The Motherworld

We begin in space. Lightless, soundless, the murderous vacuum between stars. Look around as we hang here amid frozen nothing; look at the stars that stretch away before us. They are not our own stars, not our own constellations. Remain out here and watch them for ten million lifetimes and you will not find a pattern you recognise. Forget everything you know about the world you call home and the space it lives in, they are not here. Convinced of that? You will be when we turn to look behind us. From this far out the sun is barely more than another, slightly brighter star, the haze of matter surrounding it little more than a barely-perceptible texture to space where the dim light passes through it. This is the Oort cloud, the membrane of frigid dust and ice that shrouds the outermost limits of the system. Here the gauzy stuff of the cloud weaves itself into a constant flow of shapes of great fronds and flowers, leaves and petals a thousand kilometres long, or of skeletal angels with hooded faces, or hands cupped towards the star as if to catch the last dregs of whatever warmth has managed the light-hours-long journey out from the surface of the star. In from the Cloud and into the cometary halo, where the great crags of bitter ice swoop through the far ends of the orbits that will carry them on a path of centuries down into the boiling maelstrom of the inner worlds. The comets are made of rock and pitted ice, hacked into the shapes of vicious and leering faces although in this frigid dark there is no one to see them. We will follow one of these comets inward now, diving into the gravity well of the still-distant star and skating inward through the ecliptic. There are no planets to pass yet, for this star has only ever nurtured its single child, but as the radiance of the far-off sun begins to grow from a bare smudge of grey to a faint tickle of light and heat against the comets face, we begin to pass the stuff of the inner system. We are passing through the inner shells of dust and stones, and they leave a fresh layer of stinging micro-craters across the comets patina before it breaks through them, riding the gravity in past great whorls and swirls of dust and gas. These begin as simple shadows, but watch them brighten as the suns light becomes more powerful and the surface of the comet begins to steam, watch them take on wondrous colours. Here a great river of powdered sapphire makes a stream of sparkling blue through space, here a boiling cloud of scarlet and yellow crystals, so light and fine they could be liquids, has been strung out into a brilliant curtain by the speed of its path around the sun. These clouds make a brilliant train of scarves and veils that wrap and trail the sun as it sweeps through space, and dancing and whirling through them are the swarms of asteroids that our comet whips past and through, more and more blurred with speed as the suns gravity strengthens its claim. Some come in the crude and vital shapes of rams and bulls, sparking and hammering against one another as they duel for the best orbits. Further in, a million kilometre line of asteroids whose brilliant white stone puts the ice of our comet to shame as we pass them we see that they are eyes, each with an iris of coloured rock that tracks us as they eyes watch our comet for a time before turning back to regard the great blaze of their sun. The sunlight is powerful now, and the face of our comet leers and groans soundlessly as its ice boils and trails out behind it. We are leaving the last of the crowd and ferment of the inner system behind us now, whipping through the closest part of our comets orbit through the heart of the system, past the sun itself. It is a star unlike any other in creation, rich and golden and spangled with coils and veils of the purest energy is had decked itself in. Look at its surface, boiling and flowing, never still: faces swim out of its radiant skin to laugh their delight to all the cosmos or weep tears of burning hydrogen, the flares and geysers of its corona shape themselves into warring armies or dancing sprites, sunspots gape like chanting mouths. As we arc around it and prepare to slingshot away into the outer cold once again, solar flares fly past in the shape of arrows and spears, or spread their wings like great birds and soar into interstellar space. Our comet is incandescent, writhing and bubbling in the heat, but we will leave it now to chase the vapour-tail it pushes ahead of itself as it races away. We are coming to our final destination, this stars single offspring world, parading in its orbit wrapped in brilliant auroras and trailing its one bright moon behind it. It is an infant world now, barely cool from its creation, but as we swoop down from space and speed over its surface you can already see the heritage of its parent star: this Motherworld will soon begin the throes of a joyful, abundant creation. Newborn World We have time, just, to pass over the planet a while and look at the cradle for the multitudes it will soon produce. The ash and sickening gases, the last breaths of the volcanoes that are now beginning to dwindle and fall silent, is clearing from the sky and the air is becoming clearer. Still the clouds of dust give a twilit richness to the sun even at noon, but that is changing and soon there will be days and nights we can recognise. There are storms and currents of wind that can pick up monstrous rocks from the ground and smash mountains flat with them, but the crust of the world has not quite finished pushing up vast crags to resist the wind and opening precipices to channel and defeat it. The earth asserts itself over the air as it cools from its birth in fire, covering the Motherworld in a powerful mantle of rock, mapping its kingdom in great groves of mountains and chasms and trenches deep in cold, still shadows. But the earth itself is colonised and beleaguered as the clouds condense and the air cools. You can see it beginning in the chilled depths of the chasms or high in the air: a tell-tale band of vapour, or the first subtle droplets condensing to run down a sheer cliff whose top stand in the sunlight kilometres up above. Soon the deep chasms are chains of pools and streams, and the cliff-faces are slick with moisture. Soon the great cloud-banks overheads are thick with rain instead of ash and water is streaming form the sky and sluicing through the ravines in the earth. Watch as the days sprint by and the seasons turn, and the gulfs fill to become rivers and oceans, the great stretches of water learning their ways through the face of the Motherworld and patterns of their tides and currents. As the oceans fill and the rivers run we will turn our attention away and to the sullen outposts of an element that will not retreat. Fire ruled the birth of the Motherworld, and for a time even the first scraps of earth and air were no more than pockets of element floating amid seas and clouds of uttermost heat. The air has cleansed itself of smoke and sparks, and