Other Name: The First Binding
Nature: Foundational settlement concluding the First War
Participants: Eshar, Veshar, Othuun, Naevra
Associated Deity: Jhadric
Primary Purpose: Limit the exercise of foundational power within Creation
The Concord of Creation was the settlement through which the Ancient Kindred ended the First War and established limits intended to prevent their disagreements from again threatening the coherence of Creation. Fragmentary mortal traditions sometimes preserve distorted echoes of the settlement as the First Binding, though few surviving cultures possess reliable knowledge of what was bound, who participated, or why such limits became necessary.
The Concord was not a declaration of victory. By the end of the war, each of the Ancient Kindred had seen something necessary in the position they had defended and something dangerous in allowing that position to become absolute. The conflict had begun around the rights of created beings and the authority of those who claimed to know where they belonged, but it had grown far beyond that dispute as new possibilities, established structures, chosen relationships, and preserved truths were forced against one another until Creation itself could no longer reconcile them.
Othuun and Naevra were central to bringing the conflict to an end. Each had entered the war beside one of the opposed twins, and each had begun to develop reservations well before the catastrophe at Vaerath. Othuun increasingly recognized that the continual introduction of new possibilities could undermine the conditions that allowed anything already created to retain meaning, while Naevra came to see that preserving established order could become indistinguishable from preserving an injustice merely because it had endured. The emergence of the First Paradox and the death of Aevareth turned those doubts into an unavoidable conclusion: the war could no longer continue.
The settlement they brokered did not attempt to choose one final answer for Creation. It established boundaries within which several necessary truths could continue to coexist.
Purpose of the Concord
The immediate purpose of the Concord was to end the First War before the contradictions accumulated during the conflict destroyed the reality the Kindred were attempting to preserve. The First Paradox, ruin of Vaerath, and death of Aevareth had demonstrated that the danger was no longer theoretical. Foundational powers could make changes so deep that later actions could not simply replace or correct them without producing still greater consequences.
The Kindred could not solve the problem by agreeing merely to exercise greater restraint. Their natures were already woven into Creation, and the effects of their actions could endure independently of their intentions. A promise made among them would mean little if one of them could later reshape the conditions under which the promise had been understood.
The Concord therefore had to become part of Creation itself. Naevra anchored its terms so that the settlement would possess continuity beyond the circumstances that produced it, while Othuun accepted that even future possibilities would have to arise within the boundaries the agreement established. The authority of the settlement did not belong to either of them alone; it endured because all four Kindred accepted limits upon what they could thereafter impose.
This enduring restraint is the probable origin of the mortal term First Binding. What survived into later mythology was not an accurate account of the agreement, but the memory that powers older than the gods had once been constrained for the sake of Creation.
Veshar and the Limits of Authority
Veshar accepted that authority could not justify itself merely through superior power, knowledge, or efficiency. The transformation of the Nemerai into the Ordai had demonstrated that an ordered system could function extraordinarily well while still having no legitimate claim to determine permanently what sapient beings were permitted to become.
Under the Concord, Veshar could no longer assign the essential purpose, identity, or ultimate destination of a sapient being simply because he believed he understood that being’s proper place. Hierarchies could still exist, governments could govern, institutions could define responsibilities, and beings could voluntarily enter relationships in which another possessed genuine authority. What could no longer be assumed was that the usefulness of an arrangement granted an unrestricted right to impose it.
This limitation did not require Veshar to abandon his belief in hierarchy. It forced him instead to confront the question of how legitimate authority arises. A responsibility freely accepted differs from one imposed upon a being that never had the opportunity to refuse it, and a relationship chosen knowingly can establish obligations that raw power alone cannot create.
The distinction would reshape Veshar’s influence after the war. Unable simply to determine where another being belonged, he and the devils who served him became extraordinarily skilled at persuasion, negotiation, temptation, and contract. Vharath would eventually build much of its authority upon a principle established partly to limit the Sovereign: if a being genuinely chooses an obligation, that choice can create consequences that Creation itself recognizes.
