AlsaceAndLorraine/Cytherea

Cytherea, the Mother of Creation

In the beginning, there was only the Wyld. As it is the nature of the Wyld to encompass all possibilities, it was also the nature of the Wyld to comprehend its own ending, and so the primordials came to be. Massive beings, they are concepts which, once born, are too powerful and too perfect within themselves to erode back into the chaos that had spawned them.

Cytherea is the eldest of the primordials. She never speaks, but always have Her brothers and sisters remembered Her sleeping, a point of stillness in the chaos. She slept as the Wyld turned and ebbed around Her, and She slept still as Exalted engineers, less defeated her in the great war against the primordials than created a funnel to channel her essence from Creation to the Yozi prison. She resembles an ocean, a vast body of a thick and viscous black substance which stirs and shudders without wind. Her surface is opaque, but some have nevertheless reported seeing shapes moving within, the bodies of unimaginably huge creatures turning and twisting.

When Gaia saw an vast eye emerge from the surface of Cytherea, and blink before disappearing back into the depths again, she first began to know herself. In that time before time, before Creation, the primordials were still weak. They were ideas, but ideas without shape or function, and there was not yet a mirror for them. The maelstrom of the Wyld precluded entities enduring enough to reflect the primordials yet less enduring than the primordials themselves. Gaia is Life, and she first knew life when she understood that creatures lived within her sister Cytherea.

Gaia knew then that she was incomplete. She embodied all Life, but there was no life to embody her. Gaia brought these reflections to her brothers and sisters, but they dismissed her as frivolous or vain, and returned to their contemplations and uncomprehensible games. All except Autochthon, who understood immediately. He knew the frustration of always building, always creating, always tinkering, only too watch his creations disappear back into the Wyld. And so together, the two of them concieved an idea, of a thing which was of them but separate. They reached into the Wyld, and sought to bring this thing into being.

They failed. They could not create Creation perfectly, and the Wyld devoured imperfection instantly.

But they remembered Cytherea. Somehow, alone of the primordials, she could sustain imperfection. They asked Her how. They begged, they pleaded, they threatened. If She would not tell them, could She not assist them? But She was unmoved or unhearing, and remained silent. So in the end they just used her.

Cytherea was the Womb of Creation. Gaia and Autochthon entwined their natures into a seed of essence and Wyld, and hardened it in Cytherea's flesh.

Creation began, and with it time and consequences. Gaia warped its surface into a mirror of her face. Autochthon relocated his workshop there, and filled it with many wonders, crafting machines great and small to keep it ticking and resistant to the Wyld, for its immersion in Cytherea had granted Creation resistance but not immunity to the warping influence of the Wyld. In time other primordials came to hover over Creation, mold it change it to echo their nature. The Ebon Dragon created the sun so it might cast shadows, and created him invincible and enslaved, and was satisfied. She Who Lives In Her Name meddled with every aspect of Gaia and Autochthon's invention, meddling with the hierarchy of ants and the workings of Fate and the stars. Other primordials contributed. And, as it was designed by a committee with communication issues, Creation became full of contradiction and conflict, but was still the ever-entertaining toy of primordial vanity.

Then the Games of Divinity were created. The Gods rebelled, and the Exalted slew primordials and chained their living siblings. The Dragonblooded launched their Usurpation, the Contagion decimated Creation, and the Solars returned. The Yozis, scenting freedom, rattle the bars of their prison as their Malfean brothers whisper dreams of Oblivion.

And still Cytherea sleeps, as serpents swim within Her.