The Lore of the Continent
The Mythology of Solon
The slave who broke the Dragons, and the god the Continent made of him.
At a Glance
| Name | Solon |
|---|---|
| Titles | The Stormbringer; the First War God; the Prophet; the Wanderer Who United All; in the west, the Light Above the Light, the Word Before the Word, the Hand at the Heart of the Hour |
| Age | The twilight of the Second Yuga. The Continent reckons the Third Yuga from his death |
| Origin | Born a slave under the rule of the Agnivansha; no chronicle names his birthplace |
| Wives | Sondra and Deidra, sisters, cousins of Cephamad |
| Sons | Sanga ibn Solon, the elder, founder of Sangam; Chandra, the youngest and the favored, founder of Chandran |
| Companions | Cephamad of the West, the bard who became the Church's first prophet and first Pope; Alistair Viswas of Kambhara, the freed miner who became its first Emancipator |
| Enemy | Vanir von Suriyan, second of his name, the Dragon Tyrant |
| Treaty | The Solonic Treaty, made with Chaldean the Reformer, which sent the Agnivansha into the Abaddon range |
| Faith | Solonism, the dominant faith of the Continent, in a western strain and an eastern one |
| Symbol | The sun |
| Left Behind | The order of kingdoms; the Solon, the Continent's coin; Solon's Reckoning, the count of its years |
Overview
Every soul on the Continent knows the name. It is read aloud at the close of the morning recitation in Sangam, stitched in gold thread across the vestments of the Pope in Mangholstadt, carved above the thresholds of the Temple at Arivata, rung out over the counting houses of Hasanith, and struck into the coin that changes hands in every market from the Northern Wastes to the southern sea. The Continent counts its years from his death. Most of its peoples pray to him. Solon is the warrior-prophet who rose from bondage to break the rule of the Elder Dragons, the First War God, humanity's liberator and divine champion, and, by the reckoning of the faith that bears his name, the founder of everything the mortal kingdoms have built since.
What he was is the Continent's oldest argument. To the west he is a god, and has been since the man who sang his deeds set himself at the god's right hand. To the east he is a man, the greatest who ever lived, to be learned from rather than knelt to. In Sangam, which carries his blood, some hold him a deity and some a legend, and no one is turned from the temple door for either. This entry tells his story as the Continent tells it, in the several ways the Continent tells it, at the dawn of the present age.
The Age Before Him
Solon was born at the twilight of the Second Yuga, in the last age when the Agnivansha, the Elder Dragons, ruled the Continent without question. They had ruled it since the First Yuga, since the days of Abaddon the Founder, and by Solon's time their dominion had hardened into something the mortal races remembered afterward only as tyranny. The mortals were livestock, to be managed, worked, and bred. The War Games of the Crimson Desert, which the Desert Sect keeps still, were in those days the Dragons' blood-sport, run for the amusement of a ruling race that watched the lesser peoples tear at one another; a champion was always promised, and none was ever meant to survive the winning.
Over that age sat the Dragon Tyrant: Vanir von Suriyan, second of his name, Dragon King of the Second Yuga, whose cruelty, the chronicles say, made the reigns of the Dragons before him seem gentle by comparison. Vanir believed the mortal races had grown too strong beneath his people, and he set out to break them. What his rule meant for the mortals who lived under it is the story the Continent has spent every age since trying to forget. It was into that world, and into that bondage, that Solon was born.
The Story as the Continent Tells It
The Slave
No chronicle names the place of Solon's birth, and the Church's own telling of his life, painted in the windows of its cathedrals, begins not with a cradle but with a revelation. What every telling agrees on is his condition. Solon was born a slave, the property of the Dragons who ruled the Continent, and he grew to manhood as property. The faithful of the west hold that the Light came to him, and their windows begin his story there. The east says only that he learned, in bondage, what bondage was, and that the learning never left him.
The Wandering
Then he vanished. The years of his absence are the great blank in his story: strange travels that no chronicle records, in lands no map of the Continent shows, during which the world that had owned him believed him dead. When Solon came back to the Continent he came back with the storm in his hands, the art the Continent knows as Storm Magic and the old texts call the Elemental Art of Lightning and Thunder, which no one before him had ever wielded, and with a martial art of his own making, the Ten-Sided Berserker, ten sides for ten aspects of what a human body and a human will could be made to do. Where he learned the one and made the other, the Continent has never known.
