The Long Before

Six of Wands.

Time only began with consciousness, and memory, and in the Long Before, the forebears of humanity – mindless, formless, swam in the Astral Sea, the First Root of the Human Race. We evolved; we gave birth to elongated, weightless beings of light-bearing ether, and as the Second Root, we drifted through the ages of the seas and the time of the Greatest Beasts. We learned to dream, unbound by the shackles of time and consciousness and thought, and our dreams shaped the evolution of the world around us.


And then, five million years ago, we woke up. It was innocence then, it was Adam and Maiden and all in one, no sexes, no nations, no kings.

And from outside, the Lhas, final product of an evolution far in distance and time came and taught us.
We made children out of buds that grew from our bodies; we flowered, we multiplied. Spirit became anchored to flesh, flesh to bone, and body and spirit solidified.

And the Third Root of Humanity arose, in Lemuria. We were giants in the Earth.
We saw into the Akâsha and the Akâsha saw back into us, and we were at peace. In time, we split into three sexes, and learned to lay eggs, and then to give birth to live children.
We ran across the earth in joy and play, and then we overreached ourselves, breeding with the Beasts and creating new orders of being without souls or morality.

And the Lhas left us.

We learned violence then.

By the time that the Manus came, overshadowing the soul of the eldest of us, we were unmanageable, selfish, brutal. But the Manus gave us wheat, taken from another world entirely, and the Manus gave us kingship. And we shrank a little, and darkened, and we were born in the West as the Rmoahals, First Branch of the Fourth Root of Humanity.

Some of us warred with our Lemurian parents, but some married into their tribes and with the guidance of a God King with a Manu for a soul, we Rmoahals taught the Lemurians the Speech-Words, and gave them the gift of language. But we wanted more, and we learned ambition. And when the drive to conquer gave us wanderlust, blue skin became red skin and we became the Tlavatlis, the Second Branch of the Fourth Root.

Oh, the stones we erected, the cities of wicker and wood we erected! Oh the myths we created! We learned how to make religion. We venerated our ancestors. We built ships and sailed, and placed flags in lands where only the Brother-Beasts had been. We created civilisation.
And when civilisation had taken root, we became the Third Branch of the Fourth Root, the true children of Atlantis.

No civilisation will last as long or be as mighty as Atlantis. Atlantis is fair, Atlantis is eternal. Atlantis is perfection. Our slaves toil, our armies war, and we bring order to the nations of the earth. No one will ever build a tower as high. No one will burn a light so bright, cast magic that burns so fiercely, wield science that unlocks so many things. For we have created Empire, and no empire will survive as long or hold as much power as the Empire of Atlantis.

We are Atlantis.

We believe that we will last forever like this.

We are fooling ourselves.