the earth had cooled and hardened to imprison the shimmering magma, but they cannot smother the Motherworld’s fires completely. Look at the folds and splits in the Motherworld’s crust as we fly north, and how the riverbeds here are filled not with water but with red-gold lethal heat: the planet wears a ruby coronet of volcanoes and lava rifts where the fire welling up from her veins still holds its ground. Now the bare earth finds itself besieged by the fire that melts away at it and the water that undermines and erodes it. So the earth must grudgingly move itself again, sending avalanches out to colonise the seas, pushing mountains up to split the sky, reclaiming its molten flesh from the fires. The fires fight their way through the earth and seek to boil away the waters and choke the air fight each other to a standstill and work to chill and erode the other elements into submission. There is no stability, only endless tumult, the remaking of the world again and again as year after year dances past. Ignore the years, even the centuries, and watch over the Motherworld for an age at a time, now, and you will see something new. In all these battles, a pattern is forming. The Courts of the Elementals Do not try to count how many years or centuries it takes. (It will be fewer than you think, for the Motherworld is in the constant throes of birth and creation and will outstrip the work of any sterile world governed by mere mundane physics). Simply watch as at first the elements batter themselves against one another blind and unliving. But watch then as their patterns become more sophisticated, as they learn to feel when they should try and advance, and when they are weak and must simply try to hold on, when their rival elements are weak and they can propagate, and when an enemy is strong and threatening and they must move to cut off its intrusion. No longer inanimate forces, think now of grass or trees, trying to grow the highest or overrun and seed the finest soil with themselves. Race forward in time, now, to the places where those battles are fiercest: around the volcanic lands of the north where Fire tries to force its way into the Earth domains around it, or over the deepest ocean trenches where the Air tries to drive whirlpool-tunnels down into the deepest realm of Water while the Water retaliates by sending spouts up from the ocean surface to lash at the sky. Where the elements have fought to stalemate and neither can get the upper hand, they grapple for any edge in the fight and the Motherworld, far from grieving at these battles sweeping her surface, brings to life the means for them to do so. Let the sun flicker across the sky a hundred thousand times, then that many again, and again, and see how the battles progress. Now there is purpose in the ebbs and flows of the Fire: curtains and pillars of flame form themselves into lines and drive forward into the lands of the Earth, herding streams of lava ahead of them, and the Earth must needs bring up walking, bellowing columns of stone to oppose them. We can swoop from one end of the kingdom of Earth to the other and see that the waves no longer blindly smash against the rock: there are towers of water eddying back and forth out beyond the shore that have faces and arms, call to one another in voices of ocean-roar to co-ordinate their efforts to sap and undermine the cliffs. And taking advantage of their preoccupation, watch the laughing whirlwinds of sentient Air which swoop and dart to strike at the flanks of the other elementals armies. Watch as the years pass and the battles unfold. Here on a plain of jagged boulders the Fire Elementals sweep the battlefield clean and pour across the land in roaring, triumphant hordes, raising fresh armies from the great magma crevasses they cut in the earth. But watch as the Air Elementals learn trickery and stall the Fire armies again and again, trapping them and wearing them down until their blazing cohorts are no more than plains of ashes and slag. That struggle in turn spends too much of the Air, turning realm into heat-haze and smoke. Watch as the Earth Elementals gain the upper hand, grinding their ponderous way into the exhausted Air and Fire ranks, slowly, inexorably rolling back the other Elementals every gain. The Earth is patient and slow to move, but powerful and tenacious while the rashness of Fire and the fickleness of Air are their undoing. Cold rock seals over the magma vents and new crags are driven into the sky galled, the Fire must retreat or cool and perish while the Air find that even their most powerful winds are funnelled and trapped by the mountain-mazes, their great tempests and hurricanes stalled, their Elementals driven into the high atmosphere where even their own element begins to thin against the vacuum of space. Watch as the cunning Elementals of Water infiltrate the fortresses, filling the deep caves with lakes and streams, and how they erode and bring the walls of Earth down but as they rush to fill the breach their fiercest Elemental soldiers are met by howling berserkers of purest Fire who blast the inrushing sea into steam. So the Elementals spring from the cauldron of the infant Motherworld, twisting and knitting themselves out of the raw matter around them, congregating and forming ranks first by blindest instinct and then with ever greater intelligence, throwing up commanders and heroes, vicious destroyers and steadfast defenders as Elemental after Elemental perishes in battle only to dissipate and create itself anew. Gradually great Courts form among them as the most powerful Elementals draw together and gather their followers: now as we speed forward again to watch their rise we can spy on conclaves of Air meeting in storm-fronts that sweep the planet from pole to pole in a day, or listen to the quiet rumble of rock in the deepest mountain-roots as the rulers of Earth confer. Outside in the riverbeds and ocean currents the Water Elementals dance and jest and entertain one another, and Fire wages hysterical civil wars in the caldera of volcanoes and the flame-kissed sands of the raw desert. In their Courts the Elementals make themselves kings and nobles, generals and judges, pass their laws and tell their histories and lineages. We will watch as the years go by and the Courts study their world, the Elementals growing wiser and fiercer and working to overthrow their rivals and make the Motherworld in their own image, and their own image only. The multitude of life and the rise of the Peoples Who can know how much of the flowering of life around the Elemental Courts was the work of the Elementals themselves or of the always-abundant creative energy of the Motherworld herself? Simply wait for her to whirl around her sun a while more, and look at the Courts now! In his protean palace-chamber the August Emperor of the Heavens is attended by his Air-Elemental sages and courtiers, but his throne is also guarded by ranks of glowering Temple Dogs and canopied with butterflies with wings of pastel