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Prologue

The stone stood facing the boiling grey sea as it had for countless millennia. Behind it mountains rose, shifted, fell and restored again, as the land shaped itself around the will of the stone. Where the land met water all remained the same. The stone stood through time, sometimes considered sacred, sometimes enchanted, sometimes forgotten.

Nearly three meters high, covered entirely with etched spirals, carved by beings the ages have long forgotten, its design both pleasing and puzzling to the eye. Any meaning of the stones’ etchings had been swallowed up by the sea of time like ancient undertow. The stone’s matter, owing its unearthed pedigrees from the deepest abysses of the world’s core was born of fire and crushing remoteness, it stood in the deep cavernous spaces amid vast underworld seas until it was spat out of the deepest recessed earth over time, like a sliver from flesh.

Before that, for eons the stone sat bearing the pressures and the weight of the ocean itself, a black beacon for the creatures of the deep, beings that thrived and lived in the cold salted waters. The Merrow’s, Grindylows, Ashray’s; Furies that existed together, drawn to the power of the stone. Moving through dark waters like wraiths, they gathered in the deep blackness of their feeding grounds, turning the cold water colder, darkening the pitch as the temperature drops around them and the cold turns into icy tides, floating and swirling through endless undulations of frigid salt water.

Rising out of a turbulent and unforgiving sea, the stone was a lure to the creatures that made the churning cold waters their home. From time before time, creatures of the deep were drawn to this place, surrounded and caught in the deep unimaginable cold of its fluid embrace, some creatures even return to the waters near the stone with regular pilgrimages from the deep, following instinct.

Once there had been vast schools of these creatures, blackening the waters across the horizons, skimming waves and ravaging freely, leaving endless death spirals in their wake. Now there were fewer, those bountiful times nearly forgotten as the collective memory fades, once a truth now edging on becoming myth, the flotsam and jetsam of time.

So stood the stone, awash in the sun, the air and waters of the outside world, its power grew outside the confines of the deep, and each day for endless days, the sun and wind and rain fed it with unfathomable possibility and sway. For ages it was buried under ice so thick and deep, that it remembered the crushing weight of its own birth and coming to being. Ice melted back to water and the world turned.

With the guise of infinite patience the stone waited, knowing that it would be found. Willing those who would seek to find it, waiting with sly confidence that eventually this land would call to them, and they would travel over rock and water to find it. Lured by the pure restless malevolence of the creatures inside the stone they came, these Stone Age Settlers.

These Humans constructed elaborate passages and graves inland from the stone, working these passages and tombs over generations, creating megalithic structures in tribute of the Ancient Beings that lived inside the Stone. The entities, evolving steadily on the steady diet of reverence and awe supplied by the people, eventually were able to escape the limitations of the stone.

The Spirits, pleased to be free from the confines of the deep, deep earth, the crushing remoteness and the cold oceans, free of their dense imprisonment in the stone, became Godlike. They fed well on the fear and adulation of these humans and for nearly 6ooo years the people and the Stone lived together on the edge of the world.

When the Tuatha De Dannen crossed over, displacing these early indigenous inhabitants, they too came under the rule of the Ancient Beings. But the Tuatha were different peoples, with supernatural abilities of their own, and when they in turn were invaded on their colonized land, they chose to forgo their human bodies and the Ancient Spirits rendered them invisible. The Tuatha went to live in the already ancient megalithic mounds. They became known in time as the fey people.

The immortal Tuatha immediately longed for the freedom and ecstasy found in organic physical form and quickly found ways of escaping their invisible stone realm and crossing over into the world of flesh. But this escape was not with out conditions, for they were still under the power of the Ancients and the Stone. The Ancients, for the first time in forever and always now learnt the delicious exhilaration and joy of being flesh bound.

So addicted and enthralled did the Ancient Spirits become with the ability to control and manifest in organic form, that they attached themselves to bloodlines through the ages, so that they were ensured. Thus began the rule of the Fey Gods.