History: Origins

No one remembers it anymore. Well, that's not entirely true. One person remembers every bit of what happened, in agonizing detail, and maybe that's enough. Maybe all it takes is one person to remember.
Or maybe just that it happened is enough. Just the Truth of it...and all of its consequences.
Glaive was always a world caught in the struggle between the warring powers of Ice and Fire, Immobility and Dynamism, but like any struggle, the conflict rose and fell. It was in one of the swells of that conflict, one of the moments when the war threatened to tear the world utterly asunder and wipe away all of the life that scuttled across its surface that it happened.
Pushed to the brink of existence, struggling against great forces utterly indifferent to the fate their small lives, the peoples of Glaive turned to their leaders, demanding that the Chieftains and Kings take action, that they do something to justify their titles and authority. Meeting together at the site of the first forge in Glaive, a spotted plain of lava surrounded by rings of glaciers, the mighty and the powerful of Glaive's peoples sought a solution. Desperate, the leaders laid aside their grudges and their unsettled scores and met in council. For days, they debated and discussed, offering armies and stratagems, all to no avail.
And in the end, when it seemed there was no solution, a human stepped forward. Gaunt and unbent, clad in faded robes, the Druid walked into the council and spoke a simple Truth: Glaive could not be saved by its leaders, it could only be saved by its Shamans, by those who walked between and could act not only in the physical realm that suffered from the actions of Ice and Fire, but in the realm in which They walked as well. He offered a different union, the uniting of all the Druids and Shamans of Glaive in an unprecedented ritual, a binding that would fetter the powers and allow the peoples of Glaive to seize control of their own existence instead of being at the whims of capricious forces bent on their own ends. Without other options, the chieftains agreed, conceding the Druid's demands that the shamans of Glaive be given power in its governance, the agency to choose who ruled its tribes and kingdoms on behalf of the people for whom they Saw and Spoke.
The ritual took days to prepare, shamans of different races and speech working together, sharing the scraps of knowledge they had gathered about the Fire and the Ice, the small Truths that could compound on one another to create a working that would finally bind the implacable Immobility and the capricious Dynamism and preserve a place for the lives of Glaive. They worked, they bled, they drew arcane signs that twisted against the human mind, and finally, finally they began.
It began small, as most rituals do - voices in the darkness, sparks of fire proving the ability of creation, blood falling to evidence the power over life. Orcs stood beside elves, gnomes beside dwarves, and humans beside halflings. The peoples of Glaive stood together to fight for their existence, and they wove together all that they knew, wound on cords of hope and fear to summon the Fire and the Ice and to bind them.
They blew it.
The shamans summoned the powers of Glaive, setting their life essence as conduits between the realms, calling the mighty forces that strove over the world. And the Powers saw the light of their spirits and heard the call of their magics, and they came. But finite minds were ill prepared to understand the magnitude of the powers with which they were dealing, and the scraps of Truth that they had gathered were not adequate to make a ritual strong enough to bind such beings. Fire and Ice came, and they tore with teeth of frozen spirit and claws of burning soul. Yet they did not destroy; they did not annihilate. And the human Druid who had come before the council, the man who had hollowed himself out to make room for dreams of power thought beyond the pain and the agony of their anger at the binding to wonder why.
Inch by agonizing inch, he stepped forward, breaking the protective rings to stand before the half-manifested beings they had summoned, and he offered them a deal. He offered them a release from the chains the shamans had tried to weave; he offered them a voice amongst the living beings of Glaive; he offered them an end to the infinite cycle of icy death and violent rebirth that had held for millennia. In exchange, they would agree to forswear direct action, to contract themselves to a three-pronged balance, a truce of sorts. The powers hesitated, caught between the ridiculousness of a mere human negotiating with them and the value of what he offered, the notion of being invited into the realm of Glaive and maintaining a presence there, of breaking an unending cycle.
In the end, Fire and Ice agreed to the terms, but only upon condition.
The Two would need vast amounts of energy to open the channels for them to manifest on the physical plane. The Druid looked around him, and he offered the lives of the shamans of Glaive, the hundreds of souls already focusing will and vitality to act as a conduit between the realms for the binding ritual. In a blaze of frigid snow and blinding fire, the shamans dropped to the ground like ashes and snowflakes, their lives forfeit.
The Two would need physical forms to allow them to anchor themselves and to communicate with the people of the world. The Druid gestured, and his children stepped forward. Twins, just on the cusp of maturity, they had been graced with the gift of prophecy, considered a treasure among the human tribes of Glaive. The Druid bowed his head, and the Immobile and the Dynamic claimed their first avatars, the spokespeople who would carry their message among men.
Sacrifice satisfied, the powers sealed their agreement with the Druid. They would refrain from direct action in the world, relying upon their voices in a triumvirate - the Flamekeeper, the Frostspeaker, and the Parity. With the fingers of his own children, they seized the Druid's hands, and as the power coursed through him, all color drained away as the hollow spaces within filled with lukewarm neutrality, devoid of the vital transience of fire's passion and the bitter cold of ice's security. They sealed the agreement with three runes: one of fire, one of ice, and one of memory. And on the stone that lay in the center of the bodies of the sacrificed shamans, they carved another symbol, the Rune of the Crown.
Wise enough to know that the truest power lies behind rather than upon the throne, the druid took the Rune of the Crown and bestowed it upon the chieftain of his own human tribe, Aesir. With the power of the rune, the chieftain became the first Emperor, establishing dominion over Glaive. Determined to honor the sacrifice of so many, the Emperor set out to create a new world order, a world no longer torn by Ice and Fire, Immobility and Dynamism. The First Empire instead wove a tale of unity, the Voice of the One , a single being of infinite facets exemplified in the potential of humanity and demonstrated in the limited aspects of the non-human races. With the Rune of the Crown, the Emperor began a new age, and behind him, the Three spoke and waited, bound by a contract that ensured the balance of Glaive for as long as the runes endured.