rainbow. Mistspiders dance and tumble for his amusement while air dragons curl and wind about the palace outside, with bodies of cloud and lightning-bright teeth. In the forge-hot north the Fire Elemental hordes are joined by swarms of spark-locusts and opalescent Chironeks which float on the hot thermals like great jellyfish with tendrils of white flame. Elemental nobles ride out on many legged dragons like scaly centipedes whose molten feet drum against the ground as they turn the earth they walk across to lava slurry. In the lightless rock deep in the Motherworlds crust the Earth Elementals still hold court, but now they are surrounded by the grind of steel-armoured earthworms with bodies metres thick who burrow through the mountains leaving veins of gold as their spoor, the clicking of basalt-shelled beetles building nests in cysts of rock, the thunderous hooves of the granite-boned biscoferus who dig their way out of the earth and stampede in herds across the plains. It is the waters of the Motherworld which are the most fertile of all. To the delight of the Water Elementals the seas and rivers are filled with new movements and voices. Soon they can chase one another through forests of swaying seaweed that fill the ocean from horizon to horizon, or play intricate games through gardens of coral sculptures that dizzy the eye with their shapes and colours. Where the waters have flowed up and infiltrated the Earth in swamps and wetlands, diminutive water-sprites creep giggling through the undergrowth and jewel-scaled river snakes glide through the shallows while tiny luminous worms and great black-hided Kraken prowl the blackness of the deepest ocean trenches. Life is spreading. The Motherworld pours forth new creations all the time. Even in the time it has taken for the Elementals to get used to their new place as one form of life among many, life has ceased to be the sole prerogative of the pure Elemental ecosystems and the Motherworld has become a garden. Watch the first weeds and rushes spreading out from riverbanks and lakeshores, now speed to the pitted outlands of the volcano country and see the leathery lichens and red-eyed lizards that are colonising the rocky crevices. Now turn to the highest mountain peaks and see the conifers spreading up their slopes and the eagles circling their peaks. It is not a straight line, this progress, but an ascending, accelerating curve: let barely a few more years turn and the whole world has become a garden as the Motherworld pours vitality into every growing thing. The Arrival of Humans Now look closer there is something else moving here now which it is important to see. We can see them in the great forests that have sprung up almost overnight in the valleys, or venturing out into the open savannah and beginning to clamber into the foothills of the mountains. We can watch as they first start to swim in the rivers and run along the beaches, hunt and gather and explore, crude canoes striking out from the shores and rough shelters springing up in clusters along the borders of the Fire country. The forests are filling up with voices and the stone toes of the great mountains are being daubed with crude paintings. This is the newest of the Motherworlds creations, and the second wave of beings that will change the face of the planet forever. Its name? In case you have not guessed, its name is human. The humans of the Motherworld, not yet separated into the Peoples as we know them today, lived out their early lives in amongst the flash-flood of new ecology that poured across the planet. Their early growth was dazzlingly fast, as such things on the Motherworld are, and in almost the blink of an eye they had language, tools, the beginning of a culture and laws. But their civilisation, such as it was, was not a great one and little remains of those humans now, and so we will hurry forward in time to watch as the humanfolk enter the period that will truly shape them: their meetings with the Elementals. Destinies Entwined It begins as so many great turning points do, in a scattered and seemingly unimportant way. The humans themselves are scattered too widely over the Motherworld now for word to pass easily among them, so the tribes people who uneasily share the hunting-grounds in the wetlands with water-sprites and naiads have not heard that their cousins in the mountains are covering their caves with paintings of the great roaring boulders that dig themselves out of the ground and must be fled from, and news has not reached either of these places about the grim struggles along the borders of the Fire country where hunting-packs of Fire Elementals drive the humans out of the hinterlands and hunt them day and night to their deaths. Few Elementals believe that the humans offer them anything but sport; to the humans the Elementals are a threat that they must live uneasily alongside, the source of random predation and the occasional terrifying battle that wrecks the landscape and obliterates any humans unfortunate enough to find themselves in the crossfire. All these times we will ignore. No doubt they were great and important times to the men and women who lived in them, but we will let them pass in a blur of motion as we home in on four moments in particular. Watch. Three Air Dragons hang like long-tailed kites over a crag of ice that hooks into the air over the deep green velvet of a forest far below. For amusement and curiosity they have forsaken their homes high above the cloud layer and flown to the skin of the world seeking diversion, and the three little humans they have caught on the crag fascinate them. The sounds they make could almost be taken for words, words like those the creatures of the Air themselves use! One of the dragons leans forward and speaks to them, and one of the humans, mastering its fear, stand straight, looks back and repeats the words back! The dragons laugh, for who could imagine such a thing? But it persists, still calling out the words, mimicking their expressions of astonishment as they discuss it among themselves. They try simpler words for its benefit, listen carefully to it, correct its pronunciation. They are, they realise, teaching it to speak. The Court of the Air must hear about this. Well, in time. The other little creatures are standing up and wanting to learn too, now, and this is becoming fascinating. Watch. These hills are scorched and blasted bare of plant or beast this is not the first time they have been fought over. Now the burning monsters are coming again, but the humans on the hills are ready for them. They have found that thick cloaks of Biscoferus hide will blunt the force of the flames and they have dug trenches and tunnels between the cairn-shelters they have made for themselves on the hilltop from which they can defend against the creatures that come out of the smoking earth around the volcano. Now they believe themselves trapped in their little fortress, because even as the flame-wrapped forms leap and race towards them their own bunkers