The Ancients

Those Who Shaped from the Song

The Ancients are not gods, nor spirits, nor even stories in the proper sense. They are older than myth, older than the First War, older than the first titan to shape the earth or the first whisper of mortal thought. They came not from the planes, but from beyond them—emerging from Xel, the Chaos Before, a realm of unformed potential, where meaning did not exist, and will could not stand.

They were the first to bring form to the formless.

It is said the Ancients did not speak, but sang—not with voice, but with harmonies that stitched law into being. From the swirling, unbearable entropy of Xel, they wove the first Notes, binding together threads of raw energy and force. In so doing, they revealed the primordial energies that would become foundation stones of all things—Setengar, the First Light, and Dearuhk, the First Darkness. These were not beings as much as states—discovered, not created—and from the tension between them, the Ancients found the resonance of creation.

They carved the planes not with tools, but with Song and Aspect, drawing upon the truths they uncovered to harmonise wild chaos into shape: Time, Space, Thought, Death, and Dream. Each note of their Work gave rise to new planes, beings, and laws—the Worldsong, still faintly echoing through all of reality. Where the gods now act through worship and Impetus, the Ancients wrought without audience, without altar. They needed no belief to be real. This would later be the foundation of The Narrative.

Yet they are gone.

Whether they vanished into their work, retreated beyond the Great Cycle, or were unmade by its completion is not known. Their absence is felt only in how their influence persists. The Titans bear their Rune-marks. Faeries tasked by their bidding. The great dragons remember fragments in dream. Even the gods acknowledge, in rare, hushed tones, that the firmament they uphold is not theirs, but something far older.

Some claim the Ancients still exist, unreachable in the Deep Veil between planes in the distant Astral Sea. Others believe they dissolved into the Song itself—each note of power, each law of nature, a fossil of their will. A rare few heretics whisper that one or two of them remain, watching, silent, refusing to interfere even as the planes buckle and fray. Not for cruelty, but for principle. Their work was not to control, but to begin.

Unlike the Abyssals, who claw at the walls of relevance, or the gods, who rise through belief, the Ancients represented something else entirely: the first impulse of order, the shaping of formless truth. They are not worshipped, for they would not hear it. They are not known, for they left behind no faces, only echoes.

Yet every Rune, every Spell, every Circle, and every Law that holds a plane together carries their resonance. For without the Ancients, there would be no world to rule, no soul to save, no chaos to battle.

They are not remembered.

But all things remember them.