The Well of Mimir

In the ancient, forgotten days reduced and twisted over the aeons into fragments of myth and legend, there was once an empire that stretched along the base of the mountains of Sirral, whose tall, beautiful people built incredible temples to the stars.

These lost people were said to be giants, twice the height of men, with fair skin like unblemished marble, marked by strong and pleasing features, and deep eyes like the color of the blue night sky. But their children were nothing of the sort: tall, but stunted, strong, but twisted, with ugly features and evil black eyes, and flawed, jaundiced skin.

These children rebelled against their parents, murdering the giants in their sleep and claiming their cities and incredible works for their own, fighting and scheming among themselves, breeding a thousand foul children for themselves over whom they ruled with anger and iron fists.

These fallen children declared themselves gods over all, and aeons of slavery and misery was nutured under the wicked rule of the ogre-gods. But their own terrible natures proved to be their undoing, leading to their downfall and the first vestige of freedom for mankind.

The ogres ruled from the glittering cities of their parents, and made over the celestial temples into their own centers of worship, forcing their slaves — both man and monster — to build throne and dais, statues and obelisks to honor the jealous ogre-gods.

There must yet have been something of their parents within them, for the ogres were attracted to the stars, but where the giants had held the gems of the sky in awe, the ogres were covetous and greedy, desiring them for themselves. And so the ogres devised a way in which they used the power of their parents’ temples to steal down the stars from the heavens and hide them away.

Stars rained from the heavens down upon the world, and black armies raged and fought over and around them like rabid, snarling animals, while their gods clawed with twisted fingers and tore one another with their broken teeth.

The ogre-gods battled one another for the stars the others had stolen from the sky, seeking to slay their own siblings in their unguided lust for the gems of heaven. Thus began the Celestial War, where man, goblin, and fouler things marched together under the whip of their ogre-god, spreading fire and rape and death across the land, until the night sky itself reflected the red light of burning fields and spilled blood and the earth rolled with the trembling thunder of the march.

Armies clashed and fell, blood black and red soaked the earth, and yellowing bones filled its deepest chasms, yet on-and-on the ogre-gods fought until their servants were reduced to handfuls of foul beasts and wicked men and they themselves had become no more than a handful themselves, until the night sky itself was nearly empty.

These surviving ogre-gods hoarded the glittering stars they had captured in deep vaults beneath the earth, beneath the blasphemed temples, beneath the befouled cities stolen from their parents, peopled and ruled by terrible monsters and vicious beasts. In the dark depths, they looked upon the glittering stars, seeking their secrets and power.

But the stars were more powerful than the ogres could fathom, and their power and beauty drove the ogre-gods mad with their sight — the ogres could do naught but stare upon them and covet their sight day after day. They let their empires crumble, left their servants run unchecked and undisciplined, and the power of the collected stars washed through the cities and across the lands.

In the course of short years of famine and plague, rebellion swept through the crumbling cities of the ogre-gods, and in the wars that followed, men won their freedom from monster and beast, fleeing into the wilderness.

There, they descended into a savage barbarism they did not rise from for a thousand years. Not until the Kaihk came among them and turned them back from the brutal ways the ogres had instilled within them for generations.

The stars, after these aeons, drove the ogres mad, and the once-gods fled from the depths below their ruined cities to become nothing but savage beasts haunting ruins and barren hills in the wilds, devourers of children and lone travellers.

Their intellects had become stunted, their power reduced to the strength in their twisted bodies, their empires now nothing more than rocky caves and lonely stretches of wilderness they ruled with desire and fury.

And they hate the sky. They hate the night. They hate the children of Kaihk with their star-patterned robes. They hate all things, but these things above all others.

Senselessly they pine for the lost cities beyond the black deserts of the Kai, beyond the deadly midnight dunes of Kirrel through which no man has ever traveled alive, past whispering illusions and hideous monsters…though the ogres do not know what their longing is.

They have become animals that know only rage tied to a meaningless image of glittering lights hidden in black depths beneath the broken ruins of a twice-lost empire.