Genesis
Elephants
Guardians. Made one at a time, and left alone afterwards.
Each one is already whole
You can start anywhere. There is no plot to keep up with and nothing you need to have read first. Whichever Guardian you meet first is complete on its own, and what you make of it is yours.
Each is finished before the next is begun, and nothing is revised afterwards. Each has a domain nobody else holds, and kin it never chose. The order they stand in records when each of them woke, and nothing more. Not rank. Not worth.
The writing, the artwork and the collection are still under way. This page is the door until then.
We show them here before we show them anywhere
Usually unfinished, sometimes at odd hours. There is one room, and everyone who comes in is in it. New Guardians go in there while they are still being made, long before we would put them anywhere else. Some of what you see there changes later. Some of it never leaves the room.
No account. No email. Pick a name and come in.
Shown there recently
They arrive one at a time
A Guardian is written first. It gets a domain of its own, a legend, three traits and a verse, and only then does it go to the artwork. Once that is done we leave it alone. These two are finished. The plate beside them is the one being drawn today, and it will be shown in the room before it appears here.
Umbra
The Unbegun
Terrion
The Unbegun
The next one
Being drawn now
Nobody woke alone
A few were awake before there was anyone to count them. Every one that came after came from someone, and the chart below records only that: who came from whom, and in what order they woke. It is not a ranking. A Guardian near the top is not above the one beneath it. It simply woke earlier, and had less waiting to do.
Hover a Guardian to see the bloodlineTap a Guardian to see the bloodline
The chart is not finished.
When one wakes, a line is added. Nothing already drawn here has to move, because none of it was arranged in the first place.
Seven, in the order they emerged
Each row carries its own colour, and those colours run through the chart above and around the mark in the corner. They are listed as they arrived, and that is all the order means. The last two are dimmed because nothing has been written into them yet. They will fill in time, and the one at the foot will end up larger than everything above it put together.
- The UnbegunThose already here when the counting began
- FirstbornSky, sea and the first light, before there was a world to hold them
- InheritorsHanded a finished world, and made to answer for keeping it
- SovereignsWhere the rule settled, and has not moved since
- BegottenBorn into a house that already ruled
- AscendantsNo one is born to this one, only crossed into it
- EarthlingsMortal, and given the world to live in rather than hold
Love. Freedom. Restraint.
Three of them, and every Guardian is measured against all three before it is finished. They decide what it may hold, how it stands toward the others, and what it declines to do with the power it already has. The last one is the hardest. Most of what a Guardian could change, it leaves alone.
Love
Nothing here is made quickly. Whoever picks one of these up in ten years should be able to tell that somebody cared how it turned out.
Freedom
Every Guardian wakes on its own terms. None of them was made to serve, none of them answers to another, and they leave everyone else the same room.
Restraint
The strength that is never used. A Guardian could remake most of what it touches, and mostly it decides not to. Things are left to become what they were already becoming.