Okay, next up is settling some historical background. Very little of this is known in-universe by anyone except a tiny handful of scholars, and even the Caretakers themselves don't know the full truths of the First Age, but here it is rendered in fact to clarify some important points of the cosmic design principles I'm working by.

Metacosmic History

At The Dawn of Time.....(dun dun DUN...(ELAN!))

Spoiler: The Age of Eternity
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In the beginning, there was nothing. Out of nothing came the Creator.
It spoke once, and said “I Am”, creating Present.
It spoke twice, and said “I Was”, creating Past.
It spoke thrice, and said, “I Will Be”, creating Future.

Aside from the Creator, there was still nothing. Time had no meaning without Space to act upon, and so the Creator sought to expand upon what it had made.

From itself the Creator drew forth power and built the First World. A bountiful universe of endless possibility and pure, unfettered Chaos, where no sooner did something exist than it would change into something new. But it was not balanced, for Present had no value of context, and when the Creator ceased to focus on holding the First World together it collapsed and died.

The Creator learned and tried again, drawing forth more power and building the Second World. A beautiful place of unyielding Order this time, rigid and unyielding in structure and form and everything that was would persist forever. But it was not balanced, for without Future there could be no Past, and too many of the Second World's laws resulted in mutually incompatible paradoxes. When the Creator ceased to focus on holding the Second World together it shattered and died.

Once more, the Creator learned and drew forth power to create the Third World. This time, it took equal measures of Chaos and Order and balanced them against each other. Past led through Present into Future. Five elemental planes formed a steady foundation to balance reality upon, and the Creator thought Itself content. But in time this too changed, and the Creator found Itself alone. It created life to populate the world it had devised, but was unsatisfied, for its creations were finite. They could barely comprehend Its existence, and when It removed them from the world It was lonelier than ever. But creating an equal was beyond even Its power. It could not multiply, so instead It chose to divide, permanently sundering its own essence into a number of lesser selves. These were the Caretakers, and what they lacked in potency they replaced with community. They knew little of their origins, but they had their purpose – to protect and maintain what their progenitor had left for them to enjoy.


Spoiler: The Age of Immortals
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In time this too would be a test, for while the First and Second Worlds had been destroyed, they had left countless pieces behind. Those shards were of a higher and older nature, able to overwrite the balance of the Third World with their own pure nature wherever they collided with it. Left unchecked they would break the Third World as thoroughly as they had broken themselves, but the Caretakers found their power was too great to cleanly separate a shard once it had attached. They could only blast it apart, inflicting damage of their own on the structure of the world. Seeing to their duty would require intermediaries with a smaller measure of power and even greater finesse. Three races of immortals they built for this purpose – Elementals, Dragons, and Fae.

The elementals came first, pieces of their respective planes imbued directly with life and will. They were well-suited to defending their homes, being extensions of the planes as much as independent beings, but that intimate link also made them poorly-suited to defending the Material Plane itself. Outside their native realms the elementals were formless spirits, capable of inhabiting temporary construct bodies but greatly weakened while doing so.

The dragons came second, forged of a five-way elemental gestalt and gifted with powers of destruction second only to the Caretakers themselves. They possessed of both immense power and limitless wisdom, to be the Caretakers' commanders and generals in the war against Outside. When a shard threatened the Third World, the dragons were the first into a breach and the bulwark against which a defense rested.

Third came the Fae, spun out of the raw powers of Past and Future. Instead of physical might, the fae embodied mastery of the nature of creation as it changed through time. They could turn illusions into reality, or make reality synonymous with illusion, and when a battle had concluded it was the Fae charged with repairing the scars of damage inflicted upon the world.

For an eon, the situation again seemed stable. But the Caretakers were not their Creator, and though they could create, what they made was not without its flaws. The Fae became increasingly fickle and apathetic. What was real mattered less to them than the reality they could choose to make for themselves, and their immortality meant that they cared little for a world they would outlast eternally. They ceased to fight the incursions from Outside, and instead wrought a grand magical working across their entire species. Transforming themselves into living phantasms, they created an entirely illusory plane to inhabit where they could redesign it at will to whatever whims of the moment they felt like indulging.

In their absence, the dragons fought ever harder despite being alone. But before long they too began to falter, prone to melancholy and despair. Even the battles they won were still lost in the long run, for they could not repair what damage had been done and so every fight was still a step into ruin. Being immortal, they could no longer bear the pain of seeing what they defended slowly crumble before them. One by one, they succumbed to their fatalism and withdrew from the struggle, each building an extraplanar pocket reality to inhabit while they waited for the end to come.

Only the Elementals remained, and their nature made them almost impotent beyond the boundaries of their homes. A new generation of defenders was needed, and though the Caretakers had failed, like the Creator they could learn from their mistakes.


Spoiler: The Age of Supremacy
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Chief among errors the Caretakers had made, in their eyes, was gifting their creations with immortality. It had seemed logical, but the flaws in this were now clear. The new generation of defenders would experience life and death like the plants and animals already present on the Material, dedicated to protecting it not simply for their own sake but for the generations that would follow them. While the fey and dragons were no longer able to continue the fight, they were willing to both contribute towards the creation of successors and serve as conduits for power to those worthy of bearing it. Additionally, they would spread the burden across five groups instead of three, trading raw power for resilience of spirit.

From the essence of dragons, the Caretakers produced a race of bipedal reptiles, brave and hearty. These scalekin were well-suited to dwelling in the harshest regions of the world in both body and temperament, for their heritage instilled in them a deep sense of inadequacy and a determination to live up to that legacy of power.

Out of the essence of fey came the slim and agile sidhelings. While they lacked the innate control of illusions the Fae claimed for their own, they were as flexible mentally as they were physically – the perfect adaptable tools to serve whatever task was needed. But where the fae lacked permanency of body, the sidhelings were afflicted with an unpredictable mania of focus.

Attuned to the elemental essence of water were the amphibious, frog-like aquarians. Much of the world was covered by water, and it would fall to them to guard the undersea regions from incursions of the Outside. The seas are tumultuous though, with an innate tendency towards Chaos that found itself replicated in the mercurial and hair-trigger emotions of the aquarian species.

From the elemental essence of earth were molded the stoneborn. Warriors and craftsmen who would not falter from their duty, they patient and sturdy. Unlike the other three, the stoneborn were far more heavily influenced by their extraplanar essence – their bodies composed of living stone rather than flesh and blood, and at times very slow and cautious to act.

The Caretakers intended their fifth and final race of mortals to be air-aspected, but they unexpectedly found themselves pre-empted by the Material Plane itself. The struggles of the Age of Immortals had left scars upon the Material; even after healing and repairs elements of the Outside remained. From these traces, the plane spontaneously produced defenders of its own, much like a body might produce antibodies to defend against a virus. These humans embodied traces of both Order and Chaos, instinctively repelled by energies of the First and Second World and uniquely resistant to their more insidiously corrupting influences.

Having brought forth their newest children, unfortunately, the Caretakers could no more directly interact with them than they could directly intervene against incursions from Outside. It would be the elder immortals taking up the role of beings directly seen and even worshipped, while the Caretakers settled in to fulfill the duties of their name directly.