Aurora

Of all the gods we share this world with, none are owed more than The Twins.

Eldest of the gods, The Twins are the creators of life. Every animal, every plant, every living being in this world was shaped by the hands of The Twins. Though, over the generations, they may have transformed and adapted to better suit the trials of their environment, The Twins created their ancestors and are responsible for their existence.

In the early days of the world, The Twins crafted the Three Elder Races – the stalwart Ancients, the versatile Humans, and the delicate Elves. But this early world was bright and inhospitable, and so the fragile Humans and Elves were forced to shelter in the safety of the world-spanning Singing Caves, while their sturdier fellows, The Ancients, took to the surface and began to grow.

The Twins began to fill the world with life – first according to the needs of the Elder Races, to ensure their creations would not suffer and die. Fruit-bearing trees began to grow underground; simple herding animals began to populate the surface. Verdant forests were spun from raw pools of untempered Life, and the world became a much more hospitable place for the fledgling Elder Races. Much of Life’s wild essence was bound up in these living creatures, limiting its chimerical properties and rendering the surface much safer over the generations.

But The Twins would never limit themselves to simple utilitarianism. Now that the world had been given an ecosystem capable of sustaining the Three Elder Races, The Twins, precocious and childlike, began to experiment. New species of plants and animals appeared every day as, like an artist with a new brush set, The Twins reveled in their creativity and strived every day to create something beautiful.

Like all artists, The Twins experienced stylistic phases. Shortly after the Elder Races were perfected, The Twins crafted the first dragon, and observed with great interest how her many children transformed and adapted to their elementally disparate environments. After the dragons, The Twins began to craft smaller creatures in much greater numbers – rodents, canids, felids, bovids, and many more – an array of simple, quadrupedal animals, all with simple earth-toned colors. Then they returned their focus to the skies, and with an explosion of vibrance, they crafted a myriad of birds to fill the winds with feathers and song.

This wondrous era of nonstop creation played out while Humans and Elves still sheltered in the caves, unable to bear the intense element winds that played across the surface world. One can only imagine the experience of the Ancients, waking every day to some new and incredible life. But as time and the world moved on, the Humans and Elves emerged to the surface, the Ancients dwindled, and the Twins continued their tireless work into a new age of civilization.

The creations of the twins are multitudinous and innumerable, but the more they filled the world, the greater the risk became of some unexpected reaction between two species. During their oceanic phase, The Twins crafted the magnificent Leviathan to traverse the deepest reaches of the seas, but were greatly distressed when it unexpectedly consumed a beautiful coral reef that sheltered dozens of smaller species. This sobering tragedy led the twins to take more care in their creations, restricting their new species to secret, isolated locations called “lifewells” to ensure their security and place in the balance of the ecosystem before releasing them worldwide.

One such lifewell was The Merfold, a carefully-guarded reef where The Twins first created the Merfolk. Carefully tested over the generations before finally being deemed safe for release, these resplendent beings spread through the oceans and became the first of the Younger Races – though they would be joined, in time, by the Cloudchildren, the Gladestriders, the Serpents, and many more.

Even now, The Twins work tirelessly to craft more new life, carefully hidden from prying eyes or predatory mouths. They remain friendly and childlike, but are far more distant than most of our gods, as their first priority is to their work and to maintaining balance in the ecosystem they so carefully crafted.

Many mages have historically attempted to mimic The Twins, either by crafting homunculi or by carefully inducing mutations in existing species to change them over time to suit their purposes – adding wings or extra limbs or other unnatural qualities. However, these parodies of The Twins’ creations lack one key quality – they cannot reproduce. These chimerical transformations inevitably induce sterility in the creature, preventing it from propagating its own species. Some scholars theorize that the ability to reproduce and propagate a species is inherently a blessing that must be actively given by The Twins, and this sterility is caused by The Twins revoking their blessing of the creature once they can no longer recognize it. Only one mage was ever known to be able to produce mutations that still bred true – the creator of The Ferin, whose cursed victims cannot help but pass their animalistic transformations along to their children.

It is unclear why Ferin evidently carry the Twin’s Blessing, and The Twins have never responded to inquiries for comment – in fact, it’s very difficult to get their attention for any reason. They are fully devoted to their work, and typically only respond to physical intrusion. According to a handful of people who’ve stumbled upon hidden lifewells, The Twins have manifested, very flustered, and insisted that they not look at their work before it’s done.