Mockery/Isidoros

In the beginning, the Primordials laid down the fundamental concepts of Creation. Oramus defined Inside and Out. She Who Lives in Her Name gave Order, and Cecylene gave Law. Gaia formed the substance of the world with the nature of her own souls.

Some of the Yozis blame the Ebon Dragon for their downfall, as he introduced the idea of Betrayal.

But Betrayal would have been nothing without Free Will and Independence and Drive, and that was Isidoros' touch. It was he that suggested that the Shinma that they had bound to the world be hardwired into each of its sentient beings, to give them cause to act the way they do. It was he that posited the idea that they might let those passions and Virtues drive them to greater feats than what they might have done as automatically functioning drones such as She Who Lives in Her Name desired.

She was pleased by this--it meant that even free-willed, the thinking denizens of Creation would have predictability. She added thereto that such beings could be compelled to act in predictable ways based upon the degree to which they were touched by those shinma.

And then the Black Boar added that these compulsions could be overpowered by an expenditure of a being's own will, if that was what they wanted.

And before the argument proceeded further, Cecylene stepped in as arbiter, saying that those virtues would inform a being's nature, and thus compel what they would be inclined to do by their own will, but that if other outside factors inclined them to act in another way--perhaps by other desires, perhaps by nothing more than simple reason--they might do so. And Isidoros and his sister were in agreement.

The Ebon Dragon, then, posited his own great creation, and laid the seeds for the binding of himself and his kin. But it would have been nothing without Isidoros.

Nor does his culpability for the Primordial War end there.

It cannot be said that Isidoros respected the Gods or the Incarnae during the reign of the Primordials. He could feel the subtle chafing of them under his rule, and he knew that they, more than any other being in Creation, were bound in their actions. They desired the Games, but they were denied access to them, and sought no further. However, their desire was unabated. He felt nothing but scorn for them; the other entities of Creation were more free willed. Although humans were born to slavery, some escaped to the wild. Some died rather than oblige. Many were good slaves, true, but it was not an action compelled on the most fundamental of levels. And he did not care enough to despise or approve of such tiny cogs in the Creation machine on an individual level.

But the Gods, he hated, and so he tore across Creation's land and sky, pacing about the Blessed Isle to shatter the gods' domain for spite, and then charging up the slopes of the Omphalos to the clouds, where he hunted the Moon across the Heavens by night, and the next day charged into the sun as it was about to set over the Eastern Forest, and pushed it back with such force that today none recall that once upon a time the sun rose from the western Ocean rather than sank into it. And then he took to the stars.

For as much as other Primordials approved of the idea of the Loom of Fate, he despised the idea that a thread could be woven such to direct the will of an entity, rather than it being woven to reflect his will. And so he charged across the brilliantly-jewelled sky, forcing the stars aside, or knocking them down to Earth. For one hundred and one years and a day, until the Maidens restored the stars to their place, no savant could read the stars, and nor could the Loom reflect the world with any accuracy.

And then, disappointed his work had been so quickly undone, he did it again.

And having agitated the Gods time and again, and then announced at his desiring that he was going to revel in the Games of Divinity time and again, the Gods conspired with Autochthon and Gaia to make use of the humans, and created the Exalted.