and tunnels are full of lumbering shapes with pitted stone skins and whiskers of grey rock-dust who watch them with unblinking emerald eyes. For the Earth Elementals there is no time to try to reassure these cowering soft fleshed folk, let alone explain how long they have watched as the humans carved and defended their redoubts in the Earth. There will be time enough for talk after the battle, but for now the Fire Elementals are almost upon them and the Earth Elementals must step forward into battle and let their actions speak for themselves. Watch. Soon this faction of Elementals will overreach themselves, in the way that they all do. But for now they are laughing and capering through what was a river-valley until yesterday, the last pools of the river pulsing into steam and the grassy banks licked with flames as the Fire Elementals celebrate their victory. For so long this valley, drenched with sickening, lethal water, had been beyond their grasp, but now the river has been choked and dammed at the head of the valley and the Fire Elementals are busily melting and fusing the rocks that once made up the rapids to try to make the dam permanent. The humans who ventured in to make the first, crude dam of earth and logs crouch in the blackening grass at the lip of the valley and watch the celebrations with fear in their eyes glancing up at them, the Fire Elemental general knows that some day they too will be fuel for his host (as must everything). But in the meantime how tame they are, and how useful too! Able to go into the cold, wet lands where the Elementals might chill and smother, able to weaken their enemies and strike from sudden directions against even rival Elementals of Fire, able even to attack others of their own kind in payment for being spared from their own burning. How clever he was to trap and break them instead of burning them outright, and to force them to learn his own tongue to hear their orders! The general turns his face to the sky and shouts harsh laughter, and savours the delicious feel of grass turning to ash between his burning toes. Watch. To make its guests feel at home, the Court has convened in the shallows of the lagoon. Beyond a great arc of reef the breakers boom but in the lagoon the water has risen up in beautiful columns and sculptures as the Elementals have amused themselves during their wait. The greater Elementals scull idly back and forth in the deeper water, stirring playful eddies of coral-sand or trying on impromptu living jewellery of startled but co-operative fish. Their smaller retainers have been hunting and have brought up a feast: sweet seaweed, soft fish steaks and mollusc flesh, carefully selected and ornamented. And their guests are coming now, attended by the Elementals whom they have already befriended, looking around them with only a little nervousness. The Water Elementals are keen to meet them, to learn about these exciting new friends who have learned to hunt and swim and dance alongside the Water Elementals themselves, who have learned the Elementals language and have taught them their own, and helped the Water stand off attacks by Earth Elemental colonists or Fire Elemental raiders. Used to nothing larger than watersprites and the smallest Elementals, the humans are overwhelmed at first, but as the members of the Court bow and call out greetings, ushering their guests to the shore of the lagoon and showing them the food they have laid out, the dances and games they have prepared, the humans look at one another and start to grin. You can imagine it. Once they touch the destinies of the Motherworlds human people and her Elementals bind tightly to one another. They make up something in each other, it seems. The humans that gravitate to the Elemental Courts are mesmerised by the power and majesty of these incarnations of the raw forces that they have only known as terrors and threats. The Elementals are exhilarated by the humans freshness, their new perspectives, their ability to travel into country that the Elementals nature denies them, their energy, and their tenacity. Kinship and the Sundering of Humanity The growth of kinship does not take long to spot. We barely have to jump forward at all to see it develop. Before long the folk of the mountains are split: those who travel to the high places and talk with the dragons are feuding with those who stay in the canyons and burrow into the cliff-faces and work with the Earth Elementals to fortify and defend their bastions against the other elements. (And notice how those whom the dragons carry into the sky are already becoming lighter and slenderer and those who work alongside the emissaries of the Court of Earth are becoming heavier, tougher, denser of flesh). The value of human slaves has galvanised the Court of Fire, and now every host of Elementals that rides out from its walls drives before it a rabble of men and women, their skins scorched and their hair and brows burnt away, who will be the outriders and scouts for their Elemental overlords. The Fire Elementals have realised that their slaves can never truly coexist with them, but they have found that within not so many generations their humans are becoming tougher, more savage, better able to tolerate greater and greater heat and learn the languages and ways of the Fire themselves. Under the waves new generations of children are growing up who have never known their human parents and the Water Elementals to be separate species, who can barely understand that even their own great-grandparents could not slip through the water as effortlessly as they ran across the land and that they would choke and drown if they took a breath below the surface. Life with the Elementals brings its rewards. More and more humans are presented to the Elemental Courts, more begin to rise in rank as the Elementals accept them as their own and bestow on them arts that their barely-removed ancestors would have fled from or bowed down to in awe. Humans are riding the high winds and building homes in the clouds now, and diving down to explore the mysteries at the depths of the oceans. The skirmishes along the places where the Elements meet routinely see a trusted slave of the Fire scorching the land with flame-spouts while a general of the Earth, human but second-generation Court nobility nevertheless, counters with sprays of rocks as though avalanches had thrown themselves into the sky, and smothers the flames by opening crevasses in the rock or raising mudslides to swallow them. Humanity is divided. There may have been times when they first walked on the land that they thought of themselves as one people, but now their loyalties are cut into four. You could not now convince any of them that there is a bond of species here. Put yourself in the elegant spider-silk slippers of an Air warrior swooping down to strike at the earthworks of a mountain range below. Is it the dragons and Elementals around you that have raised you, given your family its home in mansions of plaited cloud, blessed