Introduction
Across the Celestial Realm, once the home exclusively of The Keeper and his servants The Graces, Mortals settled as the Keeper grew weak. The horrors of the Devourer War and the arrival in Celestium of Levanto meant that the Keeper had little time or energy to worry about seemingly insignificant creatures such as humans and Atrushki settling in Celestium. This article follows on from
The Story of the Keeper and
The Keeper and Levanto, as a full history of The Keeper and the Celestial Realm.
The Mortal Fiefdoms
It was the Phalanx Grace Y’Dathian who first welcomed mortals into the Celestial Realm. As the power and the influence of the Keeper waned, lesser Graces, still loyal to the creator, believed it was their role to interpret his will as they saw fit. They believed that the Keeper had created the Mortal Realm and all the life in it, and mistakenly assumed that mortal life was also sacred. They failed to understand that just as the Keeper had not created the Tralanvannir, mortal life was not one of his creations either. Y’Dathian appeared to one of the early Vannic Emperors, Hordale An Rath, and welcomed him to Celestium, revealing the location of a Norlandil, one of the permanent portals from the mortal to the Celestial Realm.
Hordale was entranced by the beauty he saw, and in the subsequent decades used the portal to bring at first hundreds, then thousands of his servants through. The Phalanx believed initially that in the vastness of the Celestial Realm, creatures with short life spans such as humans and Firg wouldn’t present any problems. The Thaladic Graces who had lived among humanity might have been able to advise them differently, however. Even though Hordale was eventually forced by the Graces to return to the Mortal Realm to resume control over the Vannic Empire, his followers, including Andyrae Solust, his most loyal knight, remained and built the first Solustine Kingdom. There were three Solustine Kingdoms in total, with two other polities, the Iron Baronetcy and the League of Rathic Princes, the rebellious ancestors of Hordale himself. The Graces viewed humanity and the other mortals that resided and found homes in the Solustine Kingdoms and their successor states with loathing, but the struggles that emerged as a result of the Devourer War and the Keeper’s betrayals distracted them from eliminating their increasingly unwelcome guests.
Following the Sundering, however, one of the remaining members of the Phalanx, Y’Luran, decided to wage war against the Solustine Kingdom and attacked it and later the successor states of the Rathic Principalities. Y’Luran was eventually stopped from devastating the Solustine Kingdom by his sister, Y’Nya, following a prophetic vision. She told her brother, who desired fire and destruction, that the Solustine Kingdom and the other mortal fiefdoms in the Celestial Realm must be preserved no matter what. Her vision had shown her that a terrible shadow would soon engulf all five dimensions and mortals and Graces would eventually be forced to help one another. Y’Luran trusted his sister implicitly but has struggled to stay his hand ever since, and despite her warning, still dreams of finishing his bloody work. The Solustines hate and fear the Graces as a result of Y’Luran’s devastation and Solustine Kings and Queens have spent the following centuries looking for any means to defend the kingdom against them.
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