In the beginning, there was nothing, save the Great Old Ones.
They existed within the netherspace of nothing, dormant and dreaming statues, until the oldest exhaled for the first time and the universe was born. His sister was the first to awaken and as she opened her eyes and set her eyes on the quietly smoldering and unfurling matter of space, time began to flow.
The youngest of the Great Ones, however, was the first to move and the first to speak. He coiled himself a body that would not uproar the newly formed universe and set forth. From his breath were shaped the stars and from his words, he whispered planets into being and took their clay into the palms of his hands and called up animals and plants by the thousands, sprinkling them across the galaxies of the universe.
And as time unraveled and the universe expanded, the youngest Great One came to be known as Death, for everything he created was doomed to die. After eons of traveling and creating, Death reached the heart of the universe. And there, cradled in the center, arose the last and most favored planet to be made from his own hands, Ora.
Ora was equal parts ocean and land, with the water surrounding the sweeping great continent like a vast cloak of liquid azure. From the galaxy's settling stardust, Death called forth the fey folk, murmuring bits of his secrets in their ears as they came into being, so when they moved, it was with a dreamy and airy step that barely grazed the ground and when they gazed upon another living creature, it was with eyes as old as the universe and unsettling as Death.
They settled in Heleskyae, the western half of Ora's continent, filled with rich and verdant woodland with trees that scraped the sky. At the bottom of the Orean ocean dwelled merfolk and sirens within their winter palaces of jet basalt and brightly colored sea shells; in the summer, they sunned on the ocean's surface and roamed their home in groups-elegant creatures moving through the water with the force of a hurricane but gifted with a voice imbued by starlight, scales shining iridescent in the sun.
Across the sea was the land of the dwarves and the elves. Traicor, crowned with craggy mountains and volcanoes and brittle earth stained charcoal from constant eruptions, was home to the dwarves. It is said Death crafted the first dwarf from the molten crust of Ora and it is why dwarves are born with the mountain in their bones and the insatiable urge to dig and live in the stiff gloom of the underground resides in their soul.
Further inland laid Sathros, fertile and rich plains covered with rolling green hills save for the towering mountain from its center, and there lived the final and most cherished of Death's creations, the elves. For his last act, Death drew upon the heavens and remnants of the universe's first breath, tucked among his body's coils, to carefully mold the elves into being. And as he labored over their bodies, shaping their delicate features with precise perfection, he took their souls and laid them out in the open air, allowing the light from the sun to steep in the elves' souls and fill them with life.
As he worked, Death sang in the tongue of the Great Old Ones, song fusing body, soul, and light into one, and when the first elves opened their eyes, Sathros was washed over in the warm, gentle light of a sunrise.
Death smiled. The elves' skin glimmered like sunlight, golden and bright, carrying within them an inherent radiance while his song bestowed unto the elves with the powers of light and day. And as they gathered around Death while he worked, the very air began to hum with their light.
Death was growing weary, however. After eons of living outside his natural realm, his physical form was beginning to wear and decay and he could feel it coming loose from himself like a snake starting to shed its skin. So he began to work faster and faster and so did not notice when the sun slipped beneath the horizon and that the souls he had set out to rest in the light were instead being bound to the cool darkness of the dusk.
It was only as the sun's rays broke across his face as he finished the last elf that he realized his mistake. Unlike their light counterparts, the night elves covered the land around them in a dim twilight, appearing to draw in and erase the light around them. And also unlike the light elves, whom merely gazing upon filled one with day's vitality, the night elves gave the beholder a dreamy sense of peace, their outlines blurred with the gentle haze of dusk as they whispered night down from the sky.
But Death saw the beauty of the night in his children's being, saw the harmony of night and day existing side by side and therefore, despite his error, Death could not bring himself to correct his mistake. Nor did he have the time-as soon as he had finished creating the final night elf, he had felt a deep rumbling with the universe's foundation and knew it to be from his rapidly unraveling form, which he could feel his physical form unwinding faster and faster with every passing moment. And so, giving it no further thought, he departed from the universe and back into the netherspace of nothing and fell into a deep sleep, leaving his creations to live in peace.
But Death did not withdraw from the universe quickly enough; as he passed through the rift to his dimension, fragments of his being broke off and fell back to Ora. While they instantly disintegrated, the magic dwelling within them had a life of its own. They latched onto nearest living animal and transformed them into beings of their own, resembling the elves and looks but holding the unfathomable depths of the universe in their eyes.
These beings called themselves witches. Having once been part of Death, each witch contained some of his magic and used it to link themselves to the animal species they had possessed. As beings not of Ora or even the universe, they did not band together but were content to scatter to the most desolate corners of the continent and follow the sway of their magic.