Eshar and the Consequences of Choice
Eshar secured the principle that sapient beings must be able to participate meaningfully in determining their own lives and relationships, but accepted that such participation could not mean that every decision remained perpetually reversible without consequence. Agency mattered because choices could produce real outcomes. If every commitment could simply be treated as though it had never existed whenever one participant desired another future, choice itself would lose much of its significance.
The Concord therefore recognized that relationships freely entered can create responsibilities that continue beyond the instant of decision. A person may leave a community, break an oath, renounce an allegiance, or transform a relationship that no longer serves those within it, but doing so does not erase the history that preceded the change or the effects that decision has upon others.
This did not reduce Eshar’s understanding of agency to obedience once a choice had been made. Relationships still had to remain capable of adaptation, and consent given at one moment could not become an unlimited claim over every future state of the person who gave it. The settlement instead acknowledged that freedom exists within a world possessing history. A later choice can alter what came before without making the earlier relationship unreal.
The same principle placed limits upon Eshar’s wartime tendency to reopen relationships whenever imposed structure became too restrictive. Some boundaries had to remain stable long enough for new choices to have a coherent context in which to matter. Agency without continuity could become little more than a succession of disconnected possibilities.
Othuun and the Limits of Possibility
Othuun accepted that Creation could not remain open to every possible intervention at every level. His support for Eshar during the First War had arisen naturally from his delight in beings capable of developing beyond what their creators anticipated. The transformation of the Nemerai offended him not only because it removed choices they already possessed, but because it closed futures that had deliberately been left open.
During the war, however, Othuun’s answer to increasingly rigid structures had often been to create alternatives faster than those structures could account for them. New beings, new relationships, and new solutions could expose the weakness of an imposed system, but they could also alter the conditions under which established realities had been created. By the time the First Paradox emerged, possibility itself had become capable of destabilizing the context necessary for any particular possibility to endure.
The Concord therefore placed limits upon Othuun’s direct foundational creation. The Maker remained capable of bringing forth new forms and participating in the continuing development of Creation, but he could no longer unilaterally introduce complete divine powers into reality as he had during the earliest ages.
Before the war, Othuun had created gods through his own authority, including Aevareth. After the Concord, new divinity would have to emerge through processes already occurring within Creation, arise through relationships among existing powers, be inherited, or be attained through apotheosis. Othuun had not ceased to be the Maker, but Creation would no longer depend upon one being’s ability to introduce whatever new answer he believed circumstances required.
The later ascension of Abendigo illustrates the distinction. The loss of Aevareth did not lead Othuun simply to fashion another god of time. The possibility of a new divine bearer remained, but the path to that divinity had to arise from within Creation rather than being imposed upon it from outside its developing history.
Naevra and the Limits of Continuity
Naevra entered the First War on Veshar’s side because his concern for stable structures resonated strongly with her own responsibility for preserving continuity. Creation could not possess identity, history, or consequence if every established condition remained vulnerable to immediate revision. Authority capable of maintaining boundaries appeared, particularly in the early stages of the conflict, to offer protection against a reality becoming too fluid to retain coherence.
Her reservations grew as Veshar increasingly treated the endurance of an arrangement as evidence that the arrangement deserved to endure. Naevra’s nature allowed her to perceive the continuity connecting a thing to what it had been, but continuity alone could not determine whether an inherited structure remained legitimate. A relationship can persist across ages and still constrain beings who never chose it; a law can possess an ancient history and still have become incompatible with the lives now governed by it.
The war revealed another danger as Naevra continued to preserve truths established by her own side. Continuity could become destructive if it prevented incompatible conditions from yielding to one another. The First Paradox was the most catastrophic expression of this failure: contradictions had gained enough persistence that reality itself could no longer resolve them through ordinary change.
