The Titans

Across the Holyverse, only the dragons have more intrigue attached to their origins, and just like them, their mystery continues on.

The Titans are thought first to have appeared in fae scripture, back in the ancient times of Ywlvare and the first union of the various fairy races.

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Physiology:

In those days, scarcely recorded before even the most aged tales of humanity, the scribe of Ywlvare, the fairy known only as Poet (perhaps considered the precursor for the word itself in many languages across The Verses) authored the epic poem, The Fae’s Travels, in which we hear of them first.

Translated into modern English, starting from Part 1, Stanza 44, verse 81:

It was the large teethed titans who feasted upon the winged blood of the fairy,
Whose eyes saw all and whose magic killed the trees with a breath of their word.
They spoke not the tongue of the fine aerial kind of the woods, but in magic itself,
So unfeeling were they to the pain of lower creatures, that they were counted among food.

Constructed of the nonsense parts of The Foundation's ire they were found,
Eating sky and words of the fae art, tearing their cities from the wood lands.
Without cease the titans devoured reality itself, all pulled into their great eyes,
those that held great magic beyond all reasoning, one of each the honored arts.

The Great Queen Ywlvare saw a great need in the plight of the winged peoples,
And among them set upon a campaign to fare us from the titan lands,
Into finer places where we would not be of threat to be removed by their cruelties.
Blessed she may be forever, for a heart so man-warm and a resolve so dragon-cold.

No one really knows from where the titans emerged, but if this account is to be believed they are linked with the zone beyond both the upper and lower Verses: the infamous Foundation.

Of course, no reports have been proffered of this being true, because no one and no thing has ever returned from going down “the eternal slide” of the Foundation – we’ll probably never know.

Another cool takes away from this passage is the part on how they “spoke in magic itself”. There are very few historically confirmed accounts of titanspeech, but if I were to relate it to anything…

Think about a bass drop in a song, but also if that bass drop caused a planet to explode. It’s little surprise that they have trouble with inside voices, mmkay? Most accounts of them speaking directly preclude a severe disaster, if not the obliteration of a whole world – it’s presumed this is also how they “fed” on races, by feeding upon the residual mana of passed life forms.

This theory is the most hotly contested in titan lore, and is widely considered fairy propaganda. Many human-supremacist groups use titan worship as a fluffy (relatively speaking) entry point into their recruitment process eventually culminating in fae and offworlder-violence. Many societies hold an unspoken rule to not speak on titans (or titan-lore as it’s often called) anymore simply for their growingly precarious link to extremist groups.

That said, more modern accounts of the titans have come up to dismiss the rather extreme image painted by the poet… Poet, in their account, but from the viewpoint of such an early society, it is entirely understandable that they might have perceived the titans as unbelievable, universe-destroying predators.

While it is true that titans were a scary looking bunch, they were in fact fascinating creatures that owned a biological niche still unfilled across the verses. The first creatures of the A-R or “anti-reality” as it was coined by Head Scribe and O.E.L. leader Ywn, the titans confound all forms of formal measurement.

Vegetable?

Animal?

Mineral?

….

Mmm…mmmMMMODERN MAJOR GENER-

Okay, okay, sorry. If you ever get the chance, please take a look at the Pirates of Penzance. It’s… well, okay, it’s not for modern sensibilities at all, but neither are the titans, right?

…Ehem…

…Fungus?

Yeah, we just don’t know!

All sorts of cool scientific types have attempted to run tests on titan samples recovered from outer space before, but no matter what type of tissue they collect, they receive no cohesive data whatsoever.

It’s really quite a groovy thing.

“Oh, were’ going to get a few leg tissue samples!” a very plucky little O.E.L. librarian will say.

“Haha, go for it,” the Scribes come back with.

Librarians get the samples, only millimeters apart.

For instance, one reads at four degrees Celsius – nice.

The second at forty two degrees – okay.

…and the last one?

Seventy two thousand eight hundred and thirty one degrees, or at least that’s the approximate temperature of what the investigation team’s laydeck boxes read out after the rescue team scraped up what remained of the poor fools off the very exciting eruption-like formation of the titan’s blood as it exited the body and into the open vacuum of deep space.

