All who visit Seng Wu, the lands tended to and ministered by elf-kind, are familiar with the sight of Tianheng, if not its name or its legend; it dominates the elven landscape with its distinctive flat peak, almost always wreathed in clouds. It is an object of quite a few myths that take place within Seng Wu's borders, often as the site where a hero is given a mighty boon by one of the elven gods... but of the few myths that truly revolve around it, and not merely events that took place upon it, the most significant begins with Tesel Caduceus and her trees.
The Trees of Tesel Caduceus
When the thrones were still young, and the sky still bleeding, the Goddess of Magic gazed upon the world of mortals and saw that they were in crisis. Though she and her divine sisters had triumphed over the great evils that the Chaos Giant had left them in his dying breath, titans and giants both, a plague of lesser evils still harried mortalkind. Beasts that had imbibed holy blood, and grown vexed and vicious for it; the restless dead, not yet borne to Asphodel, for Asphodel had suffered great losses in the divine war; formless, faceless nothings that nevertheless hungered for substance, as if they were alive.
Tesel’s heart swelled with compassion for the mortals that suffered these evils; her mind blazed with new ideas. Mortalkind could surely survive in this monster-filled world; but if they were to thrive, as only Tesel Caduceus knew they could, in dreamed-up cities built on schematics and judiciaries; buzzing with language and communities; passing the lessons the years would teach them on to their children, and their children’s children, and beyond; their otherworldly antagonists had to be counteracted by an otherworldly benefactor.
And so, retreating for a time into the heart of her own throne, Aleph, which was of course one of the three fruits that dangled from the heavenly branches of the Great Tree that she and her sisters had woven from the Chaos Giant’s corpse, she produced a new seed. Nine of them, in fact. Their material aspect was hale and hearty, capable of withstanding any climate, so long as they were nurtured and fed according to their unique diet; but it was their spiritual aspect that truly gave them purpose. Each seed was linked to the others, via a web of leylines that burrowed deep within the shifting soil of Tiresia; and if another seed of this kind were ever to arise, it, too, would join this web, allowing it to partake in the sustenance provided to every other seed alongside it.
What was this sustenance, that would protect a tree from all elements and could be shared freely across the very bones of reality? Magic, of course; the arcane knowledge of each and every spell that Tesel had witnessed. The ways each one warped the leylines of the world around them, drawing the caster’s will out into reality; all these things were encoded into the very first of these seeds that Tesel Caduceus planted, in the heart of the holy city of All Tething, homeland of the gnomes.
But Tesel Caduceus’s index was not complete with just her own knowledge. The war that followed the Chaos Giant’s death had been a time of great upheaval, and each of her sisters bore magics that they kept to themselves. Desiring that her grand project would give the mortals that she so loved as deep a well of arcane knowledge as she could possibly muster, she began a journey through the thrones of her eight Sisters, to entreat each one in turn for their own contribution to the seeds’ web.
Entreating the Sisters
Cassiopeia, proud to centre her legend in the minds of mortals with free access to the magic that had made it possible, and rightfully paid the honour of being the first one Tesel approached, gladly planted her power in the seed of Qianhuan. Phaetokoria, Tesel’s twin, goddess of secrets as well as death, asked only that the trees should hide from mortals that which they were not yet prepared to learn, then gave her power to the sunken seed of Hei.
Belladonna, noble knight that she was, wished only that one seed be planted under the stewardship of her fortress, Solomon Praxis. Nerea asked a heftier price; that mortals should have to live a worldly life in order to share in their goddess’s hard-earned bounty; but this, too, Tesel was willing to grant, and so Nerea gave her power to the seed of Brigheld. Ariana, all too eager to press power into the hands of even the most unworthy mortals, asked for the arcane knowledge Tesel had used to forge these seeds, then planted her knowledge in the dire seed of Arcadia.
Delia, shrewd where Tesel was clever, saw an opportunity to advantage herself and the cabal of dwarves that she had entrusted with ruling over their kin in the living world; in secrecy, she devised a spell that could seal a seed under its caster’s command. When she finally gave her power to the seed of the dwarven undercity of Ubel, she kindly suggested to Tesel that she prevent mortals from sharing any other spell to manipulate her new trees directly, lest they should pervert her system into destroying itself. And Sophia, silent as ever, simply gave her power to the seed of Gorgon’s Fall.
Eight of the Nine had fed her seeds with their knowledge. Only one of Tesel’s sisters remained. To the throne of Gehenna she ventured, ready to make whatever concession she needed to earn this last sister’s assent; but her intentions of prostration were in vain.
“No,” said Gimel Gargantua; world-shaker, titan-breaker. “If a mortal should wish to stand upon my shoulders, she will climb there herself.”
The Challenge
Tesel knew that reason would not move Gimel, and nor would an appeal to her compassion. Gimel was as stubborn as the mountains, as unchanging as the stars, as fiercely independent as the void that swirled beyond the Sisters’ nine thrones. To her, compassion and neglect were intertwined: all should strive to stand on nothing but their own two legs. For her, power was not just something to aspire to: it was a necessity, something that mortals needed as much as air to breathe and food to eat. More, perhaps.
And so Tesel thought not to convince her with either of those doomed assays, but instead to convince with her own pride. She proposed a challenge, a wager: if she could set Gimel a task that even she could not complete, then Gimel would have to submit her power to the final tree. If, on the other hand, Gimel completed it anyway, then Tesel would forever accept her rejection--and, on top of that, submit to any one thing that Gimel demanded of her, without any of Gimel’s knowledge as recompsense.
