by Agrippa » Fri Feb 20, 2015 6:08 am
In the Three Realms setting, gods, fae and demons are the heavenly, earthly and infernal/cthtonic equivalent of each other. In fact all such spirits were once called demons, or alternatively daemon, an archaic word for spirit, life and soul molded into living flesh. The Old Gods who made them also crafted the Three Realms.
The first was Semavatevi, Heaven's House that the Old Gods ruled from. There the Elder Gods made their first daemon, spirits as light and radiant as the heavens they were birthed from. Then came Na Tailte Faoi Neamh, the Lands Under Heaven, what is now also known as the mortal coil. Here formed another race of daemons, this time the daemons created were born of the earth and it's bounty.
Then the once unthinkable happened, the Elder Gods came under attack from spirits formed not by their own hands, but from the leftover essences used in making their prior creations, they were the rakshasha, the oni and the jutens. These vile and bestial abominations waged war against all creation and their unwitting makers, ultimately slaying one of them. For the first time ever the Old Gods knew fear.
Gathering together they took their slaughtered brother and trapped his soul inside corpse and twisted him into a new state of being. He arose to a pale shade of life, dead but undying, the first undead. He screamed and begged for death, to be released from his demiurgic corpse, but his brothers and sisters denied him this mercy. Instead they, with the aid of their daemon slaves, forced their unliving brother to serve as a prison for these maddened spirits, more precisely those they had captured. A prison now known at Tartarus.
They interned the still scream corpse of their murdered brother in the soil of a darkened subterranean world called simply An Inferis, the Underworld. The surviving Old Gods then forged new daemons out of the darkness of the Underworld and set them to guard Tartarus. But the first Netherworldly daemons disgusted, for they misshapen and deformed. So the Old Gods bound the hekatonkheires and cyclopes together and cast them into Tartarus, hoping to never look upon them again. In time the Old Gods made a race of chthonic daemons more to their liking.
Even then the Old Gods treated their creations with cruelty and hardship. In this long gone age all daemons were slaves to the Old Gods. In the Underworld and the depths of the earth they mined for and shaped the precious metals and stones for the Elder Gods and for the magical metal they forged for their own weapons against the shades of Tartarus. On the surface the daemons erected colossal monuments to the Old Gods and farmed to feed the great hungers of their makers from crafting the cosmos, but soon they would eat their fill as their hunger turned to gluttony. While in the heavens daemons built palaces for their masters from the stones and metals they were given. Many daemons worked themselves to death or starved toiling for their masters.
But the Old Gods were crueler still, pitting their daemons against one another in bloody gladiatorial matches, sometimes forcing brother to kill brother, sister to slaughter sister or even parents and children to slay one another. On occasion when unexcited by merely forcing their daemons to maim and kill each other, the Old Gods would pit them in battle with new creations of theirs, behemoths, the first monsters as we would know them ever made.
In the mean time a daemon of The Radiant City descended to the Land Under Heaven to collect half-finished stone and metal works for her masters. While there she stopped to speak with the earthly daemon whose task was preparing the stone and metal for transport. He told the heavenly daemon, known as Indara, Queen of Love and Grace, of a plot being hatched by their nether worldly brethren. A plot to overthrow daemonkind's primordial masters.
To be continued.
Persian - Semavatevi
Irish - Na Tailte Faoi Neamh
Greek - Pandaemonium