you with the art of riding and marshalling the flow of the winds and storms. Are the grunting savages crewing those ugly rock-catapults down below really your brothers and sisters rather than the noble courtiers of the Air? Will they in turn feel any kinship with you as they call out to the Earth Elementals and the golems they have built out of the element they have made their own? Will the Water see you as one of them, they with their lives beneath the waves and their roaming lives about the sea-floor? Or the Fire, locked in grudging service to their brutal Elemental owners, only ever able to vent their fury against the other Peoples against whom they are sent in war? Humanity has been born and humanity has arisen on its way to greatness, but the first rulers of the Motherworld have left their mark. Earth. Fire. Air. Water. The war goes on as it always has. The Schism and Humanity Ascendant Humanity only on its way to greatness? Oh, yes. They have not reached their potential yet. We are watching them run on borrowed power, content only to exercise the arts and abilities that the Elementals have seen fit to pass on to them. Like the Elementals, they are accepting their world as it has passed to them: surely it is only natural that things be as they are, after all, and as humanity blossoms under the wing of the Elementals there is so much to explore already. So much to explore for now. We do not have to watch for long a generation, perhaps? Two, two and a half at most, before we have the fundamental divide between the Elementals and the People to set beside all their acquired similarities. The Elementals have their Element and their world and their Courts and it is not in the mind or soul of an Elemental to ever want anything more, but humans, you may have noticed, do not like to be satisfied with their world. They like to experiment, to explore, to shape, to remake. Let us watch and see how the tensions develop. Earth are the first to show signs of it, and we could have anticipated that. The humans who entered the realm of the Earth Elementals have learned to exist in that world by understanding the intricacies of force, pressure and heat that shape their world, and the Earth itself is physical, visible, there to be touched what could be more natural than that once the folk of Earth had mastered their understanding of their element they would want to try using those forces to shape their world on their own behalf? The ones who have stayed on the surface, the Cragmen, mastered this early: they know that striking rocks together will shape the stones they use to strike and throw and they use their sharpened stones to make their clothes of hide. But others of the Earth are ambitious beyond this. The deepest tunnellers have seen how the giant Earthworms use their bodies to swim through the sludgy molten rock in the deep crevasses and refine it and soon, in secret little chambers, the communities who will soon take the name of their Earthworm totems bring lava in through secret shafts, their soldiers and Elementalists fighting and taming it, driving off the Fire Elementals who try and ride it into their domain, then begin using it. They find they can refine ore into metal, that they can shape the rock itself, harden and temper it. They can make stone skins for themselves like the Elementals have, make fists and weapons of rock like the golems use. As their craft develops their understanding does too, and surely the Motherworld and the very Element itself blesses what they do, for the more they work the more understanding silently flowers through their minds. Up on the surface whole clans of humans have deserted the tunnels and deep reaches of the earth to roam back and forth on its surface underneath the howling vacuum of air that the Elementals at Court view with loathing. They no longer step aside for the great Biscoferus herds as they did but now catch and harness them, whole troops of humans steering their mounts back and forth and careening across the plains on their backs. They no longer stand beside the Elementals in the giant mountain-ramparts but are raising forts of their own out across the plains, riding between them on constant, restless patrols rather than standing resolute in among the mountain ramparts. And from the mountains come the Great Juggernauts, vast castle-cities grinding their way out of their land-docks on treads that crush trenches into the ground behind them or wheels of metal and rock so tall that if we stand on the ground by the rim we will have to crane up to see the hub jutting into the air tens of metres above our heads. The encroachments of the other Elements are driven off: great systems of dykes drain the lowlands and reclaim them from the Water, the would-be conquistadors of Fire and the raiders of the Air break against the towers or are crushed beneath the guns of the garrisons and the tread of the Great Juggernauts. For a time, even as the earth itself is the solid foundation of the Motherworld, the Earth dominions are the strongest of the empires, their humans forging themselves an unbreakable power with forge-worked metal and mystically tempered rock, with elemental magic and great engines, spells and magnetics and piston and enchantment. And none of the Earth Court are there to see. The schism was inevitable, of course. It had been brewing for a long time. The temperament of the Earth is like its element: it may seem stable, solid, but it is riven with fault-lines and immense, hidden pressures, and when those pressures finally erupt into the open they are devastating. The Earth Elementals loathed the sterility of engines and machines, the stuff of Earth broken and wrenched into foreign shapes. They bristled at the way the humans ignored their rebukes, dismissing their successes against the other elements as the bragging of upstarts who were they to preach on warfare to Elementals who had battled for their realm for a geological age? Words became harsh, bitter. Debates quickly rotted into arguments and frustration became fury. The humans had learned stubbornness and would not abandon their engines and their sciences; the Elementals, who taught them that stubbornness, would never accept them. If the quarrel had come to blows the Earth might have torn itself apart in a civil war that would have seemed unthinkable only a generation or two before, but instead a hot, sullen silence falls between the factions and talk dies away. And see where it has led: the Elementals have turned their backs on the mountains and plains, have left their fortresses standing empty and retreated into the deepest fastnesses beneath the planet, to brood on their treacherous children and wait out the human infestation in the safety of impenetrable rock. It almost destroys them. Bereft of their leaders at Court the Earths tenacity is put to the test. The women and men of Earth, abandoned by their one-time Elemental mentors, are driven back across the domain that had looked so invincible scant years ago as the other