Legends of Belariath

Sylvan Elves History

Sylvan Creation Myth, Common Children’s Tale

Many long ages after the Great Chaos, when the world again grew lush and green and swollen with the light of life, our people came to walk the land; infants in the Garden of the Real.

We walked that Garden hand in hand, and together we learned its rhythms, its cycles, and its lessons. Soon we found our way in the Garden, and in time we flourished. The Garden, in its own way, took note of us, and though wary of us, for we were not of its creation, it took pleasure in seeing us thrive on its bounty.

The longer we walked the Garden, the more it grew to trust the people, and so it chose to yield to us its secrets. With these secrets, the people were able to ease their walk through the Garden, and for a time it was good, but the Garden had given its new people a dangerous gift; for there were no limits to how its secrets could be used. It was this temptation which brought about The Sundering, the great separation of our peoples for which our hearts still ache.

The people began to grow callous in their use of the Garden's secrets, using them to deny its rhythms, defy its cycles, to leave its lessons unlearned. With the power of the Garden's secrets, the people had learned ambition and greed. They built walls around themselves and turned away from the Garden, venturing into it only to carve out its bounty so their walls might grow all the wider.

The Garden could only shudder in dread at what it had set loose, fearing the people's new Want would see no end until the Garden was no more, and the Great Chaos had hold of the world once again. What the Garden could not know was that as it shuddered, as did all those of the people who still remembered its rhythms, its cycles, its lessons, they all shared the Garden's dread and knew at that moment the way of Want to be folly.

Those who had forgotten the Garden refused to heed those who remembered, arguing the world too vast for their Ambition to ever harm it, unable to understand the way of Want had no end. Their words unheard, those who remembered went back into the Garden, vowing to maintain and protect its sacred cycles, and forsaking the ways of Want forever. And so we remain the people of the Garden, of the Briar and The Wood. We remain the Sylvan.