The Ancient Ones

Chronicle Entry – Secret Annex

Recorded by Brother Wyn of Caermynach, Anno Domini 920
Known As: Y Rhai Hynafol, The Beasts Beyond Time
Status: Speculation drawn from merchant accounts, kept from public teaching
Warning: These matters concern beings older than our world

The merchants who walk between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic carry stories stranger than Scripture records. They speak of beasts that moved upon creation before man was made, yet were not made during those six days. Creatures that knew other worlds before this one existed. Powers that built mountains and carved valleys, yet were themselves built by hands we cannot name.

I set this down because the merchants themselves admit they do not understand what they report. Even those who claim ancestry reaching back through Cymroth to the days before the Romans, even those who say their fathers' fathers carried these accounts from the East, even they confess: this is mystery piled upon mystery, and the foundation lies beyond anything we can verify.

The Record

The Church teaches plainly enough. God made all things in six days. On the sixth, He made beasts of every kind. Angels He had already, though Scripture does not say precisely when. Devils we have through their rebellion, though again the timing goes unrecorded.

Merchants from lands where the old gods are still remembered tell a different account. They say the dragons, Titans, and northern giants were never made during those six days. They existed before. Served in works that came and went before our sun first rose.

An old trader from Byzantium once showed me a manuscript, Greek letters on parchment so ancient the edges crumbled at a breath. It claimed God has made many worlds, each different from the last. In some, the builders ruled what they constructed. In others, they served. Our world, this text insisted, was made under a new law: that the mighty would serve the small, that power would bow to weakness, that age would submit to youth.

I asked him if he believed it. He shrugged and said his grandfather taught him the words, but the meaning was lost three generations back.

What the Merchants Say

From travelers returning from the northern seas comes mention of beings called by various names. The Greeks knew them as Titans. The tribes beyond Rome's frontier speak of Jotnar. In older Welsh traditions, before the Druids were broken and the church took root, there are references to powers that shaped the bones of the hills.

All these accounts agree on certain details, though the names shift with each tongue. These beings were vast. They moved stone as easily as we move air. They knew arts of building and breaking that no mortal has since mastered.

They are gone now. Bound, the stories say, or sleeping, or cast beyond the edges of the world. Where they went and why varies with the teller. Some claim they rebelled and were punished. Others suggest they completed their work and departed. A merchant from the lands of the Rus once told me they were sealed away to keep them from interfering with what came after.

The dragons receive particular attention in these tales. Unlike the Titans or the northern giants, the dragons are said to have possessed fire. Not merely the ability to breathe flame, though that too is mentioned, but something deeper. An understanding of transformation itself. The capacity to change one thing into another through heat and pressure and time.

One account places their leader as an architect, commissioned by God Himself to design the very structure of reality. Another calls him the firstborn of all created things, given the Pattern and told to build. A third, less flattering, names him a craftsman who grew proud of his work and claimed it as his own.

I cannot verify any of this. The texts contradict each other. The sources are uncertain. Even the merchants who carry these stories cannot trace them to any single origin.

The Problem with Ages

If these beings existed before our world began, then they existed outside time as we experience it. This raises questions the schoolmen cannot satisfactorily answer.

Did they age? Did they die? Could they be killed?

Scripture says death entered through Adam's sin. If these creatures lived before Adam, did death apply to them? Were they subject to the same mortality that plagues us, or did they endure by some other rule?

I have read in certain forbidden texts, kept locked in monastery libraries where only the most trusted scholars may view them, that the dragons occupied a strange middle ground. They could be destroyed by violence yet never weakened with years. Binding was possible. Killing proved difficult. One account claims the only force that could truly end them was their own fire, turned back upon itself.

Whether this is true, I cannot say. The texts are old. The scribes who copied them long dead. The original authors unknown.

Where Holy Church Stands

The bishops will not speak of these matters publicly. When pressed, they say Genesis is complete. God made all things. Whatever existed before was either angel or nothing. Angels we understand. Nothing requires no explanation.

Yet privately, in the schools where such questions are permitted, some teachers acknowledge the problem. If God made everything, and these beings were made by God, then they fall within creation. If they existed before creation, then they are older than anything Scripture describes.

One solution, proposed by a monk from Canterbury, suggests God exists outside time and may have created these beings "simultaneously" with our world, though from our perspective one came before the other. This preserves God's sovereignty while allowing for the merchants' accounts.

Another scholar, now deceased, argued more boldly. He claimed God has made many creations, each following different rules. The beings we call ancient were made for previous works. When those were complete, God called them to serve in ours. Their rebellion came from confusion rather than malice. They expected the rules of the old worlds to apply. When they learned otherwise, some adapted. Others could not.

This second view was condemned as heretical, though I have read his writings in secret and found them less troubling than the bishops claimed.

What Cannot Be Known

There are limits to what merchants can report and scholars can verify. We know our world. We see its structure. We live within time's flow. Whatever existed before or beyond these boundaries remains speculation.

Did dragons shape continents? Perhaps. Do Titans sleep beneath mountains? Possibly. Will they wake? The merchants shrug. Even those who claim the deepest knowledge admit the sources fail at this point.

I write this to record the mystery, never to claim certainty. These beings, if they existed as the stories claim, came from somewhere beyond our understanding. They worked on creation before Scripture's account begins. They vanished or were hidden before the records we trust were written.

Whether they will return, or already stir in places men do not go, or lie bound until the world's end, no merchant can say. Even the oldest accounts trail off into silence or contradiction.

Final Entry

In my twenty-fourth year of keeping these chronicles, I have learned to distinguish three types of knowledge. First, what Scripture teaches. Second, what reason can demonstrate. Third, what lies beyond both and must remain mystery.

The Ancient Ones belong to this third category. Merchants speak of them. Traditions preserve fragments of their names. Landscapes bear marks that might be their work. But the source of these accounts recedes beyond history, beyond memory, beyond anything we can prove or disprove with the tools we possess.

If they existed, they are older than our world. If they worked upon creation, they did so under rules we do not know. If they were bound or banished, it happened in times Scripture does not record.

I set this down so that others, coming after, might know what was said and how little could be verified. Let those with access to better sources correct what I have written. Let those with clearer knowledge add what I have missed.

Until then, we walk on ground whose foundations were laid by hands we cannot see, shaped by powers we cannot name, for purposes that remain, even to the merchants who claim the oldest traditions, a mystery.