But there were three witches who wanted more and stayed together: a spider witch, a snake witch and a scorpion witch. Disguising themselves, they settled in the middle of Sathros. And, waiting, they watched the elves.
The elves, being creatures with wills of their own, did not treat the gifts Death had bestowed on them with as the respect and honor as they should have-Death had not realized that where he had seen the complementary nature of light and darkness, they would only see opposites.
The light elves read the night elves' fondness for the dark and their affinity to all night creatures as a sign of something inherently dishonest and evil in their nature. For their part, the night elves took the way the light elves' radiance naturally chased away the darkness within their radius as the light elves declaring their superiority over of being Death's chosen elves and used every excuse to call down night early and force the light elves into their homes.
So while they quickly fell into a relative peace with their dwarven neighbors, struck up a trading alliance with the mermaids and were pleased to find the fey folk had no interest in paying the rest of the world any attention, the elves, unable to see past their differences, immediately divided themselves into a light elf clan and a night elf clan. In an effort for peace, the two clans settled on opposite sides of the great mountain cutting Sathros down the middle-the light elves to the east and the night elves to the west-and, for the most part, were content to ignore the other's existence.
However, it was impossible to completely forget each other's presence-when a night elf called down night, darkness fell on all of Sathros and when a light elf summoned the day, sunlight touched every part of Sathros.
A taut and uneasy tension stretched tight between the two groups. As time went on, stilted communication between the clans degraded into borderline hostility and then, when a fresh attempt for a treaty nearly turned into a fight between the clan leaders, into an ominous silence. Neither side wished for war and so they limited their fighting to the sky, which would turn inky one moment and then shining brightly the next before darkness would muffle out the light again. And where the clans had once tolerated the other, they now refused to stand the sight of each other, expressly forbidding any interaction with the enemy.
Three generations passed with this tug-of-war of the sky before a light elf and night elf crossed paths. Lucia, the daughter of the light elves' leader, was roaming the middle plains near Sathros' mountain one day when she and her horse were beset by a night panther. She fell and her head struck a rock, keeping her from using her powers to defend herself.
Nearby, Tenebrial, the night elves' chief's son, was hunting and heard Lucia's cry. He reached her just before the panther struck and calmed the beast with his powers. Instead of leaving straightaway, he approached Lucia, who had already recovered from her fall, and offered to tend to her wounds.
Having witnessed what he had done, she did not attack or rebuff him and allowed him to bandage her injuries. After he finished, they sat together in silence until the tension between them dissolved-for while both elves had grown up amidst their clan's animosity for the other, neither agreed with their clan's views and were curious about the other. They talked until the sun disappeared beneath the horizon and agreed to meet again the following day before parting ways.
Despite their differences, the two formed a fast friendship, free to speak their minds around each other without worry, and met whenever they were able to slip away without being noticed. From the other, they learned the harmony that could exist between day and night and over time, fell in love.
Knowing they couldn't be together unless the feud between their clans was put to rest, the two resolved to talk to their parents in the time before their next meeting.
Disaster struck before the couple could meet again. During a routine perimeter check, a group of young night and light elves ran into each other on their shared border, Lucia and Tenebrial among them. Biting words were exchanged and although the two tried to calm the hostility, fighting broke out and by the end of the skirmish, both lovers lay dead and a crack shining crimson appeared in the sky.
The tension between the two clans snapped and war descended upon the land with a cold and unforgiving fury. Overnight, the plains of Sathros turned black with scorch marks from the balls of white-hot energy the light elves rained down on the night elves' territory and the air became rife with the howls of the creatures the night elves sent to attack the light elves' villages.
Above Sathros, the war over the sky continued. Its natural blue was swallowed up by swaths of the brightest gold hailing from the north and waves of inky darkness undulating from the south that met in the sky above Sathros' mountain, fingers of light threading through the night only to be beaten back by the darkness.
Meanwhile, the red in the sky, for which both sides blamed the other, continued to spread until one day the elves awoke to find the sky painted in a nightmarish shade of red, leaching away both light and dark. All of Sathros was cast in a bloody light that was neither day nor night, killing off the land's crops and plunging the elves into a sudden and severe famine.
With the poisoning of the sky and land, the dwarves and the mermaids refused to engage in any trade or communication with the elves, taking it as a sign that Sathros had been cursed by the Great Old Ones. Without outside support, supplies ran dangerously low and the dwindling food stores fueled the enmity between the clans even further.
By the time winter fell, the light and night elf clans were in dire straits. The war had dragged on far longer than either side had anticipated and both groups were on the brink of starvation. Run down by exhaustion and hunger, both clans decided to launch a full-scale invasion for supplies and a last-ditch effort to bring the war to an end.