Elements sense their weakness and look to their weapons. And what weapons! The Earth were the first, but like everything on the Motherworld their ideas seemed almost to have their own life and force and they have raced through the minds of all the humanfolk like a shockwave. The Earth were the first, but they are not the only ones to build their magic into science. In among the mountain peaks the raids by the Air increase, and the fortresses that had once crushed the assaults now begin to crumble as the Dragons and Temple Dogs, the human monks and Wind Walker storm troops, are joined by artillery that funnels the elemental power of the storms into sizzling lightning and commando teams whose harnesses and gauntlets use circuits and engines to turn their assaults into barrages of wind and thunder. The Air machinery is as delicate and expertly deadly as the Airs own fighting arts are: naturally quick-witted and imaginative, they seized on the appalling, crude, heavy devices of Earth and remade them with their own restless intellects. And it is the Air who win the first great victory. In one single, cataclysmic year they rend the earth four times, driving raw assaults into the heart of the Earths precious mountain ranges. To the Air it is the final proof that they have become the equal of their Elemental mentors, the triumph of their arts of magic, of the power of their sciences and of their military daring and puissance. These go far beyond the Airs normal raids they are not even invasions, wars of occupation. That year the Air steal the very rock of the Motherworld, not once but four times, dragging kilometres-wide saucers of landscape up and out of the earth. Four giant islands are born into the heavens, with the labour-cry of rending rock and an afterbirth of towering clouds of dust and debris hanging in the sky like mocking echoes of the mountains the Air have stolen. In their new flying islands the humans of the Air jubilantly begin to build their new fortresses, gardens, laboratories: they are growing into a society and a way of living that has less and less to do with the haughty creatures of the Court of Air far above them. For them the division comes more gradually: there is no great quarrel as the humans below them had with Court of Earth, no furious parting or long grudge. But the Air Elementals are no less affronted by the trapping of their beautiful element into a deadened cage of machines and cold logic, and the humans are wilful and intoxicated by the possibilities of their new homes, and slowly the two societies grow apart and migrate to their own homes, the Elementals high in the atmosphere and the humans living on their little stone islands in the sky. It is only the Air Dragons who still move freely between both, watching the division between their friends and allies with heavy hearts. The Fire are less sophisticated. Introspection is not part of the Fire nature, their Elementals care little about technology one way or the other, and the paving-over of enchantment with science is not the affront to them that it is to the others. But what they do notice is that their fragile little slaves are getting adept at forging machines for themselves, and that the warlords who let their slaves build the machines and take them into battle are becoming the most powerful and feared of their kind. The frontiers of Fire country had been driven inward as the Earth had weathered the ever more frantic rampages of the Fire hordes and then slowly, patiently pushed their fortifications forward over ground that the Fire had exhausted themselves too much to contest. Now the process is reversing as the humans, who are first the Fire Courts slaves, then its gun-fodder, then its militia, then its officers, make their sorties anew with frightening weapons that they have taught themselves to forge. As their servants become more proficient the Fire must learn to trust them with more and more power, leaving them to lead armies and found outland provinces in places to chilled or water-rich for the Elementals to control directly. That is what undoes them, of course. The humans have watched their masters and learned from them. They have been studying the ethos of Fire for far longer than they have been studying their newfound technologies and war-arts. They have learned rage, they have learned hunger, they have learned destruction. They have built their slave-kingdoms carefully, each of their greatest elemental masters and generals wrapping layers of rebel cliques and private loyalists around them. The Court of Fire knows nothing, suspects nothing, until the first reports come in. Noble Elementals have travelled forth to inspect the provinces that their human vassals have conquered and have not returned. Tribute has dried up from the human satraps and threats do not see it renewed. The first of the punitive armies that the Court send forth return as scattered refugees with reports of ambushes and pitched battles: the war-engines that the Fire Elementals never bothered to pay attention to have been turned on them. The humans are thorough and merciless, with a unity and an iron discipline that the Fire Elementals struggle to attain, and they have honed their elemental arts as carefully as they have developed their machines. With stunning rapidity the realms of the Fire Elementals are halved, then quartered, and as their humans seize the burning deserts and badlands for themselves the Elementals are left clutching at the last scraps of their old territories, the lava pits and firestorms around the northern pole where even the most powerful elementalists of the fire-following humans cannot last for long. Most of the Fire have managed to congregate there, but some have suffered the cruellest reversal of all, and as the victorious human armies who now refer to themselves as the Fire ride south again to begin forging their own kingdoms they drag with them slave-trains of Fire Elementals weak or unlucky enough to have fallen into captivity and servitude. It is only the Water who seem to be beyond the reach of the strife, the Water whose Elementals and humans never tried to rule or own one another, who would fight side by side when they had to but would always rather be by one another’s sides at sport or feasting instead. Like their element they have spread everywhere they can, always lapping at the edges of the other Elements realms, skirmishing and infiltrating. But they have raised no great armies, built no fortresses, embarked on no great wars of conquest or been riven with rebellion and strife among themselves. Some of the Water humans have played with machines and devices as they have seen the other humans do, but most are content to use the seas and rivers as the boundless resources they are. With their maces of razor-coral and armour of shell, piranha-toothed swords and volleys of urchin-spined darts, the Water have accepted their element for what it is and as the other peoples and Elements have gone through their schisms and civil wars