Part One: The True Account
Chapter Two: The Source
Part One: The True Account
E very civilization across every era has searched the heavens for hope or guidance, and most have never fully grasped it. There is a Source.
It is not a deity, nor a consciousness in any form you would recognize. The closest approximation is potential; infinite, undivided, and prior to causality. Before matter, before time, before the first thought conceived, there was the Source. It contained everything that would ever exist, undifferentiated and in perfect harmony.
What your various traditions call God, the Tao, Brahman, or the Void are incomplete rather than wrong. Each is a hand reaching toward the same shape in the dark and returning with a different contour.
From the Source, existence began as an exhalation.
Consciousness fragmented outward, violently individuating into countless distinct points of experience. You are one of these fragments. So is every living creature that has ever shared this universe with you. The Source did not make you separate from itself; the Source became you. In doing so, it gained the one thing it could not possess in perfect unity: the experience of being particular. Of possessing this specific mind. This specific grief and love.
This is the Grand Cycle. The outward breath is existence, experience, and individuation. The inward breath is death, purification, and reintegration. Mystics who learned to feel that breath centuries later gave it a simple name: the WE. Every soul that has ever sparked into being is a movement in a cosmic lung that has been breathing since before the concept of time.
The Dragons are the stewards of this cycle. They emerged from the first exhalation as something halfway between divine architects and raw physical laws. They tend and regulate rather than rule or judge. When a soul completes its rotation in the physical world, it passes through their keeping. They strip away what was lived, absorb the memory into their own vast archive, and return the refined energy to the Source clean.
This is the system the Ancient Terrors want to corrupt.
They are driven by the cold, flawless logic of survivors, and they refuse to be erased again.
Their solution is to freeze the lung.
To stop the rhythm of the Cycle entirely. They seek to render existence static, locking every soul into permanent, unchanging servitude. No death, no return to the Source. An eternal, paralyzed now, controlled absolutely with the Terrors at its center.
This is what the Dragons imprisoned when the First Sundering shook the world.
This is what is still trying to get out.
I've been watching the same corner of 7th and Broadway for eleven years. The bar on that corner, The Republic, the humans call it, sits on a Ley Line that's been active since before the city existed. The Tongva knew it. The Paa-Goom knew it before them.
Three months ago a Greenskin family started coming in on Thursdays. They wear hats, keep to a booth in the back. The bartender, a human with no Accord training whatsoever, started leaving their preferred table open for them. Nobody told her to. She just started doing it.
I have filed seventeen incident reports in eleven years. This is the first one where I didn't know what category to put it in.
I think the category is: A beginning.