The First Era

Found Family - the trope assigned to oversee the binding ritual on the island
Estan - the self-obsessed, aristocratic high priest who became Devotion
Anittas - the priest who loved Estan enough to become Sacrifice
Ankas - the acolyte who was known to be in love with Anittas and was therefore selected to become Betrayal
Taru - the funerary priest who came to embody Escape

In the Tempest universe, stories are special. In this history, the advent of storytelling coincides with the origins of humanity - indeed, story itself is the spark that first elevated human consciousness above that of other apes. More than that, if anything can be called a person's spirit, it is their story - people talk about the immortality that comes with going into legend; in Tempest, that idea has… additional nuances. In Tempest, being self-aware goes hand-in-hand with being aware of one's place in a narrative, and when we experience a heightened awareness of narrative - when we find ourselves acting out certain roles or thrown into a dramatic situation - something of that narrative sticks. The ghosts of past events are evidence of that.

But stories are not just our spirits - they are a spiritual force unto themselves. While our evolution of a narrative dimension to our consciousness has elevated us above other animal life, the narrative itself has little concern for us or any other organic life. As far as stories are concerned, we are a resource to be managed, nothing more.

And that is how, around seven thousand years ago, the narrative began to take over. The world was plunged into an Age of Stories, in which reality itself became incoherent - truth lost its meaning as a concept, strange and fantastical occurrences became commonplace, and the only structure defining any given event came from how it was recounted, rather than from any consistency in the physical laws of the universe. At the same time, humans found themselves imprisoned within the confines of stories - certain types of narrative (revenge, the hero's journey, betrayal, etc.) became dominant and began replicating, consuming more and more people's lives as they did so.

Humans were not entirely defenceless against narrative parasitoidy, however. Over the course of several thousand years, they developed strategies to gain some control over their own lives.

The first defence to be developed by humans was ritual, the repeated use of deliberate, directed behaviours to replicate the passage of a narrative in a formalised, often symbolic manner. While as a simulation of the power wielded by stories, these techniques were somewhat crude - after all, humans are not as powerful as beings of pure narrative are - they did succeed in directing the path of stories in a limited fashion, creating certain localised rules binding the narrative in ways that favoured humans. As an example, the Master's repeated declarations that no violence was to be enacted during the castaways' weekly meetings created a rule that ensured no violence could occur at those times, in that place.

At around 5000BC, humans developed their greatest weapon in the war against stories. Writing served as an incredibly powerful means of restricting stories in new ways. The act of pinning a story down on a page restricted its capacity to evolve and adapt to changing circumstances. Although the oral tradition persisted, great swathes of narrative now found themselves strongly defined by the written word. Rendered imperfect through the potential for multiple interpretations of a text, writing nonetheless proved to be an excellent means of preserving controlled iterations of stories, together with guidance as to how they might be defeated.

While writing allowed humans some dominion over stories' passage through time, the act of embodiment provided them with a means of restricting stories spatially. A person who allowed their life to be entirely consumed by a given narrative or trope would persist as the physical embodiment of that trope. For as long as their story or the stories they personally engineered remained untold¹⁾, the targeted trope would remain trapped within its host, its sphere of active influence over people's lives limited to the place in which its current vessel came to embody it. Therefore, during the period of embodiment of the trope of Revenge, revenge plots could still occur and the trope gained power from such incidents, but it was unable to intervene directly to manipulate humans into following its narrative, except in the place where its embodiment was achieved.

With the development of these tools, humans began to devise a plan to prevent the increasingly powerful stories from taking total control over their lives. These efforts were led by a faction of priests belonging to a cult originally dedicated to the worship of the narrative. All over the world, remote locations were selected as sites of binding, and with the aid of a handful of benign embodied tropes (such as Found Family, who presided over the binding on Tempest Island), rituals were performed to limit the power of stories in these locations. One such ritual ensured that written texts would be indelible within such places, which is why no writing could ever be erased on Tempest Island.

Next, individuals were selected to embody certain tropes. Tempest Island was ostensibly selected as the binding site for the trope of Sacrifice, and a young priest by the name of Anittas stepped forward to embody that trope. Anittas, however, was adored by Ankas, an acolyte who was unable to keep their feelings a secret - and the priests made use of this infatuation to accomplish their plan. Ankas, unable to bear the thought of their beloved being burnt alive to become the imprisoned trope of Sacrifice, attempted to wrest the torch from the hands of the High Priest, Estan. All three died in the fire that followed - Estan became Devotion, Ankas became Sacrifice, and Ankas became Betrayal, the true target of this binding.

Betrayal, however, immediately attempted to find ways to leave the island by ensuring that Ankas's story was told. It tried to gain dominion over Taru, another of the priests who was in attendance on the island, tempting him to escape. However, Taru understood too well what 'Escape' would mean for him - how leaving the island would only cause him to become trapped in Betrayal's clutches - and, with the help of Found Family, he exploited this paradox to ascend as the embodiment of the metatrope of Escape. In this guise, he was able to create a tempest that prevented stories or their hosts from leaving the island; he was, however, able to offer the only true escape from the island and from stories - total oblivion.

The existence of the various binding sites ensured that the outside world was insulated from the worse excesses of the narrative. At first, the plan had been to create an individual binding location for every known trope and to continue creating such locations as more tropes appeared. However, upon the discovery that a single location could act as a trap for multiple tropes, and that free tropes were often drawn to binding locations, only a handful of such sites were ever prepared. The knowledge of how to create new ones was lost, along with any clear remembrance of the Age of Stories.