time. He felt separate from himself, stolen from his body, yet he was more comfortable and more complete, more ivhole, than he had ever felt before. He stretched out one finger and felt the universe shift around him instinctively. He opened his eyes, and suns were born. He breathed, and the flow shifted its currents around a score of spheres.
He was planets. He was stars. He was spheres, suns, systems, memories, races long dead.
He was all.
His sight, his senses, were filled with a panoramic vista of the flow, of the oneness of each sphere with its obsidian counterparts scattered like pebbles across the universe.
He thought of himself. He felt his being pull back, into the reality of the Spelljammer, and his mind saw and felt the Unhuman fleets converging on the Spelljammer. Elves, neogi, humans, giff-their ships promised bloodshed and war, and the stench of death followed in their wake.
— Who? he thought. -Where?
The answer rang through him with a force unimaginable, a force that had seen stars being born, seen planets die, seen whole spheres bubble into existence and slowly solidify, a thousand years witnessed within a second. It was a word, yet not a word, more a feeling that was sound and sight and touch and smell and taste, all at once.
— Here, was the answer.
— Live.
— See.
— Feel.
— Hear.
— Die.
— Experience.
— Know.
— All.
Then:
— We are not the first.
And the universe was a sphere, a single, wondrous black jewel floating in the empty, endless wastes of the chaotic phlogiston. Alone, perhaps; at least unknown by the beings from any other sphere.
— Ouiyan.
Eighteen worlds swung in slow, graceful arcs around Aeyenna, the eternal sun. Eighteen worlds-blue, green, vibrant with a variety of life unknown today. There, among the worlds, life had evolved, reaching out from mother oceans to stare transfixed into the skies. Empires flourished and were destroyed, then were rebuilt upon ancient foundations. Myth gave way to science, then magic, and humanity learned to coexist peacefully with the animals that shared the worlds. Children swam with the great beasts of the sea; mages and scholars shared philosophies with wolves and whales. Most unique among the worlds of Ouiyan were the spaakiil.
Alone among all the beasts of the One Sphere, the spaakiil sailed through wildspace and atmospheres alike, great mantas that sang and frolicked among the stars, swam along the boundaries of magic and reality. To each world they brought wonder. To each world they brought the joys of life and diver sity. To each world they brought peace. To each world they brought their songs of greeting from other worlds, and the knowledge that granted humanity the skills to break the cage of gravity and sail the first spelljammers into space.
To each world, the spaakiil were considered holy: gods to one world; messengers to another; brothers to a third.
To each world-except one-they were considered friends.
The outermost planet was unknown to the others, circling Aeyenna in an orbit so far distant that the sunlight never shone brighter than dark twilight. The eighteenth world was a cold rock, where vegetable life was limited to black scrubs and thick, dark flowers that cried plaintively as the pinpoint that was the sun teased the sky.
It was from here that evil came and spread across the sphere.
They called themselves the Sh'tarrgh, and for years, the Sh 'tarrgh waged war against humanity, the Stealers of the Sun. The grotesque gray humanoids fed on the blood and fear of their chosen enemies. They attacked first the seventeenth world and spread from there to claim the sphere as their own. For years cities were leveled by their weapons of destruction, their mages of darkness. The oceans of Resanel boiled under the heat weapons of the Sh'tarrgh. The Citadel of Kiril, housing four thousand men and women, was reduced to rubble in a day. Worlds died as armies were enveloped in clouds of magic, and nothing but bones and armor were left when the clouds dispersed.
The worlds burned at the Sh 'tarrgh's departure, and the One Sphere echoed with the screams of the innocent and the dying.
The Sh 'tarrgh wanted nothing but the worlds that orbited peacefully in the glow of the sun. They cared not at all for life; they simply wanted, and wanted. They wanted what before they could not have… the sacred, blessed sunlight, and their lust for power fueled their evil.
The leaders of the sphere met only days before Ouiyan was to become but a memory, a legend. The war had gone on too long, for almost a century of mindless death. Already BedevanSov and Ladria had been taken by the Sh 'tarrgh, and Ondora was about to fall. Politicians and kings, wizards and priests, knew that the sphere would not hold much longer. It was decided, then, to devise apian that could save those who were left.
Days later, magic users and kings converged secretly on Irryan, the forest moon of Colurranur, to organize one last attempt to tvin back their worlds.
The sky above Irryan darkened, and they knew that all was lost-the Sh 'tarrgh were attacking.
Then they looked up and rejoiced, for the sky was filled with the triangular shapes of the spaakiil, circling silently, filling the survivors with awe at their graceful omnipresence.
The numbers of the spaakiil had dwindled under the ceaseless attacks of the Sh 'tarrgh; but they selflessly offered humanity one last chance to defeat the Sh 'tarrgh, one last chance for life.
The humans listened to the idea of the spaakiil, and rejected it. No one should sacrifice so much for others, but the spaakiil were insistent, and the threat of the Sb'tarrgh was overwhelming.
Word was soon sent throughout the sphere to all the mages on all the worlds. On the island of Terah, in the sea o fGelaan, the spaakiil and wizards from all the races of Ouiyan together wove their spells. The skies swirled with dark clouds and danced with lightning. On the other side of the planet, tornadoes cut swaths across the countryside, and strange lights played in the sky.
Then it was over. A thousand mages had come to Terah, but fewer than two hundred survived the stress of what they had done.
The spaakiil, the wild singers of the stars, were gone.
In the sky, blotting the sun, swam a single, impossibly large spaakiil.
No longer alive, as humans knew life, the first Spelljammer, Egrestarrian, swam above Colurranur, a gleaming, sprawling city spread out upon its back for the refugees of the original, forgotten Unhuman War-the people who would be known in later ages as the Lovokei, the Kutalla, the Broul, and thejuna. Egrestarrian sailed to every world of the One Sphere and took on all who wished to escape the Sh 'tarrgh.
Many stayed to fight, to defend their homes. Some were held prisoner by the Sh'tarrgh; others felt that escape was cowardly and simply wished to die.
The virginal ship sailed through wildspace and defended itself with its stinger, a powerful weapon of annihilation, while the humans built the first spacebome ballistae and catapults to destroy their evil enemies.
The armadas of the Sh 'tarrgh came together as the Spelljammer left the orbit of the innermost world, laden with the refugees and survivors of the unbuman wars. Sh'tarrgh battleships numbered six score and converged on the ship from all sides.
The Spelljammer was built to preserve life, and was not conceived as an offensive weapon. Its only defenses were natural: speed, maneuverability, and its magical nature. In the Sh'tarrgh Convergence-an attack that lasted only seconds-the people of the Spelljammer learned a valuable lesson: that to defend, even peaceable peoples need defensive weapons.
Against the combined might of the Sh'tarrgh, the Spelljammer was impotent. Its only hope-the only hope of thousands-was to escape, to explore.
Escape lay on the other side of the black, crystalline wall of the One Sphere.
