Almost no one in Myrvand has heard the name Veyndra. It survives in forbidden fragments, stray dreams, and the sayings of a quiet old man who speaks of the first gods as though he knew them. No one holds the whole of it.
The Making Choir
The Veyndra were the first folk of gods, though not the first presence. They woke before stars, seasons, death or direction, and they did not find a finished world. They made one, together, through a harmony the fragments call the Making Choir. Five makers are remembered: Moryn gave substance weight and body, Auvra made distance, sequence and consequence, Kharun kindled the stars and the hunger by which living things change, Sael kept chance alive so creation could outgrow its makers, and Varka gave endings and empty space.
None of them could have made the world alone, and that need for one another became the first source of love, resentment and politics.
In the oldest images they wear no crowns. They appear in robes, aprons and working cords, because the Choir was labor. They are known by their hands, and by what changes in the world around them. They worked, it is said, in a First Workshop on a terrace of the first cooled stone, while mountains rose beyond its arches.
The breaking
Every quarrel among the five became a law of nature. Measure said a world without limits could not last. Flame said a world unable to change was a beautiful prison. Depth wanted bodies where change and limit could meet. Possibility refused every final design. And Unmaking came to believe that existence only breeds suffering and should be returned to silence.
That last conviction led to the War of the First Dawn, and the war ended the Veyndra as one folk. Their broken powers and vows, the stories hint, became the ground from which the younger houses rose: the Æsir with oath and rule, the Vanir with fertility and living cycles, the jötnar with the vast untamed powers from which the ordered world was cut.
Where they are now
Some say the Veyndra dwindled into laws they can no longer break. Some say they sleep beyond the Aurora Veil. Some may be dead, in a sense that did not exist before their war. Varka's fate is unknown. Myrvand, the fragments add, was shaped late in the Choir, a place where all five principles stayed unusually balanced, which may be why so much old power keeps surfacing there.