“… therefore stands to reason that there must have been some chain of events that happened before the All-Father engendered Braialla, the Green Mother, and thereby set into motion the rebirth of the World. What these events might have been, however, is unknown. Before Braialla awoke there can be no history of the World, for there was no World, at least not in any way that we can perceive of it. We can presume that the All-Father must have journeyed to the place of Braialla’s birth, but from where?
The philosophers of Hrillanderon1 speak of things in terms of causes: the immediate cause of an event, its root cause, and a primal cause. Braialla’s birth is the immediate cause of the World’s existence, and the intervention of the All-Father is, thereby, the root cause. But what caused the All-Father to be there, or to desire to infuse his spirit into Braialla, or to even be at all? As there are no means of testing or proving any assertion about the events of the times before the Age of Twilight, any answer to these questions is as true or likely as any other. The World was created: this is the only truth that can be accepted with certainty. The events of any earlier age are, alas, not only unknown but unknowable, for what is not known may be divined or deduced, but even the most potent magics fail to pierce the Veil of Origins and look back to a time before the beginning of the world. While there have been accounts of the origins of the All-Father, all of these are the products of superstition and mythology, and should as such never be…”
1 – Alas, this is the only reference to Hrillanderon that exists. Scholars still debate whether the name refers to a place or a person, presumably an elvish philosopher who founded a school of thought. The War of Tears and the Turning have forever robbed the World of whatever wisdom Hrillanderon could have given us.
- from “A Definitive Examination of the History of the World, as Related in both the Oral and Written Traditions of the Great Elvish Empire, Volume One of Sixteen” By Hallorum Quortius Jormandus