collision

prologue

When Troye is 13 years old, humanly speaking, his mother sits him down and tells him about the world.

She takes him aside after he's done bathing in the rippling spring stream with a couple of other elves and fairies. It's a wonderful day, really, wind clear and soft with sunshine and warmth, gently stroking Troye's honey tinted skin and nipping at his sensitive wings.

Troye likes spring a lot. He likes the way everything seems to be bursting with color, eager after being held down by the cold winter for so long. He likes the way the other elves and fairies' eyes turn brighter with enthusiasm and their cheeks turn the color of cherry blossoms when the snow melts away. He likes the way the waterfalls and chirping birds sound in the evening tranquillity.

He also especially likes to come with to the human forest on the other side of the hole in the big oak tree and play pranks on gullible humans. But that one he doesn't really speak loudly of in front of the grown creatures.

It is this oak tree, that his mother and he sit under when she explains how their world—our world — works. Or rather, worlds. How our worlds work.

"There are not only us and the humans," she tells him. "The nymphs and the elves, the fairies and the pixies, the trolls and the goblins, all the good and all the bad creatures in this forest—we are not the only kind apart from human beings. Our worlds are not the only ones to exist."

And Troye is unsurprisingly quite confused, seeing as he's never met or even heard of anything else, so his mother smiles gently at his furrowed brows, and continues speaking in a melodic voice.

Troye learns that there are several different universes coexisting, containing different creatures who are assigned different jobs.

Firstly, there are the Gods; the Gods of Olympus, the Gods of Asgard, and the Gods of Pantheon —but that's quite a mouthful, so commonly, they're just named the Three. Millions of years ago, they all thought they were alone on their grounds—that their empires were the only ones in the universe and that they held all the power possibly attainable. When these three suddenly grew tired of being alone and wanted to extend their powers and create a new world, and realized there were other forces right around the corner with the same abilities and wants, things got very heated very fast.

Troye's mother gestures vividly as she tells the story of the big war in the beginning of Time; the era where they had yet not served the title as Gods. She spoke about how there were three different willpowers from three different worlds with the same excessively short tempers and intense want of ruling, and how as the leaders for their own people, Jupiter, Zeus and Odin saw no other way than to fight in cold blood for their entitlement to create life.

So they did. They fought, and they slaughtered, and they wounded. It was an age where even Day and Night stopped occurring to hide away from the viciousness below, making the warriors lose the concept of time. They never even stopped to sleep, or to eat, and they did not even realize that as time went on, they were slowly killing themselves, rather than each other.

Two out of the three who later proved to put an end to the war, were Eirene from Olympus and Pax from Rome. The two of them shared the opinion that war and violence were nothing but awful things and refused to participate, and in that, combined with their intelligence and diplomatic reasoning, they found a mutual understanding in one another. They came to the conclusion that they had to stop this, because if somebody didn't, it would never end.

Eirene and Pax then went to find Idun, a beautiful and kind-hearted goddess from Asgard who was the custodian of Asgard's Tree of Golden Apples, in search for a way to stop the war. Idun, who was more than happy to help, told them about a place called Mímir's Well in her part of the world. She insisted they hurry to get there, because unlike the Olympians and the Romans, the gods of Asgard cannot only die from murder, but also from age, and time was quickly running out.