For days, there was no fighting for the first time since war erupted upon Sathros. In a strange quirk of the universe, the two sides chose to attack on the same day and happened upon the other at the same spot where Lucia and Tenebrial had been killed.
Like day pulls at night, the clans' closeness to each other automatically sparked the other's powers to life and with the largest gathering of night and light elves in generations, the tear in the sky finally ripped open, bleeding scarlet mixing with gold and black.
The two clans were too taken aback by the other's presence to notice the sky and immediately set upon the other. But before a single blow could be thrown, everything became doused in the deepest crimson since the sky changed color, halting both armies in their tracks and forcing their gaze upwards.
The labor of the magic used to summon day and night throughout the war had taken its toll on the heavens, wearing at the fraying fabric of the sky until it was splitting from the seams. A deep rumbling sound came from the growing gash and from it plummeted down a comet. In the time it took to draw a breath, the comet bore onto Ora with a searing and blinding flash and slammed straight into Heleskyae.
All of Ora shook with the force of the comet's collision and when the dust had cleared and the ground stopped rocking back and forth, Heleskyae was nothing more than a giant crater, save for a fragment of woodland that barely had been spared from the comet's fallout.
A grim and furious quiet drowned out every other sound as the surviving fey folk emerged from the broken wreckage of their home for the first time since they came into existence, brimming with an implacable rage that would not be satisfied until the world had paid for their loss in kind.
Death, stuck in a deep slumber since he had left the universe, finally awakened with the destruction of Heleskyae. Attuned to all his creations, he saw what was happening and instantly threw on his physical coil in haste, arriving in Sathros just as the fairies entered its borders.
With his ancient magic, he held tight against the moving thread of time, freezing all in place, and looked around. At the sight of the ruined land and the acrid smell of death filling his lungs, his heart grew heavy and he wept for being the cause between the differences between the elves in the first place.
When his tears dried, his gaze fell upon the cooling core of the comet and an idea occurred to him. While he could not reverse the damage the elves had done without breaking some of the most fundamental laws of the universe, he could take measures to ensure a war like this never happened again. Taking the bodies of Lucia and Tenebrial, the only elves who had ever seen as he did, he used his Deathsong to call back their souls from the netherworld. Plucking a shard from the comet, he divided it in two and wound one soul in one half of the shard and the other soul in the other half before returning their souls to their bodies, forging a bond as deep and infinite as the universe between the two souls.
Taking the rest of the comet in his hands, he crafted two scythes, one bright as diamonds and the other dark as ebony. Picking a ray of sunlight and a pocketful of darkness from the heavens with ease, he used his song to give only the scythes the ability to summon the day or night. They could only be used by the two elves whose souls had been formed from the same comet with which the scythes had been created. The souls would be reincarnated the following generations once the wielders passed on, Death decreed, and with the bond running between the souls, neither clan could harm the other without hurting the pair or the balance between night and day, for they were two halves of a whole and connected for life.
Finally, reaching into the hearts of the fey folk, Death calmed their rage and when time began to flow again, they retreated back to the broken fragment of Heleskyae, their grudge against the elves by no means forgotten but at enough peace to go back to ignoring the rest of the world.
Satisfied, Death released his hold on the thread of time and withdrew back to his domain and slept.
With this move, Death had finally succeeded in uniting the elves. They began started to live alongside each other and rebuilt the war-torn Sathros together. Lucia and Tenebrial married and made their home in Sathros' mountain and chose six families, three light and three night, to restore society. The families formed an aristocracy and spent years traveling throughout Sathros, rebuilding the war-torn land before establishing court in Sathros' mountain.
Lucia and Tenebrial preferred to stay out of political matters although they used their status and influence of scythe wielders to mediate conflicts during the merging of the two clans. And every dawn and dusk, the pair would go to the mountain's peak and welcome the day or night together. The light scythe became known as the Grigori scythe and the scythe of night as the Kokketsu scythe and when they passed, their souls moved onto the next generation and the cycle began again.
And throughout all of this watched the three witches.
Having been part of Death's magic, they were unaffected when Death paused time. The moment the spider witch, Arachne set her eyes on Death's scythes, a burning desire for their power ignited within her. It only took a few words with her sisters, who hungered for the chaos the scythes could wreak, of her plan to seize power.
And so they went back into hiding and they waited and in the meantime, a peaceful harmony settled among the elves, throughout the continent and all of Ora, and the world lived in tranquility for three thousand years.
Until nearly a hundred years ago-when Asura slew the light elf wielder.
