Chronicles of Valdoria
Seven tales of a world shaped by gods, scarred by war, and defended by those who refuse to surrender.
The Pillar and the Betrayal
Time was the first road, and treachery its first shadow.
Tibiasula listened while Fardos and Uman told her of their many vanished works. She did not mock their failures. Instead she asked a simple question: how could anything remain if there was no moment in which to remain?
Uman understood. Creation needed more than substance; it required an order in which one event could follow another. He conceived of time, an unseen current flowing away from what had been and toward what could be. Fardos supplied the strength to set it moving. Tibiasula brought harmony to the undertaking.
Even Zathroth contributed a portion of his will, though his gift carried a bitter condition. If beginnings were to exist, endings must follow them. Every living thing would eventually weaken, every fortress crumble, every triumph become a memory. The others accepted this cost, for a finite world was preferable to no world at all.
Where their powers met, a brilliant pillar rose through the emptiness. Around it moments began to gather like stars around a beacon. The old void no longer swallowed everything. For the first time a thing could stand, cast a shadow, and still be there when the shadow moved.
But jealousy had been gathering within Zathroth as surely as time gathered around the pillar. He watched the others celebrate a victory he believed should have belonged to him. While their attention was fixed upon the new creation, he formed his resentment into a single act of violence and struck at Tibiasula.
The goddess shattered. Four vast powers broke free from her being: earth, water, air and fire. Fardos and Uman tried to gather the fragments, but the unity that had made Tibiasula herself could not be restored. Their hands closed upon wild elements that refused to become one again.
Rather than surrender everything to the void, they bound those elements to the Pillar of Time. Zathroth mistook their desperation for defeat and laughed, never noticing the new law they had discovered. His blow had wounded creation, yet it had also given the world the raw material from which life might rise.
The first dawn was still far away. Nevertheless, the darkness now contained a world waiting to be formed.
An original Valdoria retelling inspired by the established creation mythology of Tibia. This text and its illustrations are newly created for Valdoria Next.