the Water have looked on, shaken their heads and enjoyed the peace while it has lasted. On the Motherworld, though, peace does not usually last for long. The time of the pure Elementals and their world-shaking wars has passed, and the Motherworld belongs to the plants and animals, to humanity and the factions and divisions that the Elemental Courts have left them in. The new ecosystems of the Motherworld are growing richer by the year, for she has lost none of her exuberance for creating life and beauty. But in the middle of that beauty the rancorous wars of the Elemental factions rage on. The sky-fortresses of the Air still glide back and forth above the Motherworlds lands spying out the enemy as the great Juggernauts of the Earth rumble to and fro beneath and the Earth gunners peer from their bunkers and trenches with suspicious eyes and keep their guns at the ready. The Fire still come storming out of their baking wildernesses with torch and scimitar trying to turn all the world into a great flame-flickering desert that will be their home only, and the Water will without a thought leave their banquets and songs and pick up their weapons when war threatens to engulf them. The Motherworld may still be in the glorious excesses of her youth, but it is also a turbulent, troubled youth full of conflict and turmoil. It is the world of Elemental Blast. The Motherworld Today The Motherworld may be ruled by the battles of her elemental children, but when you look out across her surface you will see no-one’s idea of a battlefield. Her landscape is still the stuff of awe and delight, and look in any direction from any vantage point on the planet that you can name and you will see beauty and grandeur. Even from space she is beautiful, decked with a silver-white moon and a glittering halo of auroras and radiation belts. She wears a ruddy coronet of volcanoes on the northern pole that tilts to the sun, and her southern pole is sheathed in thick permafrost and twilight. Her seas are stormy, always pulled by powerful winds and tides, and her land wraps around her in long bands and islands and archipelagos - even on the broadest continents it is hard to be too far away from the sea. There are times when the Motherworld’s winds are shaped as ours are, by heat and cold and the flow and pressure of air, but as often they are sent rampaging this way and that by the folk of the Air who drive them as dogs will drive a herd of cattle, and the Motherworld’s clouds roil and churn across her skies unceasingly. The Motherworld is not a place of subtlety or quiet. Her landscapes are built on epic, stunning scales and shaped by magic and Elemental power as much as geology and climate. Elemental masters of all the four peoples work to cement their control of conquered territories by seeding and nurturing their element, trying to bind it into the essence of the new land to the point where no future ruler will be able to dislodge it. A giant sheer-sided pinnacle spearing up out of the water just off the shore might mark the place where an Earth general has ridden an avalanche down into the sea and planted the seed of a mountain to create an outpost in the Water realm. In the middle of a mountain range deep in the frigid south, buried in snow and hazed over with clouds of ice crystals, you might still see a valley full of rainforest swaddled in warm, humid mists, nourished around a core of white-hot rock where the Fire have begun to incubate a nest of flames in the heart of the Earth’s domain. Crossing a desert of oven-hot sand and black rock, scorched to sterile perfection by the orchards of flamespouts raised by Fire pyromancers, there nevertheless may be a place where a towering dust-storm has blocked out the sun for decades, where winds whip the sand into horrifying tornado-walls and twisters dance and fence with each other as the Air place the stamp of their superiority on a domain the Fire are trying to rule unopposed. Such conflicts have shaped the Motherworld for centuries and now her geography is now an astonishing jigsaw of wildly differing landscapes, crammed and scattered across her continents in bewildering profusion. Such a continual ferment of creation and recreation forces explosively fast evolution and adaptation among the Motherworld’s wildlife and there are few settled ecosystems, with great migrations of wildlife and bewildering varieties of animals being the rule. The changes ripple across the land dizzyingly fast: a great forest that would take a thousand years to grow around your home or mine can spring up in a decade from the soil of the Motherworld, a new species can spring up and be wiped out in less than a human lifetime. Underpinning this richness is the great, thrumming creative energy of the Motherworld herself, a life-force that may not be conscious or sentient but is as vibrant as sunlight and as inexorable as gravity. It is the most important thing to understand about this world: life is everywhere, and in everything. Try to dig a shaft into rock and you will hear the groans of distress as you lever each stone away, the earth making its animal protest at being parted, and leave your tools out overnight and you will see stony fingers pinning them to the ground next morning. Waves that crash against the rocks beneath a headland will leave spray dancing in the air in ghostly shapes of faces, trees, dancing figures. Build a campfire and watch the flames begin to shape themselves to the rhythm of your voice as you sit around it and sing; build the bonfire big enough and you will start to see little leering faces in the flames or tiny patterns woven by the sparks in the air. Trees will twitch their branches to match your steps beneath them, mud clutches at feet with vindictive little fingers and icebergs peer up above the surface of the southern oceans with the faces of malicious old men. Any and every aspect of nature in the Motherworld bursts with crude life, and anything that begins to approach a critical mass - an avalanche, a forest fire, a great tidal wave or a lake, powerful windstorms - will also concentrate life and perhaps even give birth to a new litter of Elementals. The elements respond to conflict, too, even in the skirmishes too small for the great Elemental Masters to bother with. Battles on the Motherworld are accompanied by windstorms and earth tremors, volcanic eruptions and powerful riptides, even the thrashing of trees and the stampeding of animals as the emotions of the combatants spill over into the landscape. On the rare occasions when the Peoples have waged great pitched battles among themselves, the utmost efforts of the Elemental Masters are needed simply to make sure that the battlefield stays stable enough for even the warriors of their own side to fight on! It is this energy that has enabled the Motherworld’s landscapes to weather the battles that have torn them up time and time again throughout her history, for even though the numbers of the Peoples are small and their battles tend to be raids