Prehistoric Nadhron

MYTHS OF ORIGIN

The world, as the Nadhrau tell it, always has been and always will be. Their creation story (in its most common form) says:


The Earth was there and the Earth will be, forever and till the end of time. Always will she last, immortal, fearless, never waning, her breath stirring the oceans for eternities of eternities; the wind will blow the sun and the moon, bringing night and day, carrying with it tidings of the speckled stars that fill the sky, sisters to our Earth. [Wavuedue Malere 1.12-13)


This legend is consistent with that in The Book of God, the religious text of the Shalt. Although the Nadhrau profess to belong to the same religion followed in Shaltan, their versions of the religious text - called the Wavuedue Melere ("Stories for Living") - follow this with a different idea of how people came into being:


And then God made men to ride the waves, men to till the fields, men who thought they had mastery over the Earth, precious though her lifeblood was. And God sent the magic, laid it over the people like a quilt of finest woollen cloth, hoped that it would bring peace to men.

But they twisted it, turning it to suit their whims and fancies, making tall, proud evils of rock and stone and towers of shining magic.

And God was sad in his heart as he saw what men did to the world. Yet there was one corner of it, the most beautiful place of all, to which the evils of the world had not yet come. So God put magic in the land, magic of the land, so that the men of the wild places could not and would not enter therein and defile it with evils. For the magic of the wild men of the world had no power in this place, the most beautiful place on earth.

And from this land came a race, a race of men born from the magic of the land. And God said this was good, for these people were of the land, and the land was not of them, and they lived in it among their flocks and all was well for generations down unto the time when the Great Wizard came to the southern lands and taught of the good in magic. And then some among the people of the most beautiful land on earth learned to use the magic, to bring the magic forth, but it had no power for evil and though the land's children, born from her, born from the magic, could use it, still it belonged to the land, and still they were the children of the land. [Wavuedue Malere 1.30-38]


The passage probably elides time, since the Nadhrau almost certainly came into being before ships were invented. It is also unlikely that they were born out of magic, but it is eminently possible that they came to "the most beautiful land on earth" early enough that the land - inexplicably but incontrovertibly more magical than any other known place in the world - and its magic encoded a certain difference in the Nadhrau.


EARLY PEOPLES

The Nadhrau are a fairly homogeneous group. Archaeological evidence suggests that they lived in Nadhron long before the Shalt came to Shaltan. The Nadhrau were hunter-gatherers, and probably lived in small bands or tribes of individuals, but when they successfully domesticated the goat, life in Nadhron changed.