The Stormbringer
He went to the Crimson Desert and entered the War Games, and he won. By the custom of that age he was to be burned like every champion before him. Instead he called down the storm and killed the Agnivansha overseers where they stood, and the Continent named him the Stormbringer and reckoned him its First War God, the first in all of recorded history to bear the title, crowned by the Desert Sect itself. The making of War Gods, and what Solon did to the Games afterward, is told on the page of the Crimson Desert.
The Rebellion
What followed the Continent calls Solon's Rebellion, and the Agnivansha, in their own Chronicles, the Second Dragon War. Solon united humanity against the Dragons: a slave at the head of the enslaved and, in time, of every people that had ever bent beneath the Agnivansha. Beside him rode the company the songs remember. Cephamad of the West, the bard with the lyre at his back, who sang Solon's deeds across the Continent until every soul on it knew the name, and who would later make of the man a god. Cephamad's cousins, the sisters Sondra and Deidra, whom Solon took as his wives, and from whose speech the courtly tongue of Chandran descends. Alistair Viswas of Kambhara, a mining slave who had won his freedom, a true believer where Cephamad was a calculating one, who became a paladin and, in time, the faith's first Emancipator. The war was long and it was not clean. A monastery burned and its arts were lost with it; the Continent remembers mountains of the dead raised in the name of liberation. It ended when Solon met the Dragon Tyrant himself. In that battle, the legends say, he shattered the shield of Abaddon, the Founder's own shield, borne by every Dragon King since the first and more sacred to the Agnivansha than any crown, so that the symbol of Dragon royalty lay broken at his feet, and Vanir the Second fell.
The Treaty
Solon did not finish the Dragons. The faithful of the west count this his mercy; others have wondered at it since. The Tyrant's own brother, Chaldean von Suriyan, whom the Agnivansha remember as Chaldean the Reformer, took the Burning Throne when Vanir fell, and it was with Chaldean that Solon made the peace the mortal nations named the Solonic Treaty. By its terms the Agnivansha withdrew from the rule of the Continent into the Abaddon range and its hidden valleys; they banned among themselves the keeping of slaves and the darker arts of Vanir's reign; and Solon, for his part, renounced the extermination of their race and surrendered to Chaldean all written record of his own art, so that the Ten-Sided Berserker, in its complete form, was never taught again. With that treaty the rule of the Dragons over the mortal Continent ended, and the age of the mortal kingdoms began.
The Ordering of the World
Solon forged the very concept of nations. That is not a figure of speech in the temples; it is a doctrine. The tapestries of the Oracle's tent show the binding of chaos, the ordering of the world, and the establishment of the continental kingdoms under his guidance, and the Church of the west holds that the division of the Continent into kingdoms and principalities is divine will, that no mortal may claim dominion over all, and that the title of Emperor is a Dragon's title and a heresy. He took the east of the Continent for himself and his heirs and divided it between his two sons: Sanga, the elder, son of Sondra, who laid the founding stone of the palace at Sangam and is said to have addressed his first subjects from the Speaker's Platform that stands there still; and Chandra, the youngest, the only son of Deidra and by the older myths his father's favorite, who founded Chandran at Arivata, where the Temple of Solon stands. Bound by an ancient compact from passing the storm intact to his children, Solon sundered it, Thunder to Sanga and Lightning to Chandra, and two kingdoms grew from the division. The west he gave to Cephamad, to end the feud between the followers of Chandra and the followers of the bard over how Solon's will was to be carried out, and there the Church of Solon took root: Cephamad became its first Pope, with Alistair Viswas as the first Emancipator at his side. To the Desert Sect he gave the trophies of his victories and the law that governs the War Games to this day.
And one thing he did not do, which the Continent has argued over ever since: he let slavery stand. The Dragons banned it among themselves; Solon did not ban it among the mortal kingdoms he had raised. His reason, if he ever gave one, is lost. Sorkhold has built a creed on the omission. Mangholstadt has built a trade on it. The founding oath of Caligara was sworn against it.