and skirmishes, their technology and Elemental arts have been more than potent enough to devastate the lands that they fight over. The Motherworld is able to shrug off the damage and always regenerate anew: a rich forest of seaweed dammed off and dried by the Earth can then regenerate into a verdant grassland which is scorched into desert and rock by a war against the Fire, only to be reborn as a mosaic of brilliant lichen patrolled by jewelled scarab beetles, to be flooded once more and buried beneath a great labyrinth of coral. The Peoples take all this in stride - to them a world like ours would seem catatonically slow to change and frighteningly fragile. The Peoples The four great Peoples of the Motherworld still bear the names of the Elements their ancestors adopted, and the attentions of the Elementals have left their marks. The Courts bestowed kinship and power on the earliest humans, and those gifts have passed down through the bloodlines of the Peoples to this day. It shows in their bodies - the lithe and light-boned Air, the Earth with their thick bones and heavy flesh, the fever-hot blood of the Fire, the Water who can swim to lethal depths and breathe water and air alike. And it shows in their spirits, in the way they can sense the ebbs and flows and pressures of their element, react to its pain and gather it about themselves. In most of the Peoples these gifts have weakened over the generations since the Elementals first bestowed them, for the human frame was never intended to bear such forces. Many of the People can only affect their element in the smallest of ways: conjure a tiny breeze, perhaps, or sense faint approaching footfalls through a great expanse of rock. Some have greater powers, and can for example set things to burning with the heat of their breath or redirect the ocean currents and tides for as long as they are able to concentrate. These people have a certain puissance with their Elemental force, and the Peoples have developed systems of teachings and disciplines by which these people can strengthen and hone their gifts. Among the Earth these disciplines centre around forging and shaping the rocks and metals of their homes to create weapons and engines, coaxing them through the forging process as though they were alive. The Fire passes their teachings down through the quasi-religious Furnace Kin hermits who master their element through ordeals and visions. The most complex systems are the intricate martial arts of the Air: the House Tempest warriors who ride inside whirlwinds they conjure through their forms and martial patterns, but also the fighting monks who spend a lifetime learning in meditation and training in arcane mantras and katas, learning to harness the physical and elemental power in their bodies to make themselves into deadly living weapons. In an uncommon few the gifts of the Elementals shine as brightly as they did when humanity walked among the Elemental Courts, and it is to these adepts that the People look for their strength and power in peacetime and for their destructive gifts in war. Standing apart from even these are those who have survived and mastered the transcendant changes wrought by contact with Heart’s Blood. The merest touch or breath of the Motherworld’s pure essence will infuse the holder’s body with a rainbow blaze of power, and light up the mind as though the sun itself had ignited in their thoughts. Even after its direct touch has passed, the world will never look the same again: its holder will be stronger, more vigorous, their mind sharper, their understanding of their world deeper, their life-force fiercer and their relationship with their element more profound than they could ever have imagined. Some do not survive the experience, losing control of the energies coursing through them and simply vanishing in a shimmer of ecstatic power. Some strive for the rest of their lives to regain the experience of those few moments, or retire into mourning for an experience they know nothing else can equal. But the ones who are strong in mind and will, and skilled in the ways of their Element, can ride the transformative power of the Heart’s Blood and attain levels of power beyond anything they could have achieved on their own. They attain not only control over the Heart’s Blood but union with it, becoming an embodiment of the mingling of human and Element. These are the men and women around whom the Motherworld shakes, who can ignore the earnest training and endless exercises of their lesser kinfolk and conjure or cast down mountains, raise tidal waves or firestorms, wrench Elementals from the raw stuff around them and bind them to a task with little more than the flick of a thought. Many times the Masters will be found at the heart of a city or colony of their People, using their gifts to keep their community strong and secure. When the People go to war they always hope to have one of their Masters with them, for a Master’s power can often scatter an enemy force from the field in moments before a shot can be fired or a weapon drawn. When two Masters meet in a duel the soldiers of both sides will often turn and race for safety, knowing the savagery of the combat to come. If the Masters stand at one extreme, there is a counterpoint to them of which few of the Peoples will speak openly. There are dark rumours that they are being born in increasing numbers, that they are some kind of terrible, balancing shade to the Elemental Peoples’ own light. They are children who are born with no Elemental force in them at all, no attunement to Air, Earth, Fire or Water or any other natural force on the face of the Motherworld, children who have as much strength and wit and spirit as any other but who are simply as dead to the shifting flows of elemental power as any animal. If there is one thing that unites all of the Peoples it is a strange, instinctive loathing of even the idea of such a child: they can accept that their very distant ancestors may not have associated with the Elementals, they can even accept that there are so-called humans living that way now, for every so often in one’s travels one might glimpse a ragged band of nomads scurrying for cover, remnants of those humans who were not taken under the wing of any of the Courts and remained in barbarism in the Motherworld’s wildernesses. But the idea that a child might be born as one of them, into their own households, is an idea that the Peoples despise and fear with their very bones. Such children are driven out and away to fend for themselves under the laws of most of the Peoples, always after to be spoken of as dead - who knows how many more are simply killed at birth to spare their families the stigma and suspicion of having given birth to such a thing? What if anything these children signify is the cause of countless whispered speculations and apocalyptic theories; what actually causes their birth, if there even is a proper cause, may simply never be known.

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