The Lord of Light & the Titans

Behemoths, then titans

The tale is written in The Book of Bound Mithril, in an archaic dwarven dialect. In the Age of Scale, Veeshan’s dragons fought off huge behemoths of land, sea and air, and won, but at a terrible cost. Then came titans, born of the elements and of raw magic, and the dragons began to die again.

Four plagues

Earth titans shook the world’s foundations, and creatures of rock, mud and ore broke loose from the ground beneath them. Fire titans leapt from forest to forest, leaving ash and lava behind. Air titans swallowed the skies in storms. Water titans drowned the coasts. Brell Serilis had fallen in love with Norrath’s caves and veins of metal and named them the Underfoot after his own plane, but nothing he made would be safe while the titans walked.

An alliance

He could not stop them alone, and many gods would not help. Some were selfish, some afraid or ignorant, and some he could not ask, for their price would have been too high. So he went to Mithaniel Marr, god of valour, whom the book calls the Lord of Light. Mithaniel had seen the titans’ trail of death as well, and he agreed.

Cages of the opposite element

Brell had noticed that each kind of titan kept to its own element: water titans never crossed desert or lava, fire never went to sea, earth never rose into the air, and air never went under the soil. Mithaniel had noticed something worse. Like the behemoths, a broken titan slowly mended itself. They could not be destroyed, only held.

So Mithaniel tore the titans’ bodies apart one by one, and Brell trapped each essence in a cage forged by Varig Ro, the Forge Lord: air titans in cages of earth, fire in water, water in fire, earth in air. Mithaniel sealed every cage with a divine seal, and Brell buried them deep in his plane. Only then did he begin to create.

The meeting at the Cauldron

Other tellings of Brell’s move against the dragons leave the titans out entirely. In them he simply wanted to take Norrath from them, and proposed a meeting with Prexus, Tunare and Rallos Zek. To suit them all he dug a water-filled bowl into the cliffs of southwest Faydwer, and there they sat and talked. That meeting began the Elder Age, and afterward Brell made the dwarves, Tunare the elves and Prexus the kedge. The kobolds remember it a little differently: Brell, deciding he alone could not break Veeshan’s grip, made his pact with the same three gods while keeping secret where he had learned of the world.

The goblins’ version

Brell’s other children tell their own story. The Goblish Stones, translated in an in-game book, describe the gods worrying that “our made men would know no peace with wyrm kind on rock, in water, and in air.” Since it had taken “other big hitters and biters” to kill many wyrms before, the answer was simple: “With mud we shape big, mean, hitters and biters.” His followers rarely agree on anything else. The Runnyeye goblins claim him as their father, to the disgust of the dwarves of Kaladim, and the Splitpaw gnolls say he sculpted them from the sacred Clay of Cosgrove.