Gimel did not hesitate for a single second. And when Tesel declared what her task was to be, she gave a roaring laugh, causing the earth to crack calamitously around Qianhuan. To climb from the base to the peak of a single measly mountain, even in the form of a mortal, was utterly beneath any god, let alone the reigning Goddess of Power. Honouring the terms of engagement, she placed herself in a mortal shell, and began the climb up Mount Tianheng.
The Mountain
In a certain sense, Gimel understood the significance of Mount Tianheng to the world of mortals. Brute though she was, she was still a goddess, and a sister of Cassiopeia, who had watched as she wove it from the threads of creation that had been freed when the Chaos Giant fell to them. She knew that it linked Tiresia to Calliope above, and that to surmount it would necessarily place her among the stars.
Where her understanding faltered, however, was precisely what that entailed for a body constrained by the laws that govern mortals. Where a goddess could move freely through reality, unbound by the leylines that structure it, a mortal had to obey certain metaphysical edicts--including the Edict Between, which enforced the absolute physical separation between each of the Nine Realms. Gimel the Goddess could step from the crown of the World Tree to its roots with but a thought; Gimel the mortal could run uphill for days--weeks--months--years--without ever once seeing the stars draw closer.
And yet, climb she did. Though Tesel often appeared to her, in the form of ravens and mighty oaks and the whispering wind, Gimel brooked none of her taunts, or suggestions to surrender. Delia, though openly delighted by her endless struggle, manifested to her to offer to intercede with Tesel on her behalf--in exchange for a favour of her own. Gimel dismissed her. Even when Belladonna, tasked with overseeing their bet from her vantage point in the sky, descended to offer to mediate their dispute, asking for no recompense whatsoever, Gimel sent her away with scarcely a word.
And as she climbed, and climbed, and climbed, and climbed, and her strength--all of her normally inexhaustible well that she had been able to bring, in the course of incarnating as a mortal woman--finally began to fail her, and feverish visions wracked her mind, and the treacherous thought crept into her unmoving heart, that this mountain would finally do what the Chaos Giant and his vile sons could not… Gimel, for the first time in her thousands of years, finally did something that her sisters had variously tried to get her to do thousands of times.
She stopped in her tracks, and changed her mind.
As Tesel appeared behind her, already crowing about her victory, ready to whisk her to the icy Northeast to fill the last of her trees with Gimel’s power; and Belladonna sighed with relief from the heart of her chariot, thankful that something at last had brought Gimel to reason; and Delia gazed upwards from the depths of the Third Hell, curiosity underwritten on her scarlet brow; Gimel held up a single arm, her fingers extended and marshalled tightly together. In silence, she raised it to the heavens, channelling within it all the still-vast power she still had remaining;
and brought it crashing down upon the mountain beneath her. Through dirt and stone and bedrock she cleaved, not stopping for a moment, not to take a breath or reconsider what she was attempting, until her hand burst free from the dirt of the other side… and the unending peak of Mount Tianheng, severed completely from its base, toppled from the sky.
In the dust and rubble that remained, Gimel finally lowered her arm, and gazed evenly at her older sister. She was standing at the peak of Mount Tianheng.
Mountain-Breaker, Triumphant
In the years and centuries that followed, the legend of Gimel’s victory was spread far and wide across Tiresia. The flattening of Mount Tianheng’s peak, and the vast avalanche that accompanied it, had not gone unnoticed; and though mortals still found it no less impossible to crest its summit, those few elves who had received Cassiopeia’s blessing to stand upon it found its new plateau a far more amenable place to erect temples and monuments dedicated to Cassiopeia’s glory. The other eight trees had matured and grown to be core fixtures of the cities where Tesel had placed them, and those who used them at last understood why the magic of Gimel utterly refused to be recorded upon them; Gimel herself had done so.
The name Mountain-Breaker was added to her list of titles, even by those who reviled her as a goddess of evil; retellings of her feat were added to children’s books and scholarly accounts alike; and both Belladonna, in her capacity as then-Queen of the Gods, and Cassiopeia, in her capacity as the prior Queen of the Gods, descended to ensure that Tesel would honour her end of the bargain.
“Fine,” sniffed Tesel, once the shock of her defeat had faded. “What would you have of me, you brute?”
“Your firstborn,” said Gimel.
This confused Tesel, to begin with, for she had never borne any child, unlike most of her sisters. But Gimel disrobed herself, and her meaning rose like the mighty prow of a galleon, twitching upon a storm-tossed sea. Tesel glanced pleadingly to their sisters; but though Belladonna cast her eyes solemnly aside, they did not move to intervene. The laws between the Sisters were clear. She had made the bet; now, she would answer for it.
For seventy days and seventy nights, Gimel made ferocious love to her, taking her in every position known to her considerable experience. Though her view was that Tesel prided herself in weakening mortals, making them pathetic and dependent upon each other for their might, she at least recognised Tesel’s power; and that their child together would share in it, as well as her own. The thought made her love all the harder; and when she finally released Tesel, allowing her to return to her library-throne in shame and tears, that she was with Gimel’s child was all but assured.
And some time thereafter, the goddess Phoebe, named for fear, was born; and Gimel took her to her throne of Gehenna, where an endless vista of wilderness would train her in the methods of Might; but that is a story for another day.