Extinction Excused

Long before the Earth was ceded to mammalian control, before mankind would build great civilizations and develop technology to explore the depths of their hubris and reach out to yet unsullied stars, the planet was dominated by the mighty dinosaurs. The only order at play was the natural struggle for survival, a functional ecosystem built from wild chaos and instinct. One could only wonder how far such an ever-evolving world would continue to grow over an infinite expanse of time… but, unfortunately for the inhabitants of this primitive world, this era would soon be cut short. A cosmic accident, an anomaly that all of Earth’s defenses had no means to prepare for, was set to collide with the planet’s surface, resulting in an extinction event on an unprecedented scale. It would seem that dinosaurs were doomed to death by asteroid impact if not for the intervention of yet greater outside forces.

The inhabitants of this world had no means of understanding what sort of interference would be at play in the protection of the world they knew. All they could tell at the time was that, at the moment they seemed destined for unparalleled destruction, a great light enveloped the sky, swallowing up the threat that loomed above their heads in a worldwide burst of luminescence. What was once a great boulder from beyond the stars turned to relative pebbles, making many minor impacts on their home and causing minimal harm. The sky would remain forever changed, however; where there were once blue skies that provided a vision of distant stars and the curious celestial body that is the moon on a cloudless day, now there was a strange, ever-changing oil painting of colors and flowing shapes of unknown geometry. There was still a bright globe that provided life-bringing light that one could recognize as a sun, but even that seemed beyond the established norms, the days and nights constantly changing their spans of time. Now the sunlight could control the skies for days or minutes at a time, with the darkness of night being equally as inconsistent. It seemed to the inhabitants of this world that the void surrounding their little marble of a planet had embraced the chaos of their own daily struggles for survival in order to help these species avoid extinction. This sky-bound phenomenon and the unique crimson lightning that would sometimes strike the surface of this planet would one day come to be known as the Primordial Storm.

The bizarre new circumstances of this environment did not stop there, however. Something about this new world had influenced the mighty dinosaurs and their less dominant cohabitants as well; unknowable energy flowed into each living creature and became fuel for spontaneous, chaotic bursts of evolution in an untold number of unique paths. Some gained power over the elements of nature, others gained traits of creatures they heretofore could never share a genome with, and a number would eventually acquire a kind of intelligence that would have taken millions more years to properly hone and develop. This species of savage beasts had acquired sapience without a need for sapiens to fill the gap in primacy that would have been left by an extinction event; this was the birth of the race that would come to be known as the Saurians.

As their comprehension of the world around them grew, they had come to an understanding of that which protected them from destruction in exemplars of nature’s work around them. They first deemed that the power to end such an unstoppable cataclysm must’ve been the work of an equally destructive force, so they looked to the volcanoes that roared against the horizon, melting debris from the multitude of meteorites with the oppressive heat of their fire and magma; this fury would come to be referred to as the work of a mighty god of creation and destruction, Gargarok. Following this thought process, some looked to natural forces that not only stood strong in the face of death from the stars but utterly consumed them; the sinking strength of the everlasting tar would come to be known as the touch of Necroxa, who would be referred to as a goddess of death and decay, while the all-consuming depths of the ocean would become the domain of the goddess Arelis. Then there was the almighty mountain that even these missiles would crash and break upon - the home of the sister goddess to Gargarok and his volcanoes, Graiera - and the strange shadows that would both foretell of the disaster’s approach from above and secret it away upon landing in the darker hideaways of the globe, the dark dwellings of the god Pterrorak. There would be many lesser gods and stories built from such observations as well, mostly conceptualized from a place of terror, but one in particular stood out to rise above their station and into a place among the higher pantheon from a place of hope. Within the reflective shine of quartzes, glittering gemstones and light filtered through a tree’s hardened amber lay a sparkling goddess of light and preservation of all life; a great presence of peace known as Shinberra.

What would start as mere concepts would become fueled by the faith and willpower of these Saurians, their ambient evolutionary energy giving birth to a true pantheon of gods and goddesses, existent in each of these elements that spawned them and serving as conduits for these people to discover and learn the ways of to manipulate their new reality in all sorts of magical fashions. These newborn deities would choose the greatest among them to be champions, avatars of their newfound might to lead the Saurian people to prosperity in the midst of chaos. Soon enough, they would build their own societies and civilizations in synchronicity with the savage world around them. It would be a bit presumptuous to call this a perfect world by any means, certainly not a peaceful one… but just as it had before the onset of disaster, this world maintained itself all the same. So this new world, the Primal Realm, would continue to exist, unaware of the true nature of their continued existence as the realm humanity would come to call Earth grew parallel to it… that is until the avarice of mankind would reach its greedy claws into this reality, unsatisfied draining their own natural resources. But that is a story yet to come…