He left Ben and Geris sitting beside the pool and wandered toward the riverbank. The river branch was relatively thin, only twenty feet across, but the measureless swampland forest on the other side, with twisted mothertrees and slanting undergrowth-so different from the arid land where he stood-gave it a deep, immense feel, as though it were a spiritual divide between two separate worlds. With the rushing of the water came a light breeze, and Jacob closed his eyes and tilted his head back, allowing it to play with his long hair. Then he gazed south, watching the river wind into the distance until it melded with the horizon. They were nearing the Sanctuary now, which meant they were close to the shores of the Thulon Ocean. The winds would be stronger there, and the rocky coast would tempt one to sit and take in the splendor of the sea.
Jacob lived by that sea, but not once had he relaxed in front of it since he’d dedicated his services to Ashhur seventeen years before. He had been free before that, for Jacob was the first-and only-human created by the hands of both brother gods. He was indelibly perfect, but that status carried a responsibility all its own. The rest of mankind had been made by either Karak or Ashhur, and with the River Rigon as a divider, they had split the world to make their nations. Jacob, as the First Man, was to be the link between the four First Families, two for each deity, who served as young humanity’s guiding light. It was only after he had spent time with the followers of both gods over the past ninety-three years that he’d decided his presence was most needed among the people of Ashhur. The eastern society of Neldar was much further along, having cast out the Wardens and replaced them with industry and towns and a ruling class and caste system. In the west the Wardens were all but necessary, and those that had been ousted from Neldar were welcomed into Paradise with open arms, for mankind hadn’t even decided on a king yet, and many in Paradise still debated over whether they should even have one.
He took another sip from his skin before kicking at a loose stone, which bounced down the steep riverbank, crossing from reddened clay to brown mud. The stone plunged into the water, and Jacob watched the ripples it created expand in an ever-widening circle.
Jacob had been formed from the magma at the center of the planet, birthed beneath the light of Celestia’s star as a fully grown man with the intelligence of the ages. His very first act had been to bow before his creators, the brother gods made flesh. His next was to bear silent witness with his two fathers as Celestia, the goddess who’d originally created this world and populated it with beings of her own design, stood before her two elven races, the Dezren and the Quellan, and asked them to act as wardens to a new race of beings that would soon be created by the brother gods. The leaders of both races declined, pleading with her that their numbers were still depleted from the great war many years before, and that if any beings required assistance, it was they. The goddess turned her children away, disappointment painting her glimmering, otherworldly features. With or without the elves’ help, she said, the decision had been made.
Jacob stood by in awe when, a day later, Celestia forged this very river to split the land for the brother gods to share. He watched as a fissure formed in the center of the world, slowly widening like the maw of a great serpent, separating the land into east and west. The sound of splitting crust had been deafening, the echo of the boulders tumbling into the new crevasse like the constant beating of a drum. And when the gap was broad enough to please the goddess, water rushed into it from the snow-capped mountains in the far north. The rushing tide resonated with the deafening hiss of a massive windstorm, and with it the ecology of the land changed in an instant. The northern expanse, which had once been Kal’droth, the lush green homeland of the elves who had populated the world in the two thousand years since its creation, was particularly altered. The new twin rivers, the Rigon and Gihon, dried the Formian Lake and sucked the nutrients from the fertile soil, depositing them farther south along the new rivers’ banks. The trees shriveled and died in the elven homeland; the grasses browned and rotted; and the wildlife fled to the Northface Mountains, where vegetation still grew. With little choice, the Dezren and Quellan elves moved south, along the banks of the new rivers. Kal’droth became known as the Tinderlands-a wasteland of rocky soil nestled above the northern wedge of the conjoined rivers-where crops refused to grow, and neither god bothered to lay a claim.
That had happened on the third day of his existence. On the fourth he embarked on a ten-year-long journey, one that took him from one corner of Dezrel to another, crisscrossing the landscape by foot. He was privy to wondrous sights: the southeastern coast, where the surf dashed against the shore, chiseling giant cliffs into wide beaches of fine sand; the Knothills and Craghills of the northwest and the giant grayhorns that grazed between them, beasts of thick gray hides, horned noses, and docile temperaments; the Kiln mountains on the outskirts of the far eastern Queln River, where flocks of multicolored brine geese migrated, forming living rainbows in the sky during the summer; the desert that would become Ker and the infinite prairies that surrounded it, oceans of flowing golden wheat that stretched far as the eye could see; the Pebble Islands off the southern coast, brimming with tropical flora and fauna and surrounded by crystal-blue waters; the snow-capped mountains of the northeast, offering frigid temperatures and deep caves in which Jacob often explored, discovering more than a few strange creatures that existed in almost pure darkness.
He observed the cycle of life, watching as creatures struggled to survive, fighting each other for food and then huddling together for warmth once night fell. He witnessed the act of birth for the first time, one of the few miracles that he, as a forged man, had been denied. On a boulder outside the Ghostwood, he’d sat and looked on the last of the great dragons, a winged creature fifty feet long with glinting copper scales and fire dripping from its jaws. It had been swallowed whole by a glowing blue portal, ripped away from its home and sent to another reality by Celestia as she finished preparing the world for the coming of humankind.
Finally, the gods summoned him back. It had taken Ashhur and Karak the full duration of his journey to gather the power and materials necessary for the spell that would bring forth life as well as form the Gods’ Road between the two nations and prepare the amenities that would allow their newly created children to thrive. Clay vessels were laid out on either side of the Rigon, with Jacob sitting in an anchored raft between them. First he looked on as the originators of the First Families took form-Clovis Crestwell, Isabel DuTaureau, Soleh Mori, and Bessus Gorgoros-four beings molded of the earth from the corners of Dezrel that would become their homes, coming into life just as Jacob had, as adults filled with knowledge, able to choose their own names from the ancient language that would become the world’s common tongue. Next he saw the new Wardens arrive, refugees from a different world, chosen after the elves dismissed Celestia’s offer. A thousand of them, males all, stepped into Dezrel as if passing through an invisible doorway. Half went to Ashhur, half to Karak. The tall, beautiful, elegant beings began filling the clay ewers with the same materials that had been used to create the First Four: silt from the Great Lake of the northwest, red sand from the south, chunks of quartz from the frigid northern mountains, and blue clay from the eastern coastal cliffs.