Kevin forced himself to ignore the fury happening in the sky, and focused on telling Lord Lewis enlightenment that could only be found in the pages of the Ante Tempus Aetatis. Master Galwynn breathed deep, and made a silent prayer to the god Terra that the worlds of Land and Sky would still exist by the time he finished.


It is known by one and all, said Master Galwynn, that the Cosmos designed the universe to consist of four seen worlds, the domains of Fire, Sea, Land, and Sky; and a fifth, veiled world, the Unseen domain. Taken together the four, smaller, Seen domains; and the one, larger, Unseen domain, formed a Balance. But the five Domains as experienced by their current inhabitants, were not the first. 

 The first time the Cosmos tried to design the Domains, It decided to only embody emotions and ideas in the inhabitants of the Unseen Domain. From there, feelings could seep into the hearts of folk in the other Domains, and motivate their actions. 

This strategy was an abysmal failure. Passionate emotions rampaged haphazardly among the folk of other Domains, until those folk were no different from wild animals. The Cosmos was determined to perfect His creation, no matter how many iterations it took. 

The Cosmos dissolved the failed domains It had created, and after countless more tries, It invented the notion of imbuing the folks of each domain with the ability to give rise to and experience any emotion or concept they desired. But to restrain emotions and ideas from haphazardly driving folk amok, the Cosmos also blessed domain folk with the conceit of free will. 

Free will would enable folk to foresee the effect of their ideas and emotions, and act accordingly. Free will did not yield a perfect system by any means—domain folk still did the most ludicrous things in the name of some wild passion or groundless folly—but it was the best conceit of the myriad that the Cosmos tested. 

Furthermore, to prevent free will from becoming as chaotic as no will at all, the Cosmos blessed emotion with equal standing to the Balance. This was the crux of the Cosmos’s new design. The Balance; that is, equal amounts of chaos and order, provided the life force that animated the universe that the Cosmos created. For that reason, the Cosmos created His newest universe from equal amounts of the Seen and the Unseen. 

Purely as an artistic flourish, the Cosmos partitioned the distinctive elements of the Seen into domains, and paired them with their opposites. That is, Fire is paired with Sea, and Land is paired with Sky. The Unseen domain, on the other hand, was too uniquely its own creation to be divided as a whole. Instead, the Cosmos apportioned the Unseen domain itself into its individual inhabitants; that is, the Unseen folk. But taken collectively, the seen domains still balanced the unseen.

Master Galwynn paused to note that in The Age Before Time, an extended and heavily annotated sidebar emphasized that in this design of the universe, Unseen folk embodied concepts such as human emotion, but the Unseen folk were not themselves the source of human emotion. There’s a difference. Humans can engender their own emotions. But because every emotion is so closely related to the concept of that emotion; and because there is a denizen of the Unseen who embodies every concept; each time a human feels a strong emotion, it attracts the attention of a denizen of the Unseen as surely as the smell of blood attracts a predator. 

The Cosmos realized that separating emotions from the embodiments of emotion, would condemn the Unseen folk to a never-ending sense of loneliness and being deprived of something constantly beyond their reach. As an act of mercy, and to maintain the Balance, the Cosmos granted the Unseen folk the unique ability to gaze out through the senses of the folk of the Seen domains and experience some semblance of their emotions.

There was always some danger that when the Unseen folk were gazing through the senses of the Seen folk, the external desires of the Unseen might adversely influence the true desires of Seen. But the Cosmos knew His act of mercy would not result in the same animalistic chaos as His first design, because He made free will intrinsic to folks born of the Seen domains. Free will is the natural defense against the Unseen. Free will is anathema to unseen influence.


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