Eoin, I might know what happened to ANDAN

[Scott of Hyperborea]

The Treesian gods have few temples, nowadays. There are a few in Kai-Raikoth, where most of the Treesian diaspora resides, and a few more in Shirekeep. Here and there some are scattered around the rest of the world. Laguna, Mandorel, Utas all have their temples.

But there is only one temple to ANDAN, and it will not appear on any map. You can find it on a remote rocky island too tiny to appear on the MCS map, somewhere in the Halberd Strait between Treesia and Hyperborea. The temple is the only structure on the isle, and it looks like it could fall apart tomorrow, wracked as it is by constant storms and huge waves. Inside live two priests, the island's only inhabitants. They look gaunt, appropriate for the last worshippers of the God of the Apocalypse.

But, they tell me when I arrive, they don't worship ANDAN at all. ANDAN, they say, is dead, destroyed by his own apocalypse. They're not here to worship him. They just want to tell his story. He deserves to have it told.

ANDAN, they say, wasn't bad at heart. He was just...confused. How could he not be? He was only a child. Elwynn his mother abandoned him, filled with self-loathing at the act of weakness that caused his birth and terror at what he would bring. His father took no interest in him - the prophecy said his birth would doom the world, and born he was, so Lest saw no need to waste any further time on the child. And the two orchids were really only children themselves - eternal children older than the oldest stones of Shirekeep, of coures, but children nevertheless. Sent out alone into the world with powers he didn't understand, he watched as everything he loved got violently destroyed.

ANDAN's one flaw was that his power was too great for him to contain - or for the world to contain, for that matter. Wherever he went, fire and destruction followed in his wake. Towns burnt to the ground, animals grew rabid, people went into seizures and raved and die, empires shattered into civil war, volcanoes erupted. Nothing had been designed to contain the level of power caused by sheer proximity to ANDAN, and it all went to Hell in any of a million little ways.

When ANDAN realized what was going on - and this was when he was living anonymously as a street urchin in Failte, well after the Order of Ybrekk had seized power in Treesia - he tried to kill himself. But Carding appeared before him and told him that if his mortal shell were to be shattered, his power would course unrestrained through the seven planes and they would burst immediately. Better to do anything, said Carding, than to end it like that.

This was during the days of the Hurmu Gate, and the colonization of Giess. The great colonizing corporations, ever on the prowl for wretched refuse to indenture themselves and become the grunts to tame the new world, went recruiting among the displaced refugees in Treesia, and ANDAN found himself among them. When he heard of the new world, and of the portal Babkha and its allies had created to it, he felt a great peace come over himself, and he signed up as an immigrant (within the week, the recruiter and his entire family were dead, the company that recruited him had collapsed, and the forest from which the tree from which the paper ANDAN had signed had come burnt to the ground).

The company that bought out the last company's assets evaluated ANDAN as being mildly retarded, uncommunicative, but basically healthy - the perfect person to serve as no-questions-asked labor in their imperial projects. Along with hundreds of others, ANDAN was shipped to Hurmu, trucked through the gate, and landed on a new world.

And when he reached Giess, he found a young, vibrant world, one without the ontological wounds of Micras, one that could contain his power. And he thanked the gods of this new universe for giving him a new chance, free from the prophecy that doomed him...

...is, said the priests, how they wish they could have ended the story. But although Giess could, for a time, resist ANDAN, the prophecy said he would destroy the world, and prophecies are not to be crossed. After many centuries, Giess lost its youth, and its sclerosed onta began to stretch and strain, and at last it shattered, and ANDAN was destroyed along with the rest of them, the poor Giessians, his inevitable destiny of destroying the world fulfilled at last.

And this, said the priests, is why they remember ANDAN, who destroyed Treesia and was destined to destroy the world. Deep inside him, a fundamental spark of goodness led him to flee to the only place he could, and Giess' sacrifice saved Micras, the planet he was meant to doom.

ANDAN's gift, the priests told me, is world without end. No longer do we live in a story with a pre-ordained conclusion. The authorial intent has been broken, broken by ANDAN who refused to play his role and found an escape his creators couldn't have imagined. Now the only endings are the ones we write ourselves, and whether it be the destruction of all things, or a new creation, not even the gods who made the gods can tell.

I don't know whether this is the true story. My friends who study history say it is not; the dates don't match up, Treesia was gone long before the Hurmu gate was ever built. But I like it. I like to think Treesia's death meant something, that it wasn't all a big mistake and all the orchid lore a bunch of hokey false prophecies. I like to think that the death of Giess wasn't just the vacuum implosion the scientists say; that maybe there was some deeper plan behind it. And I like to think that ANDAN, if he was still around, would be happy with what we're doing with the time he bought us.

[Daniel Farewell]

This is interesting, Scott. Well written, though there are Treesian temples in Eliria. I think I wrote a story about it many years ago. Will see if I an find it. But it's possible it's gone away after the Froyalanization of Elwynn one day those many centuries ago. Sad, history is. Sad.