Arcanogenesis

Okay to talk about this I'm going to have to give some context and that context involves dinosaurs so

THE DINOSAUR LORDS

Source

 

They ruled sovereign over the earth for a hundred million generations, kaiju as huge as cathedrals and covered in brilliant plumes of feathers and where there weren't any feathers there were horns and claws and teeth, and when they moved they moved with all the unstoppable momentum of plate tectonics, the highest links on a primordial chain of being, and beneath them a thousand-thousand species of merely-enormous saurian underlings and supplicants and soldiers and hunters, every niche dominated, Perfidious Dinosauria, a taxonomic clade on which the sun never set

except they could never take the oldest forests 

(where the trees were as iron and their branches grew tall enough to drink straight from the clouds and their roots wound deep enough to blacken their tips against the inner heat of the earth)

The First Folk lived in those trees, locked in a long, slow evolutionary war against scale and egg; they were soft-skinned and nimble (and they had boobs and fingernails and three weird little bones in their ears), and they survived against overwhelming odds by being fucking clever.

The trees were too big and the forest too dense for the Lords themselves to enter, and so time after time they sent their raiding parties of deinonychus and allosaurus sprinting through the undergrowth, and time after time they were driven back, ambushed by envenomed arrowheads and ensnared in nets and pitfall traps.

But the dinosaurs had their numbers and they had their fury, and over millions of years of war the assaults grew to be almost constant. The dwindling populations of the First Folk sought safety in the highest branches, up past the clouds and the squadrons of circling pterosaurs, and at the top of the tallest tree of all they found the stars just within their reach, yearning burning yawning portals to another brighter world (maybe even a home) and in they went and while the Folk didn't find a home and while a whole bunch of them were driven incredibly mad (their gray matter boiling in their skulls and out of their ears as they raved) the ones that made it back out carried with them in their crackling minds the first bit of magic, the ur-spell, a Noumenal idea more influential than reality.




The ensorcelled Folk did three things upon their return to Phenomenon:

1. They fireballed the ever-living shit out of the dinosaurs, the ancient feud finally finished.
2. They studied the magic they now held and built an arcane engine in the sky to empower it further, to catalyze their apotheosis into godhood, and populated it with the wayward souls of their many dead. Nowadays people call it the moon.
3. They ascended into immortal beings of pure light and launched themselves into the far future where nothing would ever bother them again–

–which turned out to be a somewhat more explosive than expected and sent a chunk of the newly-minted moon hurtling into the planet below. Its impact (combined with the recent orbital bombardment) resulted in the extinction of 75% of all plant and animal species, including all the surviving dinosaurs, except obviously I'm stealing one of Arnold K's fabulous ideas and saying that a few of them escaped fiery death by pursuing the First Folk through the timelines and are even now chomping out the throat meat of all the disgusting hairy mammals they can find.

And how did God react to the theft of magic, this blasphemous intrusion into Their domain? The Church, if they knew about any of this, would probably sputter that it was nothing but Their infinite mercy and love for Their children that allowed even a few of the First Folk to escape Noumenon unscathed. The elves, who consider themselves direct and honored descendants of those most ancient people (they're mostly right) say that God, who loved the First Folk as Their dearest favorite, granted magic to them as a gift so that they might take their rightful place among the stars. And the heretics, the cultists who listen to the whispers of the old chaos that still speaks from the quantum spaces behind creation, they preach that Anu is gone, that the thieves looted an abandoned house, that the path to salvation now lies only at the feet of the maddening things squatting on the property.