Every Skeldr child knows how the world began: a gap between ice and fire, sparks that became stars, a giant whose body became the land, a great ash that holds the worlds. A rare few, reading forbidden fragments, believe this is a broken memory of something real: the war that ended the age of the Veyndra.
At midwinter the seeresses still recite the opening lines:
"Sand was not, nor sea, nor cool waves. Earth was not, nor heaven above. Only the gap was, gaping and grassless, and on its edges the frost and the fire."
The silence in the Workshop
The war began without a blow. In the First Workshop the Making Choir sang in five rhythms, and one morning that was not yet a morning, one rhythm was missing. A vessel took a shape no one could describe. A star near the arches went out, and afterward no one could say whether it had ever been lit.
Varka, the Name-Eater sat at the edge of the terrace with one hand on the stone, and where that hand rested, the stone stopped being stone. Varka had decided that nothing which would one day grieve should be made to exist.
Moryn struck first. The blow missed Varka and hit the silence instead, and the terrace split. The crack ran out under the newborn sea and widened into a void without floor or far shore: the Yawning Gap. Whatever it swallowed lost its name.
Frost, fire and a body
Four makers held its edges. Auvra bound before to after so nothing could be unmade all at once, and her binding rose as endless walls of rime. Kharun broke the single First Flame into a storm of sparks, too many to put out, and they climbed into the sky as stars. Where frost met heat, meltwater dripped into the Gap, the first thing the silence could not swallow.
Still the Gap would not close. So Moryn lay down across it. Bones became mountains, blood became seas that drowned the silence, and the skull rose as the vault of the sky. Only the spine did not turn to stone: it grew into an ash of impossible size, and the drifting new worlds caught in its branches and held fast. The Skeldr call it the World-Tree. Sael hid part of the future in a well at its foot, beyond any prophet's reach.
The First Dawn
Then the four sang together again. Limit, change, body and possibility became one sentence, and that sentence was the First Dawn. Light no longer simply existed. It rose, and morning became something that could happen again. Varka was driven out, though no fragment claims Varka was destroyed.
Out of the meltwater came a vast white cow, and from the rime she licked stepped the first forebear of the Æsir. The jötnar walked out of what remained of Moryn's vastness. The Skeldr made one giant of it all, Ymir, slain by Odin and his brothers. The jötnar tell it differently. No one slew the first giant, they say. "She lay down."
How it is remembered
The Skeldr believe their poem word for word. The oldest Eilvaren sing a song with a missing word in every verse, held as a breath, "too sad to say". Stonebound smiths never strike in a certain pause. Hearthkin children count on five fingers, and the little finger is always "the one who left".
Aldren, the First Witness, only says: "The first war was not over who would possess the world. It was over whether a world may belong even to its makers."