Older than the gods — older, perhaps, than the world's own memory of itself — are the Great Spirits of Fire and Ice. They are not gods in the way the Elders are gods. They have no faces they were born with, no thrones, no commandments. They are the living principles of fire and of cold, vast intelligences that dwell at the deep heart of the world, and the wisest priests admit that even the Elders could only befriend them, never command them.
"The gods we may pray to. The Spirits we may only hope to be spared."
Older Than the Gods
When the star-born Elders first came to Kworgale, they found the Spirits already here, already ancient, already burning and already still. The two could not be unmade, only bargained with — and the great pact that allowed mortal life to flourish in this world was struck not only among the Elders but with the Spirits as well. Every flame ever lit in a temple of the Ruby, the faithful are told, is a borrowed ember of the first fire itself.
The Pyreheart and the Everfrost
The Great Spirit of Fire dwells in the Pyreheart Nexus, the molten core-sanctum where creation and destruction are the same act; her counterpart, the Great Spirit of Ice, keeps the Everfrost Sanctum, where all things are preserved, structured, and held against decay. Fire is passion, energy, growth and ruin; Ice is patience, order, preservation and engineering. They are opposites, and yet — unlike the gods, who warred — the two Spirits have never stood against one another. Their balance is the quiet hinge on which the whole living world turns. The fire-spirit's nature, and the long shadow she casts over the present age, is told in full on the page of the Great Spirit of Fire.
The Endless War She Did Not Choose
Yet fire can be made to weep. In the frozen north, the Glacial Dominion has fought a war without end against tides of demons that pour from a wound near the Pyreheart — for a great imprisoned power festers there, and its torment agitates the Spirit of Fire into spasms of creation gone wrong. The Spirit is not the enemy in that war. She is its first and oldest victim — a primordial warmth made to birth horrors by the thing chained beneath her, while the children of the world stand against the tide she cannot stop herself from raising.