The Age of Paradise - Protennoia
- The Last Words of Thelonius the Scribe - Part I
The Age of Paradise
The story of this Creation begins with Protennoia, the First Redeemer, who gave birth to Humanity at the sacred heart of the world, where Axis Mundi would one day rise. Protennoia's gifts to her children were pure, plain and unadorned, birth, love, and light. In that first garden stood a wondrous tree, believed by many to be part of the Redeemer’s own spirit. Its golden fruits granting eternal youth and sustenance.
This was a time before complexity and before the concept of need. No hunger gnawed, no danger stalked. There was no fire, for there was no cold. No spoken word, for thought and feeling flowed as one. Humanity moved in silent harmony and grace with beasts, drank from chiming silver streams, and slept beneath a sky that never darkened.
There was only summer, the endless warmth of divine favor. The sun dawned, rose, and softened to dusk, but never vanished. There was no night. No death. No shadow.
But even stillness can decay.
Sloth was the first sin to stir, a dulled spirit content in passivity. Then came Lust, turning innocent joy into covetous craving. One among the Firstborn broke the sacred bond. With their kin, they idly plucked the sacred fruit not for need, but for power. In that act, the Divine Root was violated. The harmony of Paradise cracked. The great tree started to wither and waste away. The waters that had sheltered Creation began to recede, revealing a world unprepared for what lay beyond.
Night came. No one recalls exactly when, only that it came after the betrayal. And with it came the first chill.
Paradise was not taken from us. We abandoned it.
As tribes fled the dying garden, they met a world both vast and cruel. Sharp winds tore at them, hail and rain bit them. Wild beasts, once gentle, turned predators. The first one to die left no words, no rites, no songs. For Humanity, there had been no memory of grief and no course for sorrow or regret. They were children born for peace, forced into survival.
Those who endured were changed. Hardened. Embittered. They became the Wild Firsts, wrathful and feral, their bond to the Divine dimmed, their tongues unshaped, reduced to guttural chants and wordless humming.
And yet, not all strayed into shadow. A few, bearing still the memory of Protennoia's warmth, wandered far and founded hidden sanctuaries. These scattered lineages preserved glimmers of the old peace, traces that would one day resurface in the tales of Atlantis and in the sanctity of groves where vines still swirled toward heaven.
Though the Divine Root lies withered, and its fruit is no more, echoes of that first stillness linger in the Ley Lines. And sometimes, in dreams, or in the hush before dawn, we remember what we were.
And what we lost.
—Thelonius the Scribe