Origins of Núreht

Before Núreht

Before Núreht, there was the Dream. A formless realm without time or substance, where all things can happen and nothing matters, the threads of Dream often tangle and give rise to strage places, fleeting moments of reality, of events past and present and never to be. Hypothetical, impossible, contradictory scenarios - all things that might arise from infinte time and infinite space and infinite possibility.

The first age

With infinite possibilities it was, perhaps, inevitable that the ever-shifing tides of Dream should spontaneously coalesce into a tangle of thought that did not fade of its own accord. Pockets of reality are not uncommon, but this germ of an idea did not pass back into nothing, instead snaring other threads of Dream, attracting other trangles of reality and coating itself over and over like a pearl in an oyster. Slowly, it became larger and denser. More complex. More Real.
This dense tangle brought forth Thoughts and beings to think them. The Thinkers wove themselves from the Dream, testing and discovering the laws of reality and, in doing so, bringing forth substance and form and matter and meaning. Where they passed, Dream coalesced into Reality. So began the first age.

The Second Age

Aftr its initial rapid growth, Núreht languished. Too small to attract new realities, it stagnated. Thinkers wove reality into being wherever they walked, but it fell apart with their passing and the folk of the world drifted faceless and formless, in their absence. Núreht threatened to dissolve back into the Dream; it had grown too large and was supported by too few. The decline was long and painful, made worse and more complete by the attentions of the cosmic dragons, whose touch unraveled the world. Things which might have stood a thousand ages were lost to the void.

The Third Age

The decline of Núreht was halted by the the beginning of the third age, when the dissemination of the knowledge of Reality and Dream democratised magic. This understanding stabilised the world by raising ordinary folk to Thinkers in their own right. The blessing and burden of maintaining reality being spread across the population led to widespread revolution, and new countries - even new landmasses - rose on the foundation of unity and the common good.

The Fourth Age

The fourth age was a frenzy of new cultures, philosophies and beliefs, and is demarcated by the arrival of the gods. Despite the ability to change reality to their will, the Thinkers found that there were places where magic could not reach. Things without form - luck and love, death and what comes after - were beyond the reach of Dream, and gods rose to fill those gaps. The gods are many and various, their existence a fact of reality, supported first on a cloud of belief and now on a foundation of knowledge.

The Fifth Age

It is now the fifth age. Núreht is not the wild and volatile place that it once was, but is a solid thing, living and breathing and self-sustaining. Though the cosmic dragons still idle through the void, the world is finally shored against complete destruction and this hardy little knot of Dream awaits those who would reach out to discover it.