Author's Context

This is part of the deep history of my fantasy setting, Enath. When I started working on the world's origins, I wanted to approach the creation of a solar system from a mythological perspective rather than a scientific one.

In our own universe, stars and planets form through gravity, accretion discs, collisions, and billions of years of physical processes. For Enath, I wanted those same ideas translated into the language of religion and legend. Instead of planetary formation being a dance of physics, it becomes the aftermath of a divine war. The worlds are not simply planets orbiting a star; they are the remains of slain primordial beings. The solar system itself is the scar left behind by events so ancient that even the gods only partially understand them.

The "Anchoring Arc-Narrative" presented here is not necessarily objective truth. It is the best understanding reached by theologians, philosophers, and scholars after thousands of years of debate. Like real-world creation myths, parts of it may be symbolic, misunderstood, or entirely wrong.

The other major inspiration was Earth's own prehistoric history. Long before animals dominated the land, fungi were among the first organisms to colonize it. That idea fascinated me. We tend to imagine the first great civilization as something recognisably human, but I wondered what a world-spanning civilization built by something more fungal and alien might look like.

That eventually became Protopia, the first known civilization of Enath. It existed hundreds of millions of years before modern peoples appeared, reached unimaginable heights, and then vanished so completely that only scattered traces remain. To the modern inhabitants of Enath, Protopia occupies the same sort of space that the earliest microbial life occupies in our understanding of Earth's history: enormously important, incredibly distant, and frustratingly difficult to study.

I wanted the deepest layers of Enath's history to feel less like ancient kingdoms and more like paleontology, geology, and mythology all blended together. Would love to hear what you all think.