The Death of Solon
He carried the wounds of his last campaign for the rest of his life, and they, with age, killed him at the last. The Continent measures its ages in Yugas, and by the Continental Calendar the Third Yuga begins at the death of Solon and the collapse of the Elder Dragon dominion; the mortal nations call the count of years since Solon's Reckoning, and the coin they count in is the Solon. The histories record a heroic death. The Church of the west records something more: the last of the scenes in the windows of its cathedrals shows the Prophet ascending to his eternal reward while his followers weep below, and the Church dates itself from the Prophet's ascension. Of the Ten-Sided Berserker, the Continent remembers that its tenth side, called only the completion, a state of martial perfection, was reached by its maker at the very end of his life and by no one since. His final writings, the east teaches, named eight passages of the spirit beyond the mortal journey, and for them the great stair to the Temple at Arivata climbs one thousand and eight steps.
The Figures
The names the songs and the scriptures keep beside his.
| Cephamad of the West | The bard in Solon's company, rat-faced and silver-tongued, who sang Solon's deeds across the Continent until every soul on it knew the name, styled himself the Prophet's greatest friend and truest chronicler, and labored to raise a leader into a god. First prophet of the Church of Solon and its first Pope; the document that founded its doctrine bears his signature. First cousin of Solon's wives. |
|---|---|
| Sondra and Deidra | Sisters, cousins of Cephamad, the wives of Solon. Sondra the elder and the warmer, mother of Sanga; Deidra the sharper, mother of Chandra. Arivatan, the heritage tongue of Chandran, descends from their speech. |
| Alistair Viswas of Kambhara | A mining slave who had won his freedom, a true believer where Cephamad was a calculating one, a paladin, and the faith's first Emancipator, head of the Church's Inquisition. The Viswas name has stood beside the Sun Throne ever since. |
| Sanga ibn Solon | Solon's elder son and Sondra's, founder of the Mountain Kingdom of Sangam and of its royal line, which carries Solon's blood to this day. Heir of Thunder. |
| Chandra | Solon's youngest son and Deidra's only child, by the older myths the favored son, founder of the Golden Kingdom of Chandran and first of its kings. Heir of Lightning. |
| Vanir the Second | Vanir von Suriyan, second of his name, Dragon King of the Second Yuga, the Dragon Tyrant, whose fall ended the age of the Dragons. |
| Chaldean the Reformer | Chaldean von Suriyan, the Tyrant's brother, who took the Burning Throne when Vanir fell and made the Solonic Treaty with Solon. The Agnivansha remember him for banning their slaves and the darker arts of his brother's reign. |
Solonism: The Faith
Solonism is the dominant faith of the Continent. Its church governs the spiritual life of most Continental nations, though not all peoples bow to its doctrines, and the Continent has never agreed on what, exactly, it venerates. Two great strains hold the two halves of the Continent, and around them lies a scatter of lesser ones.
The Western Strain: The Church of Solon
In the west, Solon is a god. The Church of Solon, seated at Sanctum Magna in the Holy Theocracy of Mangholstadt, on the slopes and summit of Mount Solon, is the religious authority of the whole western half of the Continent. Its head is the Pope, who sits the Sun Throne beneath a dome of gold-leafed glass built so that at the appointed hours the sun itself appears to kneel to him; he is styled Shepherd of the Sun Throne, Voice of Solon, Father of the Faithful, and at his ordination he lays down the name of his house, so that the Pope may belong to the faith and to no family. Beneath him stand the cardinals, the Inquisition, the knightly orders of the Sun Host and the Sacred Vanguard, and the Radiant, the burning souls who wish not to be soothed by Solon but to be spent for him, gathered and readied by the Radiant Saintess. Its liturgy names Solon the Light Above the Light, the Word Before the Word, the Hand at the Heart of the Hour, the mighty Lord and Savior of the Continent. Its faithful are called to Solon's side when they die, into the keeping of the Light and the paradise Solon promised his servants.
Its doctrine is hard. Solon proved humankind the rightful master of the Continent. The order of kingdoms he established is sacred, and an Emperor is a heresy. The strong rule and the weak serve. Life is sacred, violence is permitted only in defense of the innocent, and every killing carries a weight that must be atoned. The faith must expand, willingly or otherwise. Ten virtues mark the Solonic path, and ten is its sacred number; a child born under an eclipse is a holy omen and belongs to the Church. Its art shows Solon in postures of sublime authority, marble and monument, the right hand raised in the gesture that is blessing and judgment at once, which in the doctrine of the west have always been a single act.
