The Last Light of Ellium

Legends

Ellium is a beautiful land with sprawling hills and waterways marking much of the landscape. The land is widely famed as the crown jewel among the treasures of the gods. Ellium has held favor with the gods going back further than any spoken tongue among peoples today, but legends say that Ellium was chosen by the Queen of the Immortales herself. 

According to this same legend, the Queen looked down on this otherwise unremarkable land filled with good and bad but mostly indifferent people, and she saw worthiness. The other gods in the Council of the Immortales vehemently disagreed, seeing the lands for what they were rather than what they could be. The Council wished to dispose of the peoples and the lands altogether. 

So, as the legend says, the Queen challenged the other Immortales. She proposed that she could descend into the realm of the Mortales and, as a mere human, transform the land. Within the week, the Queen had entered the realm as a strikingly beautiful woman. Even as a human, she was notably different from the undistinguished people around her. She bore striking white hair and eerily clear golden eyes which were far different than the dark-haired dark-eyed people around her. 

The week came and went, and the task before her proved to be much more difficult than she had once assumed. These people around her, while they noticed her physicality, largely ignored her warnings. Never one to be deterred by a challenge, she forged on with her task. She found that while few people were moved to action with her premonitions of doom, they could be persuaded with favors and goods and if all else failed intimidation. 

So, day by day, and month by month, she organized a motley group of people mostly under the control of various local "nobility" into a kingdom worthy of her position. She amassed an army, sometimes with gold, sometimes with blood, but eventually, she had thousands of soldiers willing to fight and die with her. She wrangled control of the entire region, but in doing so, she lost control of her heart. 

The Queen of Gods and Mortals was never meant to fall in love with one, and she certainly was not meant to bear the child of such a union. However, as human fates often do, hers strayed from her predetermined path. She fell in love, and within a year of her marriage, she had fallen pregnant with his child. 

The Council of the Immortales was enraged. The Queen was never meant to take a human lover, nor was she meant to bear children. It has always been a strict policy that the Gods do not interfere with the Mortale institutions of love or procreation. They called the child an abomination and demanded the return of the Queen forthwith, lest she further blighted the realm of Mortales with her continued involvement. 

She was angry but more so she was tired. She had been fighting for so long. In truth, she had probably spent somewhere close to twenty human years amassing her empire and her newfound human family, and she was ready to return home. However, she refused to abandon her baby. She bargained with the Council for weeks over the life inside of her. Eventually, they decided to allow her to give birth, provided she leave the Realm of the Mortales immediately following and that she step down from her position as the Head of the Council. 

She was unsurprised by the request though it angered her greatly. After all, were these Gods not the very reason she was in this position, to begin with? They had questioned her intuition and her ability, and she had proved them wrong. However, she knew that she had no option but to agree. There was no way that the council would allow the birth of her child otherwise, and, as a human, there was little she could do to stop them from smiting her where she stood. 

So, she lived out the last of her human days with her husband, creating decrees and succession proceedings as fast as she could humanly draft them. She tried voraciously to finish what she had started with her kingdom. She drafted decrees on government proceedings, the succession of the monarchy, principles of law, but as hard as she tried, her time was undoubtedly up. 

On the eve of the first snowfall of the season, The Queen went into labor. She was surrounded by handmaidens and her husband, and, as the sun broke the clear horizon with beams of gold and orange, a baby girl was born. She held her newborn child in her arms for only a breath, and, as she slipped away from the world of the Mortales, she whispered to her daughter the name that would crest banners for centuries to come, "Ellium." 

With that, The Queen slipped from her mortal body, ascending once more into the realm of Gods. So, according to legend, this is why our country is named Ellium, after the first princess of the realm, daughter of the Immortale, and the first human ever to be born without a clear fate. She, of all humans, truly forged her own path forward, as the gods could not foresee her future.