✎ first_era [tempest]

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====== The First Era ======

===== Dramatis Personae =====

**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//

===== Plot =====

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 untold((and for as long as no more fitting vessel was presented to the trope in question)), 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.

^ Column Text ^ Simplified |
|The first age of this land was the Age of Becoming\\ for at this time did He Who Makes The Best Of Things\\ bring home such materials as were pleasing to him\\ and fashion them into flesh of his own flesh. | Finalising the plan,\\ Found Family showed\\ the group of priests\\ how to embody tropes. |
| And he asked each of those who were to awaken,\\ “What will you be?”\\ And “Which of you will be\\ Held at the heart of this our family?” | He asked them to consider\\ what tropes they might embody\\ and which of them would be\\ the focus of the binding ritual. |
| And the reply came:\\ “They Who Bear Gifts!\\ Let them bear this burden!”\\ And they who were to become\\ They Who Bear Gifts\\ said, “Gladly will I bear this burden.” | And Estan said,\\ "Anittas.\\ We'll sacrifice Anittas."\\ And\\ Anittas said\\ "I'm fine with this." |
| Then was a stone prepared\\ deep below the land\\ deep below the watered earth\\ where they who were to become\\ They Who Bear Gifts\\ were to lie, and where\\ They Who Bear Gifts\\ would rise. | So they laid down a slab\\ in the ritual chamber\\ under the marsh\\ where\\ Anittas\\ would get Sacrificed\\ and become\\ the trope of Sacrifice. |
| And all came to that place:\\ He Who Makes The Best Of Things\\ and those who would become\\ They Who Bear Gifts\\ and They Who Are Adored\\ and The Unbound One\\ and He Who Calls The Storm\\ and one other also.\\ And they came with an abundance of wood\\ to lay upon the stone.\\ | In attendance were: \\ Found Family\\ and the priests -\\ Anittas,\\ Estan,\\ Ankas,\\ and Taru.\\ (Twist was watching.)\\ They made a pyre for Anittas\\ on the slab. |
| And they who were to become\\ They Who Are Adored,\\ came with a flame\\ to burn wood from stone,\\ and all that was not They Who Bear Gifts\\ from They Who Bear Gifts.\\ "For who better to do this thing\\ than they who are adored\\ by they who bear this burden?" | And\\ Estan\\ took a torch\\ ready to light the pyre\\ and burn Anittas alive\\ so they'd become Sacrifice.\\ Estan said, "I get to do this\\ because I'm the high priest\\ and Anittas loves me." |
| But there was another there\\ who bore the mark of She Who Plays With Hearts\\ and who would not see the flame turned upon\\ they who would become They Who Bear Gifts\\ and so they turned the flame upon\\ they who would become They Who Are Adored –\\ and in that moment were born three children:\\ They Who Are Adored,\\ They Who Bear Gifts,\\ and the one who had wished to stop the ritual\\ and by whose own faithlessness had joined it,\\The Unbound One. | But poor Ankas\\ was in love with Anittas\\ and wanted to stop them\\ from getting burnt alive.\\ So Ankas tried to wrest the flame\\ from Estan's grasp - oops:\\ all three of them got burnt.\\ Estan became Devotion\\ Anittas became Sacrifice\\ and Ankas, whose plan to save Anittas\\ had just got them all killed\\ became Betrayal. |
| And He Who Waits and Smiles\\ smiled, for this was intended from the start. | And Twist was pleased\\ for the real plan had been to bind Betrayal. |
| Ah, but the Unbound One was clever\\ and made haste to cheat their fate,\\ to disperse on the winds that caress the ocean.\\ How fortunate then that some resource remained\\ to He Who Makes The Best Of Things,\\ by whose grace\\ another ritual was conducted\\ to fashion the richest of materials into a new child,\\ He Who Calls The Storm. | But Betrayal felt betrayed\\ and tried to leave the island\\ by telling their story.\\ Luckily, Taru offered to help\\ Found Family contain the story.\\ They exploited a paradox\\ to ritually kill Taru, allowing him\\ to both leave the story and be part of it\\ as the metatrope of Escape. |
| And so the Unbound One became\\ Storm-Bound\\ and that land became\\ this land. | So Betrayal became\\ sealed within Escape's tempest\\ and the island became\\ an effective trope trap. |
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