The Eastern Strain: The Temple of Solon
In the east, Solon is a man. Arivatan Solonism, the strain of Chandran and of the eastern kingdoms, is seated at the Temple of Solon on the peak above Arivata, a temple the east holds older than the city, older than the kingdom that grew downward from it. Its entrance is an open archway, with no door and no gate, for the path to understanding requires no permission, and every Chandran schoolchild knows the count of its stair: one thousand steps for the mortal journey and eight for the passages beyond it. Inside there is no throne and no altar, only carved alcoves holding fragments of Solon's teachings, a fountain that rises from the living rock, and cushions on the floor. Its friezes show what the west would never carve: Solon seated beneath a tree, teaching; Solon tending a garden; Solon sharing a meal with tired travelers; Solon laughing.
The Temple is led by the Oracle of Arivata, a blind seer whose office is the oldest prophetic voice on the Continent. He reads the year's fortunes at the festival of the Year's Waking, officiates the weddings of the royal house, and prays, as the east prays, to Solon and the Djinn together. His personal disciples wear a braided silver cord at the wrist and his priests wear saffron; the Temple's sigil is a seven-rayed sun, worn at the throat by the faithful of the east, and the emblem of Suriya-and-Solon is carved on every threshold. The east keeps the morning prayers and the intercessory fasts, and it teaches the path in the words of its own architecture: you enter because you arrived, and you arrived because you climbed.
The Other Solons
Sangam, which descends from Sanga, is the most tolerant realm of the Continent, and its Solonism is looser than either great strain. Some of its people venerate Solon as a deity; some honor him as a legendary ancestor; some pray past him to Hashem and to Suriya, to the old gods and the new; and its temples bear no icons, its worship running to philosophy and meditation rather than image and rite. The Church of the west counts this heresy, and calls Sangam and Chandran alike the heretical sons of Solon, kingdoms that carry his blood and refuse the Church's guidance. In the Free Cities of the southern sea he is Great Solon, God of the Continent, Patron of Hasanith, and the bells of Hasanith's Temple of Commerce ring his blessing over the day's dealings; the scripture there tells of the merchants he blessed with insight and the bankers whose rivals he ruined. In Sorkhold, the Slaver Dominion, he is the proof that the strong rule, a liberator who let the chains stand. And in the Northern Wastes the old gods of the cold and the hunt hold the tribes far more surely than any creed of the south.
Symbols, Rites, and Relics
The sign of Solon is the sun: a golden sunburst on the breastplates of the Church's knights and the vestments of its Pope, a radiant sun within a circle of sacred geometry above the household shrine, the seven-rayed sun of Arivata worn at the throat. The Church's colors are white and gold. Its evening liturgy runs in call and response: Solon, who brought light to the darkness; we praise your name. Solon, who broke the chains of Dragon tyranny; we honor your sacrifice. Solon, who taught us the path to salvation; we walk in your footsteps. Then follow the readings from the Solonic texts, the homily, and the offerings of incense and wine for the Prophet's sacrifice. A knight of the faith prays Solon, guide my sword; Solon, strengthen my shield; Solon, illuminate my path, and the blessing of the Sun Throne runs the Sun sees all, the Sun judges all, the Sun protects all.
The holiest relic in Mangholstadt is a fragment of Solon's staff, kept in a golden sunburst on the breast of the Pope. On his hand are the Seal of Solon and the Sun Crown Ruby, said to have been worn by Solon himself in the final battle against the Dragon Tyrant. The Matron of the Sisterhood of the Sixth Veil, which serves Solon's vision in its own fashion, carries a staff of black wood said to hold splinters of his walking stick, and splinters of that same stick are sold in every market square from the Holy City to the outer kingdoms. At the winter solstice, the Year's Waking, the Church overlays the Continent's old midwinter festival with prayers to the Wanderer Who United All; in the east the older customs persist beneath them, the bonfires burned in patterns against evil spirits, the masks worn to confuse malevolent ancestors, the fortune-tellers, and the puppet shows of Solon and the tyrant Vanir. Arivata keeps the High Sun festival besides. And everywhere, in every tongue of the Continent, his name is the oath and the blessing of the common day: Solon bless you; Solon preserve me; may Solon grant you rest; I swear it on Solon's name.