They’re… well, they’re insanely mysterious, and their “nonsensical properties” aren’t the only thing that’s strange about them.

Much like “true” dragons like the Four Primordials, Titans possess what is known as biological immortality in zoological terms. While this normally wouldn’t be such a big deal, they also retain an active growth sequence throughout their lives. Any amount of time can pass, and they will simply continue to gain size. While the first thousand years of a titan’s life may have afforded them a size comparable to gracing the cloud line of most terrestrial planets, ten thousand, and then a hundred thousand years later these beings may have in fact enjoyed sizes that would compete with solar objects, and as some might theorize, stellar clusters.

This may sound like fanciful theory-craft at first swipe, but the reality appears not to be far off from the truth.

In 593 A.D. (using your planet’s most popular calendar for simplicity’s sake) the O.E.L. came into contact with a titan’s corpse entirely by chance.

The observation vessel H.E.G. Astragalus (named after Rondi’s favorite flower, or so I’ve heard) pinged what was originally through to be an outrageously well-packed formation of raw iron. As mineral resources are always at a severe need by this retinue of complete nerds, the research team approached the formation to conduct a formal scan.

It was not iron, but biological material.

The ships original outline from the ping claimed that the formation was over 1.239 gigameters.

To put that in comparison to some other really big thing, if we took the full circumference of your planet, Earth, and multiplied it by thirty one, that would register approximately 1.24 gigameters.

This boy big–

About thirty one earths peeled in half and stretched tip to tip on a galactic measuring stick big.

A little something to keep you up at night when you’re worried about the sun blowing up or something – there’s always a bigger fish, and some of these fish think, and are alive.

Oh, and they love eating magic.

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Titans and “The Divine Arcane”

Titanity as a whole is seen to own a mystical link to modern magic, particularly among the more “superstitious” groups among spellcasters, ironically enough.

Many communities considered one titan to be linked to each of the schools of magic, and that was to be the school they were to be the ruler over. “High Patron” is the term attributed to them by ancient magic user and mentor to Rondi, the Woodswitch Allna Wise-eye.

As thanks for killing her witchcraft rival: Lye the Breathtaker, she educated Rondi in the secret (though of what source we do not know) as to magic itself: the existence of the titans.

This theory was maintained by much of the ancient lower realms to be undisputed fact, until the first titanic corpses were found. The Librarium was obviously quite concerned about this, until Ywn discovered these deaths were caused by the maturation of a certain someone as Rondi’s right hand in field of combat magic, to the most truly unimaginable horror of anti-magic destruction known throughout history.

Of course, most everyone hated “Ol’ Deechay” for this… with the exception of the fae. To this day they still give him ultimate street cred for these achievements, placing him at a rank just under Ywlvare, though they’ll never mention this ongoing worship to humans and especially not Rayda’s Royal Knights.

After Rayda put an end to Oidhche’s anti… well, anti-anything hyper-rampage across the cosmos, it became excruciatingly clear that, even though each titan had owned a preponderance of skill towards a very specific school of magic each, they did not appear to affect the magic of other casters.

It’s widely believed that all titans are dead, killed specifically by only Rondi’s Black Knight Oidhche who, while he probably could have done it, likely is an oversimplification of the case.

That said, after the events following Traehern and the Fall of Reinen, there have been no living titans spotted anywhere, though in the first place people mostly avoided them up to that point: considering them mostly unexplainable cosmic nuisances that seemed unusually drawn to fairy worlds and zones of high magic to destroy.

What is the cause of this unusual fixation on violence toward fairies by the hands of the titans? Could it be that they knew something that we do not?

Fairies are really cute! They wouldn’t hurt anyo-

Well, no, no they would totally hurt plenty of folks, and have done so many times in the past – heck: they’re largely xenophobic, backwards, perverted, outrageously racist, and take great pleasure in the suffering of others.

…B-But they’re cute! So I uh… I guess it’s okay? I don’t make the rules, I just report on what people do with ’em.

I hope you enjoyed this brief unit on titans. Let me know if there’s anything else you’d like to learn about.