Before the first book

The Prism

Since the beginning of history there has been divinity, and there has been darkness. They have fought each other for ages, and the echo of their battles has shaken the whole universe more than once. Creatures of good and of evil, all of them born of the one supreme lord, the one who came to be called God the Father. First in the heavens, then on the earth, and at last in the shadows below, divinity and darkness raised their legions in battles without end. These beasts were given the name of Ikon: like the creatures of the earth, like gods, perfect, yet without reason.

At the hand of God, blessed with His divine power, two servants stood. At His left was Gyvenimas, ambassador of life and resurrection. At His right was Mirtis, guardian of God and funeral king of sin, darkness and death. Together they drew up a divine plan to end the endless wars between the great beasts. God the Father gave His will to the word of Gyvenimas, and with her power of life she gave God two children, heirs to the three realms and voices of peace among their legions. Both were made in His likeness, and yet they could not have been more different from each other. Their names were Vita and Éres.

Vita would reign over divinity. She would protect the balance and defend the creatures of light from extinction, and she would learn the wondrous art of giving life, to become queen of the heavens and ambassador to the earth. Éres would reign over darkness. He would bring justice, gather the souls of the beasts across the universe, and lock away in eternal penance any who defied his command. The abyss of other people's sins was his home, and the penance of souls darkened by evil became his own burden. He condemned every beast that would not obey the laws of God.

Gyvenimas grieved for Éres, who lived alone in the endless dark trying to master the abominable beasts of dread and malice. But Mirtis, born of the eternal darkness himself, taught Éres how to live among the shadows and how to tame the fiercest beasts. In time both Mirtis and Éres came to loathe the presence of Gyvenimas, and she returned to Vita's side.

For centuries divinity and darkness stayed at odds, though they came from the same origin. As the ages passed, both rulers began to grow old, for their bodies were imperfect, and each of them would need an heir to carry on the charge God the Father had given them.

Vita's body was like a woman's. She conceived from a sad sunflower seed and bore a son she named Herggott, child of Vita and heir of the heavens. That knowledge had been given to her by the great Gyvenimas, giver of life both brief and eternal. Éres's body was like a man's, and for all his reason he knew no way to bring forth an heir. Unable to please his Father, he felt only betrayal. Eaten alive by jealousy of his own sister, blind with the fear of failing his Father and convinced that He favored Vita, Éres challenged her to a fight to the death, so that she could never give their Father an heir either. He forgot the true charge God had given them, and the reason they had been made at all.

A great and terrible battle was fought across the cosmos, where both kinds fought to survive and for the rule of divinity and darkness. Vita accepted her brother's challenge, but in her heart she was only defending herself from his fury. She was never willing to truly face him. Even so, Éres, blinded by what he believed was treason, drove his black sword, dark as a river of shadow, into Vita's chest. He tore her Prism away from her, and with it, her life. Then he placed a seed of his own being inside her womb, and it bore fruit: a small boy, heir of the shadows, whom he named Reficul.

Éres went before the great walls of his Father's palace. His Father sees all things, and He already knew what had happened between His children. Only then did He understand that His son had been consumed by the darkness he had lived in for so long. Broken by the crime and by the tragedy between His children, God locked Éres in the deepest dungeons of hell, where he was never seen again.

Centuries later God created the heavens and the earth, and gave life to the plants and the animals as we know them. Meanwhile, in His small constellation, the wars began again. This time God believed the best way to stop the wars was to give the Ikon reason, and to treat them as equals. He took the counsel of Mirtis. He gave every Ikon the understanding of good and evil, and allowed them a body like that of God and of men, through an essence much like a soul, which He called the Prism.

Inside the Prism lived the essence that let an Ikon take a human body. It also held the true essence of its animal form: its old shape as a beast, which was given a life of its own and became its protector and companion. These wondrous creations were called gods, and that is when the God we know took the name of God the Father.