Abaddon, Briefly
To the mortal Continent, Abaddon is a name on a mountain range. The Abaddon Mountains wall the kingdoms off from the Northern Wastes, their peaks lost in perpetual cloud like the broken teeth of some fallen god, and the legends say that Dragons ruled there once, in sanctuaries carved into the high stone before mortals had kingdoms, before Solon's conquest and the long decline that followed. The Church of the west teaches the Dragons as cautionary fables from the First Yuga, stories told to children to explain why certain mountains are hollow and certain coastlines are glass, and it classes the Agnivansha themselves as abominations, unholy hybrids of mortal and divine essence destroyed by the righteous judgment of history. Of the being the mountains are named for, the mortal histories keep almost nothing but the name.
The Agnivansha kept a great deal more. To them Abaddon von Suriyan, first of his name, is the Founder and the Progenitor: the First Dragon King, and the first bearer of what they call the Eternal Flame. He was born in the First Yuga, in the age before the mortals had learned to forge bronze, when the Agnivansha ruled without question and had never yet been one people. Their telling holds that Suriya, the Djinn who elevates, the Sun God whose fire the Dragons carry, blessed and appointed him and baptized him the First Eternal Flame; the oldest tapestry of the Burning Throne showed him receiving that throne from hands that emerged out of flames. Abaddon chose cooperation over domination. He united the fractured clans beneath his wings, the mountain clans and the plains dragons, and fought the first of the Dragon Wars against the Old Wyrms who would not have it, winning through alliance rather than force, at the cost of half his people. He declared that the Agnivansha would have kings, and that those kings would carry the sun in their veins; he founded House Suriyan and breathed the Founder's Flame from his own lungs at its founding; he ordered the great houses, and charged House Aayudham to be the sword and shield of the Flame for as long as the line endured. Then he made war on the southern kingdoms and built the dominion over the Continent that the mortal races would remember as their bondage, and, the Agnivansha say, spent the rest of his existence trying to make what he had built worthy of the blood it had cost.
The Founder's gift, the fire in the blood that shows in the amber eyes of his line and that legend says once covered his whole body in living script, was his to give and theirs to inherit. His shield passed down through every Dragon King after him until Solon broke it. And the holiest place of his people is Abaddon's Cave, the Cave of Wisdom, deep beneath the range that bears his name: the crucible that forged the Founder himself, older than the Agnivansha and guarded by things older still, of which the ancient texts cannot agree whether it is a remnant of the primordial void, a gift of Suriya, or a wound in reality through which something terrible once entered the world. Seventeen who entered it never returned. The Agnivansha reckon their Dragon Wars in their Chronicles, the first Abaddon's against the Old Wyrms and the second Vanir's rebellion, which Solon ended. Between the Founder and the Tyrant lies the whole of the Dragons' age, and the mortal Continent, which lived beneath it, remembers only its end.
The Djinn and the Yugas
Behind Solon and behind Abaddon stand the powers that neither faith made. Three Djinn preside over the architecture of existence: Hashem, who creates and continues; Suriya, who elevates; and Nerua, who concludes. Together they are the Trimurti, the cycle of creation, elevation, and entropy upon which all reality turns, and their names are spoken in prayer and whispered in war, though none living have seen their faces. The Desert Sect of the Crimson Desert serves Hashem. The Agnivansha carry Suriya's fire and swear their oaths before Suriya the Flame Eternal, who, they say, breathed fire into the clay of the world. When the east prays to Solon and the Djinn together, it is calling on the old gods and the new.
The Continent measures its history in Yugas. The First Yuga was the age of the Founder and the rise of the Dragons; the Second was the last height of their rule, and it ended in Solon's war; the Third, the present age, begins at Solon's death. Between one year and the next lie two uncounted threshold days, the Year's Sleep and the Year's Waking, a sealed doorway between what has been and what is to come, and it is at the Year's Waking, on the winter solstice, that the west prays to the Wanderer Who United All and the east climbs the thousand and eight steps to hear the Oracle read the year.