The Jackal and the Bear

The first war was begun by the first of the fiends. On leathery wings they rose from their first home in the Gray Waste, dripping gore and spiritual slime, hungry as only a new-hatched thing can be. They rose to devour the Upper Planes, which were then uninhabited by anything corporeal.It was in response to this first threat that the priminals fashioned the devas, intended to be the upper-planar answer to the baernaloths' challenge. Shining with the light of their home, they beat back the fiendish threat, and were beaten back in turn. The battle raged long in that time before time, but eventually the bright ones triumphed, as the war broke them the least.And only then, with the failure of its hunters, did the other baern reject Apomps and banish the Three-Sided One and its creations from their presence. Only then did they create the Second Born, the bariniths, to drive the gehreleths into the bowels of the Scarlet Prison.And only after that did they conspire to create a new race that would succeed where the First Born had failed.The first of the Third Born was created in mimicry of the Jackal, a sly spirit of the Beastlands. It was only after centuries of contemplation of the Waste that the Jackal would learn to erase its face.The priminals were slow in responding. Alarmed at the prolific nature of baernaloth experimentation, they had begun creating their gentle, sylvan cervidals for the devas to watch over. The first loss of cervidal innocence may have been by accident, a chance meeting between a cervidal and an arcanaloth lost in the planes. But from that meeting Talisid, the first of the ursinals, was born.Only fragments tell of the travels of these strange companions, the Jackal and the Bear, still struggling to understand the ultimate evil and good that they represented. The fragments become allegories of the conflict the multiverse as a whole was to know in the ages to come, and the conflict each soul was to know within itself.They awakened the sleeping Ogdoad in their chaotic mire. They introduced conflict and painful self-awareness to the harmony of the Twin Serpents. And at the base of the Spire, their nervous copulation created the first of the rilmani.So say the oldest of the fragments.And when it was over, the Bear returned to the Elysian fields, to metamorphose into the first leonal.And the Jackal would journey deep into the Wastes of its creation to learn the secrets of oblivion, to transcend its own visage and erase it.