Under the Concord, Naevra accepted responsibility not merely for preserving what had become true, but for guarding the continuity of Creation as a whole. She would not intervene simply because a change was disruptive, a government unjust, a god mistaken, or a magical event catastrophic. Creation could survive extraordinary transformation. Her responsibility began where competing truths threatened the possibility that Creation could continue as one coherent reality.
This authority was deliberately narrow. Naevra did not become sovereign over the other Kindred or final judge of what Creation ought to become. Her responsibility was to prevent continuity itself from becoming the mechanism by which contradiction destroyed the world it existed to preserve.
Freely Accepted Obligation
One of the most consequential results of the Concord was the recognition that freely accepted obligations can become part of the metaphysical relationships through which Creation operates. This principle emerged from the settlement between Eshar and Veshar rather than belonging wholly to either.
Agency requires that a choice genuinely belong to the being making it. Authority can arise from that choice when the being knowingly enters a relationship that grants another party responsibility, jurisdiction, or claim. Continuity then allows the obligation to matter beyond the instant in which consent was given.
The result is broader than infernal contract law. Oaths, covenants, sworn duties, divine relationships, and other freely undertaken commitments can acquire significance because a being’s decision creates relationships that persist through time. Veshar and the devils eventually became the most sophisticated practitioners of this principle, but they did not create it.
Real assent remains necessary. Direct supernatural compulsion cannot establish the same kind of legitimate obligation because the decision did not meaningfully belong to the person supposedly making it. Influence, desperation, unequal knowledge, manipulation, selective disclosure, and deceptive framing occupy much less comfortable territory. A being can make a genuine choice under terrible circumstances, and the Concord does not guarantee that every choice will be wise, equitable, or made between parties of equal understanding.
This ambiguity would become the foundation of infernal contractual practice. The Concord protects agency sufficiently for consent to matter; it does not protect mortals from every consequence of exercising it badly.
Creation of Jhadric
The question of the dead became one of the final matters addressed during the settlement. The First War had produced death on a scale Creation had never previously experienced, revealing that mortal identity could persist after the body ceased to live. Souls accumulated throughout the realms, and no existing power possessed an uncontested right to determine their disposition.
Allowing one of the Ancient Kindred to claim universal authority over the dead would have risked reproducing the dispute the Concord was intended to end. The Kindred therefore created Jhadric together and established his office so that its authority depended upon none of them individually.
Jhadric would judge souls as continuing individuals rather than interchangeable members of a category. The lives they had lived, the choices they had made, the relationships they had entered, and the obligations they had accepted could all remain consequential after death. His judgments nevertheless carried genuine authority, and both the continuity of the soul and the permanence of his office were made part of the settlement rather than left dependent upon the changing will of another power.
Jhadric consequently became both a product of the First War and an expression of the Concord. Valid obligations entered during life can still affect a soul’s disposition: a soul willingly granted elsewhere through a relationship recognized by the Concord does not become free of that obligation merely because bodily life has ended.
Withdrawal of Eshar and Veshar
The Concord required Eshar and Veshar to withdraw beyond Creation. Their opposition had driven much of the conflict, and both possessed sufficient foundational power that continued direct participation risked reopening the struggle whenever their disagreements again became irreconcilable.
Neither could simply be destroyed without threatening principles already embedded within Creation. Their departure therefore served as separation rather than punishment or annihilation. Both returned to the Nascent Expanse, where they could persist because neither had originated wholly within the Created Realms.
Eshar established Lethara, the Living Concord, an enclave sustained through reciprocal relationships continually adapting to preserve the whole. Veshar established Vharath, The Eightfold Depths, where hierarchy itself provides the continuity necessary for the enclave to persist against the ceaseless transformation of the Expanse.
Neither is an ordinary divine realm. Both exist beyond Creation and remain persistent only because their creators can maintain stable conditions where stability is otherwise not guaranteed.
