Taris, the Life Bringer and Mother Goddess, is the ancient creator deity from whom Tarisia is said to take its name. She is associated with creation and the endless cycles of life: birth and growth, hunger and predation, death and decay, and the renewal that follows. Ancient myths claim Taris shaped the living world from herself and that all life upon Tarisia ultimately descends from her creation.
Overview
The oldest creation stories begin with Taris and her first five children, now remembered as the Five Pearls. Each lived for a time before dying, and the grieving Mother Goddess placed their pale bodies among the heavens. Taris continued her creation, giving birth to Azha & Azharun, the living Twin Suns whose fires illuminated the world beneath them.
Beneath their light, Taris is said to have shaped Tarisia from her own being, filled its waters, and raised life from its soil. The oldest traditions also name her Queen Mother of the Eld, the strange beings remembered variously as gods, servants, or children of Taris. What relationship they truly bore to her has long since disappeared into myth.
Creation in the teachings attributed to Taris was never synonymous with immortality. All living things are born, grow, consume, die, decay, and give way to new life. Death belongs to Taris as surely as birth, and the predator is as much a part of her creation as its prey.
During the Age of Abundance, Taris was widely worshiped throughout the Old Kingdoms, with Casshern among the greatest centers of her worship. Yet the same civilizations that revered the Mother Goddess increasingly sought powers once reserved for gods, culminating in what nearly every surviving tradition remembers as the Betrayal.
The Betrayal
The stories disagree on much of what happened next. They agree that the Old Kingdoms turned against their creator.
With Sorcery revealed by Erra, the Old Kingdoms marched upon Casshern and attempted to bind Taris. What they intended to do with the Mother Goddess varies considerably with the telling: steal her power, command life and death, achieve immortality, or simply destroy her.
Whatever their intentions, the stories say Taris was defeated and entombed beneath Casshern for eternity. The place of her imprisonment became known as the Tomb of Taris.
The world that followed bore little resemblance to the one she had created. Waters receded or soured, fertile lands failed, and the Old Kingdoms collapsed amid Sorcery and wars over dwindling resources. Some traditions claim Taris cursed her betrayers. Others hold that imprisoning the Life Bringer wounded the natural order itself. Perhaps the Old Kingdoms required no divine assistance in destroying themselves at all.
The Creeping Wild
Casshern withered with the rest of Tarisia, but it did not remain dead.
Over the centuries, strange vegetation spread from the lands surrounding the Tomb of Taris, swallowing ruins and transforming much of the Casshern Peninsula into the vast and seemingly sentient Creeping Wild.
Some regard the Wild as Taris’s wrath made manifest. Others believe its impossible abundance proves the Mother Goddess still lives beneath Casshern, or even that something buried within the legendary Tomb of Taris is slowly escaping its prison.