Dear Diary

Dear Diary,

I got attacked today. It was the first in many years. My attackers, unprepared both in their knowledge and their abilities, were easily defeated. My power has grown in leaps and bounds from all those years ago when we decided to hide away. Their easy defeat made me ponder the simple innocence of my youth during the first attack all those years ago. I was merely a child, my eyes covered, and my innocence shielded from the secrets of the world I lived in.

“What secrets?” You ask.

The secrets of the world before history, creation and the reason for all life as we know it. The secrets we hide in plain sight from today’s modern world. Simple secrets. I’ll start with the history you do know.

Cultures and civilizations from our past had Great empires that ruled the known world until they crumbled, got destroyed by some other empire, killed themselves from within, or simply vanished without a trace. Before even these histories of great empires and grand conflicts, we are taught of the semi-man that would dwell in caves and wear animal furs. Their survival was simply from one meal to the next. Beyond these histories still, we learn about the pre-historic creatures of grand scale and gargantuan proportions that roamed the planet long before even the earliest simian life forms came along.

Not taught is what came before this. Oh, we learned of the upheaval and violence of our planet’s environments before. It is said that this ball of dirt and metals we call home was not a hospitable place to be.

The histories that are not spoken of are the existence of the first ones or elementals as they are called today. “Why?” one might ask. Because the stories of the first ones are not known by many. The ones that do know are forbidden to speak of them. And who or what might the first ones be? The First ones were the very forces of nature. The term nature is used because it is the most straightforward way to describe them. They were everything that helped to create this world that we now live on. They weren’t just forces, though. They had sentience, in a manner, and possessed individuality from one another. They were not as we are now. They did not feel love or hate. Vanity was unknown to them. It wasn’t just as simple as wind, earth, water, or such. There were beings that controlled specialized portions of nature. Plants, trees, flowers, fruit, animals, insects, sun, rain, water currents, etc. You name something dealing with any part of nature, a first one existed that had individual control over that one aspect.

Over the millennium, the First Ones evolved from the mindless elements they started as and developed cultures, languages, and cities such as they were. In these societies, there were also factions. Any large collection of individuals will always have differing ideas and opinions. This is not to say the First Ones had “ideas” or “opinions” such as we know them, but they did not always agree with each other on the creation and development of things around them. These differences sometimes amounted to nothing more than a mild climate change, maybe a slight variation in the global temperature plus or minus a couple of degrees. Other times, these differences would mean the extinction of almost everything on the planet. None of these events ever occurred with any kind of hate or malice, though. It just simply was.

Man came along and eventually grew in intellect, far outpacing other animals before it. The first ones took notice. The increased intelligence gave man freedom from the first ones. Man was no longer simply a part of nature anymore. The first ones could no longer affect them like every other aspect of the planet. Many of the first ones did not care, creatures had come and gone before, and this one would too. Other first ones did care. They did not understand the lack of control, and for the first time in their long existence, they did not like something. These few felt emotions for the first time, fear and hate. In a better effort to understand this strange creature, a small group merged with the hairless monkeys to understand them better, to regain control of their world. This merging of beings destroyed the physical forms of the first ones and obliterated the sanity of the human it was forced upon. What was left was something between humans and the first ones. The Fei were created, and the world would never be the same.

These new creatures, at first ignored, became a cause for concern for the first ones. Where the first ones had total control over their one specific aspect of the world, the new Fei creatures had control over many elements simultaneously. Most Fei could not create or destroy things like the first, but they could control them. That control extended to all of a particular aspect; any tree, any plant, any flower, all at once. The first ones had a being for every flower, every animal. Just the one. It required the actions of many First ones to affect an ecosystem, yet needed one or two Fei to do the same.

The first Fei were not sane and had no reasoning for the havoc they wrought. The offspring of the First Fei, those sired with normal humans and no other First Fei, kept their sanity but not all the power. They could see the damage being done and fought to end the madness of the first Fei. A great rift formed, and the wars started. It was many thousands of years before the last of the First Fei were brought down, and peace was achieved. The first ones disappeared without a trace. The remaining Fei offspring realized that the ordinary humans feared them once the fighting was done. They had seen the power they possessed. For the humans, there was no difference between the offspring and the First ones, and so the remaining Fei offspring hid what they were from the world.

Why should this matter to you? Perhaps it should not; ignorance is bliss after all. Some prefer knowing something regardless of the cost to their personal happiness. I was not one of these people. In my youth, I was blissfully ignorant of the realities around me. Unaware of the grander scale of the small events occurring around me. Events that would all add up together to change my life irrevocably. Mine was not the enlightenment of choice but one of circumstance and necessity. Events would take hold of my small life and cast them out into a vast ocean of possibilities where none of the fish biting were small. I could only pray that I was not swallowed whole before I could make my escape or learn to swim. If you are reading this, then your eyes have been opened as well. Ignorance is no longer an option.

We are Fei…