Their withdrawal sharply reduced their direct influence upon Creation but did not remove the principles they represented. Agency and authority remained woven into mortal relationships, institutions, oaths, governments, communities, and countless other structures without belonging exclusively to either twin.
Orrath and the Ordai
The fate of the Ordai could not be corrected simply by reversing Veshar’s transformation. The beings who had once been Nemerai had accumulated identities of their own, and restoring an earlier state by force risked destroying the people they had become in the name of returning possibilities they no longer possessed.
The Concord therefore stripped Veshar of any claim to ownership or command over them without attempting to overwrite them a second time. The Ordai remained within Creation and received the independent realm of The Ordered Reach, where their extraordinary constancy made them well suited to maintaining processes that must continue regardless of divine disagreement or mortal ambition.
Their existence remained one of the most painful unresolved consequences of the war. They could not be returned safely to what they had been, yet leaving them unchanged preserved the result of an act the Concord had effectively declared illegitimate.
The settlement did, however, leave open the possibility that an Ordai might change under extraordinary circumstances, particularly when rigid adherence to an established function would defeat the deeper purpose the function existed to serve. Such events remain rare, but their possibility ensures that Veshar’s transformation did not become an absolute law extending through every future state of the Ordai.
Limits on Divine Manifestation
The Concord also imposed limits upon how freely divine and foundational powers could manifest within Creation. The First War had demonstrated that unrestricted divine presence could transform realms at a scale where disagreements among gods became threats to reality itself.
These restrictions were significant but should not be confused with the much stronger isolation later produced by the Sundering. Gods remained capable of creating divine realms, interacting directly with mortals, dispatching servants, granting power, and under extraordinary circumstances manifesting within physical reality. Divine contact remained far more immediate than it would become in later ages.
The Concord was concerned principally with preventing foundational powers from repeatedly rewriting Creation according to competing visions. The Sundering addressed a very different crisis and weakened Kor Sirok’s relationships with the wider planes far more severely.
Later mortal traditions sometimes confuse the two events because both are remembered through fragmentary stories of gods being constrained. The similarities are real, but the scale, purpose, and consequences were different.
Enduring Significance
The Concord remains active not as a written document stored in a divine archive but as a network of relationships embedded within Creation. Its terms established boundaries within which agency, authority, possibility, and continuity could continue to shape reality without any one of them becoming an unrestricted answer to every problem.
The settlement did not eliminate disagreement among the Ancient Kindred. Veshar still believes stable authority can prevent suffering that unconstrained choice creates, while Eshar remains suspicious of structures whose participants cannot influence the relationships governing them. Othuun continues to delight in what Creation becomes, even while accepting that not every imaginable intervention should be made real. Naevra preserves continuity while recognizing that endurance alone cannot determine what deserves to persist.
The Concord succeeded not because those disagreements disappeared, but because Creation no longer required one of them to win.
Mortal Understanding
Outside the guarded tradition of the Djozanates of the Kenai Mountains, almost nothing reliable about the Concord survives among mortals. The phrase First Binding appears in scattered creation myths, religious traditions, and obscure planar writings describing primordial beings confined beyond the world, ancient limits placed upon the gods, or laws established before ordinary history began. These accounts preserve too little common detail to reconstruct the actual settlement.
The Djozans preserve substantially more of the settlement and its context than ordinary mortal scholarship, although their teaching is kept secret and is not available for comparison with surviving texts. Beyond the Djozanates, the name Concord of Creation is not known to mortal scholars. A theologian encountering the phrase in an extraordinarily ancient source would be far more likely to interpret it through later religious assumptions than to recognize an agreement among beings predating nearly every familiar god.
Its effects nevertheless remain woven throughout Creation. Freely chosen obligations can possess genuine metaphysical weight, Jhadric exercises independent authority over the dead, the Ancient Kindred operate under restrictions they did not possess before the First War, and later gods arise through paths unavailable to Othuun’s earliest creations.
Mortals do not need to remember the Concord for Creation to remain bound by it.