The first temple

[Kabra Ly'Zakerdot]

Mors remembered his promise to Brrapa, and decided to make one of Brrapa's descendants ruler of a great empire. He went to Brrapa's favorite great-grandson and asked him to take the crown of So Sara, the happiest and most blessed land in the world.

Brrapa's favorite great-grandson absolutely refused.

So Mors went to Brrapa's second favorite great-grandson, and then his third favorite great-grandson, and so on, meeting nothing but refusals each time, until finally he came to Brrapa's least favorite great-grandson, a man named Jiliad. And Jiliad thought and thought, and finally accepted. So he and his tribe went from their homeland in Benacia to So-Sara, where the gods themselves lived, and Mors blessed them, and they grew strong and multiplied into a great empire.

When they had spent five hundred years in total peace and perfect order, they decided to celebrate by building a temple to Ikol, the God of Tranquility. The roof was made of solid gold, and the columns that supported it were of great ebony trees of a lost species. The sides were of black marble, and the ceiling was a great black marble dome spangled with diamonds so that it looked like the night sky. So great was the temple that a man standing on one side could not see a man standing on the other. And in its center was an idol of Ikol made of solid silver with ruby eyes. No building had ever been so great, and no building since then has surpassed it.

Loki, the god of chaos, grew jealous of his twin brother. For the empire of the So-Sarans was so serene that they had wholly forgotten the very existence of chaos, or that it had a god. And so while Ikol had his mighty temple, Loki had nothing, not even a little roadside shrine. "I will make these So Sarans think of me," Loki said to himself. "Indeed, when I am through, they will think of little else!"

So he went to the edge of the world, and he watched the spider as she wove, and he began to understand bits and pieces of the pattern. And he learned the arcane secret of weaving his own threads into the pattern - threads of different colors and different lengths - using strange and subtle movements of his hands. Then he went down to Ke'Najrad, the greatest city of So-Sara, and he found a child crying alone.

"Why are you crying?" Loki asked the child.

"My mother and father and all my brothers have gone to the great opening ceremony for the Temple of Ikol," said the child. "But I am too young, and so they didn't want me going with them."

"Don't worry, kid," said Loki. "I wasn't invited to the new temple either. But we've got to stick together, people like us, the rejects. So let me show you something that will make your day."

And he taught the child the hand motions he had learned to frustrate the spider's weaving and add his own threads to the pattern. And so the child whose name was Ekar was the first magic user, and he taught many others, until So-Sara was teeming with users.

And Ikol looked down upon the islands and worried, for magic is ever antithetical to Tranquility. In vain he pleaded with the So-Sarans to abandon their magic, but they were addicted to the power it brought them and the secrets they learned.

Ikol decided that to fight magic on its own terms, he must find an alternate source of power and secrets. And so he went to the edge of the world, and he watched the spider as she wove. But what he saw there was that he must not intervene, because for his countermagic to work, it must come from mortals, and from mortals alone.

And one day not so long afterward, he saw a So-Saran named Talru Sorto fix gears together and create the first clock. It was not a very good clock, but the world had never known mechanics or precision before, and Ikol was impressed. So he blessed Talru Sorto, and told him to found the Order of Tecnomaezji which would oppose magic with reason and technology.

[Daniel]

Finally a dimension to Cedrism that one can relate to!

[ari]

Now I'm a bit frustrated, because I remember Talru Sorto being a figure of quite a bit of importance, but it's been so long since I last studied Cedrism that I can't actually remember what he was all about..