show everyone what the model of good behavior was without the hostile gesture of actually saying it. Attempts to circumvent, like stealing embers from a bonfire and bringing them elsewhere, became crimes. Itinerant summoners who traveled to different tribes to start anew were quickly intercepted and brought into the fold of the existing summoner clan or driven away. As tribes kept expanding the costs of that expansion continued to expand too, and so the tribute extracted got more and more onerous.
Those without the Aspect were in a hard position. Though there were far more of them then there were summoners, banishing or killing tyrants wasn’t an option as it would leave the tribe without the ability to harness fire, collapsing everything.
There were other schemes that came about. In the north was a tribe who reversed the balance of power. Summoners were stripped of power and became communal property of everyone else, made to light fires at spearpoint. Their reproduction was similarly controlled by the tribe. Despite these efforts, the tribe was plagued with uprisings from the subjugated summoners who started wildfires or burned through the restraints and cells they were held in. Scores of them died and the tribe was at risk of losing the Aspect. To compensate they expanded outwards, waging war on neighboring tribes and absorbing them and their summoners. Invariably there would be more uprisings from the new influx of summoners and more bloodletting as a result, and the cycle would begin again.
Far away in the archipelagos of the south there were three tribes who allied with each other after generations of constant war. They agreed that the reason for their wars had been the scarcity of fire and the uneven ways it was distributed from tribe to tribe and within individual tribes themselves. Central to their alliance was a plan to first intermarry their summoner clans. From there, a census would be taken of every village and every family would also be intermarried into the summoner clans. In this way within a few generations every member of each tribe would be able to harness the Aspect of Fire.
While the means were different, the end result was the same: to change the relationship of the tribal structure to the Aspect of Fire. The right sort of reengineering made empires possible. These schemes didn’t go unnoticed. The tribes between the two empires began to meet. Their summoner clans agreed that their neighbors’ practices were an existential threat. As the two continued to expand the summoner clans caught in between could choose between enslavement or absorption into an undifferentiated mass where their ancient privileges would be gone. Neither of these were acceptable. They formed a consortium and set out to destroy both empires before the empires destroyed them.
The First War of the Aspect raged. For years there was a stalemate, but over time the fundamental flaws in the consortium began to rise to the surface. Its armies, mostly manned by non-summoners by necessity, began to learn about the Northern Empire or the Southern Empire depending on which front they fought in. Dissension formed in the ranks. To prevent revolt and defection the consortium ruled that armies could only be led by summoners, even if that meant passing over a qualified non-summoner warrior over a less-qualified summoner. This not only made discontent worse, but contributed to more defeats in battle. Both empires sensed this weakness and began inciting the consortium’s non-summoners to rise up against their rulers in return for rewards. Both empires offered them something better in one form or another. Pushed into a corner and being devastated on all fronts, the consortium decided to bar non-summoners from the armies entirely. To make up for the drastic loss in numbers they sought out summoners with exceptional abilities and the capacity to use them in novel ways like creating walls of fire, melting sand to create razor sharp towers of glass to block off beaches and deserts from invading armies, and boiling rivers and seas to cook fleets alive.
The level of devastation increased by countless orders of magnitude. It reached the point that Enhin, normally preoccupied with the other side of the quilt, noticed. He summoned Aklis and Kalaya and raged at them, demanding to know the meaning of the mess made of his work and how they proposed to fix it.
Kalaya glared at Aklis and said that the entire thing had been a mistake. She didn’t know who introduced the Aspect of Fire to the second world, but said that it would be best to simply wipe the slate clean. Burn the transgressing races from the face of the world and return things to equilibrium.
Aklis scoffed. He pointed out how the introduction of the ancestor races to the second world without the means to give themselves sustenance was itself an inherent flaw in equilibrium. To remove them now would only exacerbate the problem.
Enhin asked what his solution to the problem would be then.
Aklis said that the best way to do it would be to eliminate the reason the conflict had begun in the first place.
Kalaya it might be desirable (she may not have been opposed to devotion being granted to her in place of Aklis) but was skeptical as to how it would stop any of the chaos. After all, wasn't it the summoners who enabled the escalation of the destruction?
Enhin interrupted before Aklis could answer. The elimination of any distinction between summoner and non-summoner would, ideally, remove the impetus to fight. No further point in a regime of enslavement or attaching a material premium to the ability to manifest fire. Sensing what Kalaya was about to ask, he added that the threat of greater destruction might actually lessen the overall threat of chaos as every tribe would know that the other had the destructive capability of the others. If they chose to pursue another Aspect War in spite of that knowledge then that would be their fault, not that that of the gods.
Kalaya asked who should be the one to deliver this new gift to the other world then.
Enhin shrugged. If their goal was equilibrium then it only made sense that it should be delivered by she and Aklis together.
And that was how our world came into its full realization of the Aspect of Fire. Not long after came all the other Aspects, but that’s a story for another day.