Listen—
I tell of an age before that long Nothing when time and space lost all who might measure them. Just as there are none who can tell us of the Nothing, all that came before it, too, is a memory that exists only in legends and tales turned half to myth.
Yet it existed, without question, this history; already then, man bravely struggled to raise the precarious torch of civilization and sagacity against the primitive darkness that had enveloped his prehistory for an unspeakably long period.
Nay, if any age was ever truly wise, perhaps that was the only one—not because man mastered so much, from the genesis of the cosmos, to the means of traveling far and high, to the means of perceiving two worlds, both the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small, but rather because, as those who speak of the age always say of it: “In those days, man was wiser than he is now, for he understood that he knew some things but not others. Moreover, he knew what things he must not know and what things he did not need to know.”
At any rate it was not the “primitive age” that we have come to call it. Science existed, and so did that which we term the scientific spirit. Yet, just as the common man did not concern himself with the principles by which the sorcerer wielded his spells, so too did the same possess sufficient wisdom to leave scientific matters to a minority of scholars, neither troubling them nor in turn troubled by them.
In that age, man lived in a society where classes and taboos were firmly established but he did not feel fettered by them, since it was what he chose, and ample opportunities still existed to exit it. As in any age and society, outsiders formed a society of their own, large numbers joining the strata of mercenaries, itinerants, bards, caravaners and prostitutes. While citizens treated them as outsiders, the boundary itself was tenuous and hence all of it a matter not so much of discrimination as of mere distinction. The citizens accepted the existence of an outsider society with its own rules just as they accepted that there were lords; that there were magi; that there were great men, although their numbers were truly few; and that these had their own rules. So it is and so be it—that, then, was something of a golden rule of the age.
It was an age when light and darkness, intellect and emotion, and sagacity and ignorance mixed indiscriminately; an age when science and sorcery, order and disorder, superstition and understanding, tyranny and largess, and arrogance and servility all freely asserted their rights; an age when man was as convinced of what is close to the gods as he was in awe of the magical realm.
It is true of any age, but especially of the one in question, that capturing it in one word is difficult. There was glory, yes, but blackness as well, savagery and war alongside peace and prosperity. If the age were to be spoken of in severance from the rest of history, then, more so than any other, it may appear to us a period of contradiction itself. For this reason, it was also a period when the true shape of things was thrown up awfully near to man together with so much worthless dross.
Historically, the age is called a tumultuous one. Many mighty realms rose, fell, and revived, or perished. The world did not belong to any one or a few ideals, or banners, nor did it belong to any one man. Every country, every king, every ideal and every accord carried secretly the awareness that it could never become absolute—gods and their servants included.
Lands vied against one another, annexed and were annexed. Kings lived in danger not only of assassination but also of crises of nonconfidence among their subjects. Sacred but not unassailable—a fundamental beauty of this age, or perhaps a sacrilege, which in any case applied to the gods as well—royalty attracted much adoration, only as long as it was merited.
Anything, any event, had the right to demand that it take place: coup d’état, dark reign, assassination, conspiracy, oppression, magnanimity, massacre and treachery, the base and the exalted, fanaticism, revolution, catastrophe, freedom and enslavement, and even the stern work of justice. It was a simple age, yet one filled with power, of the chaos that admits all, the age of that only truly glorious thing which is contradiction, and which is becoming lost to us if it is not already lost.
Naturally, there was a place for heroes, too. Their history was shaped, alongside that of scoundrels and assassins, by great emperors and warlords with sharp blades.
The Age of the Three Kingdoms, so-called, when the three powerful realms of Parros, Gohra, and Cheironia took center stage, each waxing and waning in strength, swallowing smaller lands about them, now dominating the Middle Country, now beating bitter retreats—this age whose contours we today are permitted if only vaguely to trace boasted a myriad of heroes.
It was the last age when one could become as great as the reach of his will, or as puny. In this sense, the age constituted the final act of the epoch of myth. The holy kings, warlords, princesses, tyrants, and strategists who became its players are too numerous to name. There was Holy King Alcandross, the founder of Parros; the warlord Vladislav of Mongaul; Yuro, aspirant to the throne; Archduke Vlad, who instigated the First War of the Black Dragon; the Magne of Cheironia, Achilleus; the vampire emperor, Kolura Talus; the martyr Radu the Elder and his son, Duke Radu the Younger of Valachia; Sylvia, the traitor-princess who brought temporary ruin to Cheironia— and of course, the Gohran King Istavan the Usurper, and Holy King Remus, restorer of the Third Holy Kingdom of Parros. And finally, there was that hero of heroes, he who abandoned Cheironia, the mighty leopard-headed King Guin.
If we were to track the greatest and brightest “living myth” among the threads that wove this age of heroic tales, it would surely be that of the leopard-headed king of Cheironia. From nowhere he appeared, and walked into the annals of history.
It was his very emergence—or, to be more accurate, the events leading to his emergence—that marked the boundary between the years of tumult when small nations rose and fell and the later Age of the Three Kingdoms, when it was determined who would bestride the center stage and who would support from the skirts. In this sense he was both the last mythical hero and the first historical individual.
Always above him loomed both dawn and twilight. He was born from the chaos of the Age of Chaos but was also the first to intend order for it.
And this he did by ever seeking whence he had come.