The Protean Cradle

Founding

Over the course of 4 years, The Proteans created all of sentient mortal life. While The Divine Architecture already existed, as well as most basic plant life, The Proteans used this as their muse for creation.

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The Proteans arrived at Kreigh only the year prior. What they based their decision on as to why Kreigh was chosen still remains a highly debated question. After their arrival, they began to prepare to create what they believed was to be their contribution to The Divine Architecture.   The amount of time spent traveling the stars prior the their arrival is also unknown, but it has been passed down that The Proteans were nomadic creatures, traveling the cosmos and reflecting on The Divine Architecture as if it were a massive art gallery. The subtle elegance of The Divine Architecture influenced and inspired them to make their mark on the universe.   The central point of the Protean Cradle was a small island on Kreigh, which The Proteans named Arifi'tes, and from this singular point, they began their four year long creation.  

The Lesser Creatures

  At first, The Proteans wanted to show their appreciation for The Divine Architecture and what it represented. Because of this, they first created basic life to live within, and off of the fruits of The Divine Architecture. With this came most animals, fish, birds and insects. This took months, but gave The Proteans a sense of power and pride in their work. Possibly too much pride.   Up to this point, The Proteans had attempted small additions to The Divine Architecture, but now they wanted to created something bigger, purely based on each aspect that made up its worlds and stars.  

The First Five

  The first race they created was the Elves, the first of the Highmortals and of the First Five. They were based on the woods and forrest spread out through out The Divine Architecture and were created to thrive and commune with the forrest. Instilled with the grace and tenacity of the branches of trees in rough winds, the elves were built long and thin, elegant and graceful. They held fair skin, a spectrum from pure whites to light greens, and they eyes a spectrum of colors.   As they settled on the design, they began sending out waves of creation throughout The Divine Architecture, proliferating the forests and woodlands of the universe with the first elves.   Pleased with their work, The Proteans went on to create the next race, the dwarves, a reflection of the many different metals and forms of stone that make up the planets of The Divine Architecture. The were built smaller in height, but stocky and strong. Their eyes were built to see better in darker lights, and their form constructed to excel in tearing into the earth, built strong and hearty, skin thick and tanned.   Again, they stood back from their new creation and felt pride in their appreciation of The Divine Architecture. The waves of creation poured forth from Kreigh, and the caves and mountains gained their new masters.   Feeling as if they were learning a better understanding for creating races that had higher intelligence, the created the next two races together. For the plains and grasslands, they created a center point between the dwarves and the elves known as the halflings. Alongside them, they also created a race small and strong and eccentric based on the beauty of the gemstones that were scattered sparsely across The Divine Architecture, and from that came the gnomes.   Both these races were deemed completed, as much like before they were spread throughout The Divine Architecture with ripples of creation.   The last race they made of the The First Five was to be the race that reflect the whole of the The Divine Architecture. They were to be adaptable, built to thrive in any biome. They were to be the glue between the races, the ones that can exist anywhere. They did not have the means to commune with the aspects of nature that the other races had, but they made up for that in the instillation of pure will to succeed and progress. This is how the humans came to exist. Much like before, The Proteans felt as if this was truly understanding The Divine Architecture.   Little did they know that the creation of the humans was to be their undoing.  

The Magical Races

  Up until this point, The Proteans had created all of these species and filled the habitable planets with them, but none of them held power near what The Proteans held. Because of this, The Proteans began to create Mortal Magic, a more simple and less powerful version of their Protean Magic. This new version of magic is what we commonly know as magic today. The magical creatures came soon after this, following in the footsteps of their previous creations. Genasi were the first they created, followed by the many types of Giant. After this, they decided that they wanted to make the most majestic creatures that lived and breathed both the elements that The Divine Architecture seemed to be built on, as well as the power of this new magic The Proteans had created. This creature should not only thrive in their surroundings, but instead their surroundings should adjust to the mere existence of such greatness. They envisioned this creature as a true hunter, a beacon of the beauty The Proteans saw as their crowning achievement. This is how the first Dragons came to be.   The magical races did not get sent out amongst the stars in the same way that The First Five did. The ripples of creation spewed forth from Kreigh but only affected a few worlds, as much like The Divine Architecture, The Proteans understood the value added by rarity.  

The Mistakes

The Proteans were a young species, and had the ability to manifest things at will. The ability to make dreams reality. That being said, they were just a fallible as any creature, and while their perspective was vast and their understanding great, there were many unseen aspects to the events of the Protean Cradle.   After the creation of the Dragons, The Proteans took a step back to view their work. It wasn't until this moment of tracing their creation that they realized that they had made one major mistake. The Proteans were a material plane based existence, though it is widely theorized that they did not originate from there. As such, they rarely visited the adjacent planes. The ripples of creation that they had sent out across the cosmos when they created the mortals crossed the threshold on to other planes of existence, replicating creation beyond the material plane. Each of these threshold passed acted like a lens colored by the pigments of the plane it guarded. These lenses distorted the Protean creation, and colored it with new raw planar energies.   These new planar energies continued to create new and different beings, some beautiful and elegant like the celestials, some dark and devious like the fiends, some elegant and mischievous like the fey and many were much less fortunate. Aberrations, Abominations, Monstrosities, and Oozes were all born from the refractions and distortions on the Protean energies.   At this point, it had been 3 years since the Protean Cradle began, and The Proteans took a year to witness their creations exist before moving on as a precaution going forward. This culminated in the final creation act of the Protean Cradle, the investment of the Protean Mantels, and the creations of The Protean Pantheon. This creation event has been later named the Protean Ascension.