Pain.
That was all the elder gods knew.
The fire brought upon them from the burst of atoms was but a prick from a pin compared to what they experienced in each waking second of their anguished lives.
But even something as small as a pinprick could wake a sleeping giant.
—
Before the universe, there was nothing.
And there remained nothing.
Until a great flash brought existence to life.
From the flash came the elder gods, the highest order of the realm. Odin. Yahweh. Norden.
Odin, the eldest of the elder gods, the great Allfather, ruled over the heavenly domains of existence. His stewardship over the brave and the dead emerged from this rule, and he quickly grew to accept it.
Yahweh, the middle child of the three brothers, ruled over the Skies and Earth. His reign led to wonderful splashes of color and life everywhere he looked, his role becoming the most celebrated out of the elders.
Norden, the youngest of the brothers, was mysterious and reserved, and chose to resign himself to the depths of the Great Wastes, where he ruled over the icy coldness and over death itself.
The inhabitants of the North took a liking to Odin and his pantheon. They worshipped him as the Highest of the Almighty, the Allfather of the Norse.
The plains of the South made Jahweh the central figure of their worship. He was both adored and feared throughout the Earth, his influence spreading rapidly like the ocean over sand.
Norden, ever by his lonesome, lay into a great slumber beneath the North where his favorite of the brothers presided. The region slowly took his name, its people almost subconsciously selecting it as their preferred term without realizing its implications.
—
After a great many millenia under their rule, the elder gods and their pantheons fell quiet. Prayers went unanswered, cities and armies went unprotected. But the Believers continued to believe. Why, they asked, have our gods abandon us? The Devoted went further. What could we have done to ward off that which is highest? The Philosophers took their opportunity. God is dead, they proclaimed. And now may we rise and fall by our own accord and our own whim!
Many more millenia passed, and as they did, the Devoted and the Believers began to fade into the background. More and more simply stopped believing. How could such beings possibly exist?
But a great war broke out, and as humanity wanted since its creation, as they had wished for thousands of years, they had finally decided their own fate.
The atom.
The final decider.
Death, the destroyer of worlds.
The eldest of the gods and their families all perished, their slumber made permanent. Their Believers were gone, wiped from the Earth in the face of their own hubris.
But Norden, a god forgotten from the start, had no need for such feeble people. But the fires raging across the world startled him from his deep rest.
The suddeness of his awakening unearthed a great evil buried beneath him long ago by creatures beyond even his knowledge, his resting body being the best prison for the great Pestilence.
The Pestience.
Oh, how horrid it was.
The dead began stirring, much like himself, their sole purpose being simple but final.
Hunger.
They hungered, hungered more than anything. They could not be satiated, not even by the most abundant meal on the Earth.
The people of the North, without their protector and in the face of crisis, fled to the wastes of the Arctic snow to escape the Pestilence. The bitter cold froze the dead before they could advance, making Norden’s realm a safe haven for the migrants of the world.
And so it was.
And so it shall be.
—
The Book of Jernea - In Survival, Solace
