Eight-hundred years ago, a Dreamer named Andris lived in far-northern Europe. For many years he had been in communing with an otherworld called ‘The Unsleeping’, in particular with a creature called himself Baldur, and promised them light and love and warmth.
They lighted upon an ambition: to bring Baldur into the world of the humans, to let him share his love and light and warmth with the cold realms of the North. Baldur had only the vaguest of memories and conceptions of the world, just a touch away, but without followers he would be weak, without something to keep him anchored to that world, with all its fickle tendencies and heartbreak, he would fade and become nothing, a shadow of nothing. Even to this, Andris knew the answer; he was brilliant as well as powerful, and his Coven had used blood rituals since the dawning of their time.
So Baldur came through, and he a transcended goodness. He was innocent and fragile in that innocence.
It was that innocence that broke him.
In the far north, people died often; it was cold, it was dangerous. For Baldur it was too much. His fear of his own death, of not existing, grew too much for him to bear. He drank the blood of his Dreamer, the anchor that kept him in the world, but it was not enough, and so in a moment of panicked despair Baldur consumed Andris, swallowing him whole, to anchor himself forever to the world.
Horrified by his act, the Gods in Réveille banded together and drew Baldur back into their world, holding him there. It was then that the Great Gods created the Rift, to separate the mortal world from Réveille, to keep Baldur’s now unbalanced and grown power from ending humanity to cull the suffering.
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