The Founding Myths of Caldero are the primordial myths of the gem-world Vala Cristalis, older than the known count. The bard Mascor Blancarba compiled part of them in “Appendices & Sundry Deliria” (Apéndices & Delirios Varios), a section of his Caldero Gazette, in December 1824 AE.
| Place | Caldero |
| Houses of the Cycle | ☯ House of the Twin Cosmos |
| Spanish entry | Mitos Fundacionales de Caldero |
Mascor holds that myths precede chronicles and makes no claim to completeness. The corpus lives mainly in oral tradition. Its plate shows a closed, leather-strapped book among loose sheets with the separate myths (a burning bird, a raven, a coiled serpent, a spoked wheel), a cup, a golden-hilted dagger and, framed on the wall, the red crater world.
The myths
- The Eagle Asvila: solar figure of the day and visible cycles; the primordial light pole.
- The Moon-Serpent Auna: nocturnal figure of hidden cycles and underground volcanic flows; the Eagle’s complementary opposite.
- The Phoenix of the Volcanic Nest: renewing fire, destruction and rebirth; it acts beneath Caldero’s dormant crater.
- The Goddess of the Deck of Many Things: cosmological chance, the playful pole of the primordial order.
- Myth of the Lovers and the Lunar Serpent: Ishen and Nalía, the canticle of the silver mirror, and the sealing of the Sol-Luna pact in the Chapel of Redemption.
- Embassy of the Devils with Pablo the Chronomancer: a fragment of the rite of Sacred Reconnection, with a Templar immolation and the sealing of the cosmological rift; the Templars of Time appear in it.
Three readings
The Chronicler of the Plata distinguishes three readings without choosing:
- Orthodox Decadian: moral allegories of the natural order, used as religious teaching.
- Clandestine serpentine: primordial doctrine older than the Decadian apparatus, kept alive despite papal repression.
- Crystalline (recent, tied to the Blue House of Vala): a material cosmology of the crystal of Vala Cristalis itself.
The readings do not fully exclude each other. The Decadian reads the paired figures (Eagle and Moon-Serpent; the Sol-Luna pact of day against night) as twin hemispheres.
For Arkos, the chronicle of the present cycle (La Jabalina, the Cageewrights, the Dark Chapel, the high towers) rests on this corpus, and myth and chronicle must be read together.
Preservation
No single source holds the whole corpus. Fragments survive in:
- songs, minor spells and everyday prayers of Caldero;
- Mascor’s compilation, the primary source of the present cycle;
- private archives of the Blue House of Vala;
- clandestine serpentine papers unrecognized by the metropolitan Decadian apparatus;
- margins of provincial Decadian manuscripts, Templar notebooks and the Chronicler of the Plata’s notes.
History
- Primordial era: origin of the figures and pacts.
- Centuries of oral transmission, despite church repression.
- Period of the Borg Pope: partial repression; clandestine serpentine preservation.
- December 1824 AE: partial written fixing by Mascor.