While any history from prior to the First Age is difficult to find and generally delivered from unreliable sources, the legend of Comalan's origin is well known to most. This is only due to the Windlords' expedition to Skyres City, where the truth was discovered in Crane's own text. Among the many secrets that were stolen from the city's grand, forbidden library, this was the most grievous of sins. The windlords were punished by forgetting everything they knew about Skyres City and the information they found within. But Crane wasn't able to stop them from dispersing this information before his curse eradicated them. This knowledge, along with the ancient language that the gods speak, has been passed on through the clergy since that day with the blessings of Serenity and Salica, who have been quoted with the belief that the mortals deserve to understand where they came from.
The world began with the two brothers, Chaos and Crane. Together, they survived a war that was never well described and a deadly plague that was driving their species to extinction. Believing that they were the only people left in the world, Chaos boldly declared his intent to master the evils that killed his kind. With his power and Crane's intellect, the two bound together to create a world where new people could form to fill the void left in the wake of such tragedy. The groundwork for this new world was laid in a once-unimportant city known only for being the birthplace of the brothers. This was the place mortals now know as Fadal, the sacred city of the Gods. Crane's mind went into designing the planet and all of the life that would inhabit it while Chaos' hands made all of these designs real.
Although their plan was described by Crane as perfect in theory, the brothers quickly lost control of what they had created. As such, any life they spawned was quickly threatened by the natural disasters which were commonplace at the time. It took the help of another godly creature, referred to as the King of Doran, for the brothers to finally bring order to Comalan. After declaring that Chaos owed him a debt for his role in fixing their imperfect world, the King left Fadal, never to be heard from again.
With their world finally put together as they envisioned, Chaos and Crane spawned the first person, a man who was known as Morta. It was from his image that humanity began to grow and spread through the great continent of Mortanis. It was the ultimate goal of both brothers for their creations to eventually fill the shoes of their lost race, but their methods couldn't be more different. It was the intent of Crane for humans to develop intellectually so they could converse with him as equals. He fostered this growth by encouraging their curiosity and leaving lessons for them in every living thing that surrounded them. Chaos, on the other, prized those with the fortitude to resist the dangers of his past. Thus, he intentionally created both the feral beasts of the world and all of its evils with the express intent to promote strength.
The accord the brothers shared over the planet eventually crumbled when each became concerned that the other's methods set everyone back. Chaos began to find that the mortals' desire to understand the world around them was a distraction from the demands of daily survival. Crane, for his part, believed that Chaos' intentional creation of evil was killing more people than it helped. This disagreement spilled over into the mortals who listened to them. Divisions began to form among the humans based on loyalties to Chaos and Crane respectively. With the eastlands threatened by war for the first time, those who resisted this partisanship banished those followers of only one of the brothers. Those who worshiped Chaos and his Doctrine of Power moved north to form the first clans of Pyris while those who believed in Crane's Doctrine of Knowledge migrated south to form the republic of Eris.
The hostility between these two creeds placed the North and South into a long state of perpetual war that only ended during the First Age's War of the Gods. With more easily-navigable land, the tribes in the east were frequently caught in the middle of these conflicts.
Meanwhile, the westland forests were taken over by Crane for a series of biological experiments. From the genetic material of existing humans, he created two tribes. The lenof were breed imbued with some characteristics of Crane's own biology and he used them to study the effects of the plague that killed his people. It was through the data he collected in these efforts that he cultivated the genes of a second tribe--the dwarof-- with the specific intent of resisting this malady. However, these two tribes formed a natural enmity that caused the lenof to drive the dwarof deep underground.
The debt of the King of Doran would later be collected in the form of two new arrivals to Fadal-- his two daughters Serenity and Salica. They looked upon the world the brothers created with disgust and set about fixing their problems. Serenity touched the westland forests, changing the lenof who survived Crane's experiments into forms that more closely resembled the gods' race; thus the elves were created. Salica, meanwhile, claimed dominion over the various islands littering the seas to the east of Mortanis. There, using the model of Morta, Salica created humans of her own to play with.
Though the Gods did not all get along for most of the planet's existence, it was by getting to know each other through the eyes of mortalkind that they created a lasting bond with each other. When the mortals carried on their hatred long past the point when they had reconciled, they purged most of the known world and bid everyone to start over. Since then, the four elder gods-- and later, the three offspring of Chaos and Serenity-- ruled over Comalan as a close-knit family that shepherds mortals toward greatness.
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