Gyvenimas was jealous of Mirtis, for she knew he had worked on the mind of Éres until he committed his unforgivable crime. She did not share God the Father's decision, and she chose to leave His side. Mirtis, instead, drew closer to Him, and demanded that Gyvenimas hand over the power of life and resurrection, and her place in the kingdom of heaven. Only then would he let her leave.

Gyvenimas looked God the Father in the eyes. Seeing no objection to Mirtis's demand, she drew a sealed scroll out of the air with her magic, opened it, and wrote on it the prayer that would grant the power of life and resurrection to anyone able to wield so much power. At the very moment Mirtis thought the scroll was his, Gyvenimas hurled it down toward the earth, where God had given life to humankind.

Mirtis seemed to lose his mind at her defiance, and he threw himself after the scroll without a second thought, forgetting the most important thing of all. The only gate between heaven and earth is a magical illusion. It opens only with a key, and it turns invisible for as long as it stays open, until it begins to close. By the time Mirtis came back to his senses, he had lost the trail of the scroll and forgotten where the gate was. He was forced to live in the world of men for long centuries...

The War between Light and Darkness

In the eleventh century, gods and demons still walked freely through Italy. They had no souls, only their Prisms, and with them they lived among men in human form: nobles, landowners and lords of a modern Italy, each one carrying the strength of an ancient beast. The legions of divinity followed Herggott, son of Vita and heir of the heavens. The legions of darkness followed his brother, Reficul.

Reficul denied before his followers that he was the son of Vita. His power came from the darkness, he said, and so he raised an army of black gods and gave them a new name: demons. From then on the three worlds came to see the demons as a different race. For thousands of years they had darkened the souls of men one by one, in revenge for what God the Father had done to Éres, while the gods carried a message of faith and peace among the nations. Everyone knew there were gods with black Prisms and demons with white ones, hiding on both sides, waiting for their deeds to give them away.

When Reficul's legions struck at Europe and spread the Black Death through Italy, killing a third of its people, Herggott answered. He named five gods to carry on his charge as heir of the heavens, the Celestial Union, and with the four strongest warriors of his legion he formed a small company to lead the gods to victory: the Army of Light.

The brothers met on the battlefield. Over his shoulders Reficul held a giant sphere of fire, an offering to Éres, the father of all demons. He called it the Arcana, and as it rose into the sky it gathered every soul promised to the darkness. "Give me the key to my father's prison," he cried to God the Father, "and I will give you back the souls of your humblest children." Herggott called him a traitor. Reficul called Herggott a liar, and swore that God the Father had always wanted Vita and had banished Éres for it.

They fought sword against sword, one in armor of blinding white, the other in violet light that darkened the sunset. Reficul's spear of darkness pierced Herggott's shield and nearly reached his heart. Wounded, Herggott prayed to his mother, and from the top of the heavens a great thunderbolt fell on him: the power of Vita, sent from where her soul rests in peace. Covered in lightning, he struck his brother with the Thousand Thunders, a single closed blow that sends a thousand shocks through the body of its victim, and kicked the demon's sword out of his reach.

Then Herggott spoke the prayer of exile. He stripped Reficul of his Prism and of his human form. He took away the name he had been given in Heaven and condemned him to carry it backwards, as a mark of shame, and he locked him in the deepest dungeon of hell, where his name would never be heard again. As a spiral opened in the sky to swallow him, Reficul swore he would escape, and that by then his brother would be dead. From that day, the name he was given in Heaven has only been spoken backwards.

Herggott flew into the sky with his sword in both hands, shaped like a harpoon, and split the Arcana in two before it reached the sun. The dark souls returned to their bodies. Every demon on the face of the earth lost its Prism and its human form, and was banished to the shadows with its name reversed, so that one day men and gods would forget them, while their animal essence slowly became something less than a beast and darker.

Herggott ordered the Celestial Union to write the laws that would restore the balance of the three worlds, and gave three humans the privilege of sitting among them. Then he disappeared. Some say he destroyed his own Prism and returned to his mother's side. Others say he went down to the darkest dungeon of hell to take revenge on Éres for the death of Vita.