Thievery
an excerpt

Our world was born in fire, coalescing from the great swirling chaos of creation’s inferno. It took thousands, hundreds of thousands of years for life to form, whether by chance or by the hand of the Gods that man created in their minds. It is not for me to say, but I have read many of the surviving history books, and it seems that the first appearance of a known God was millennia after the advent of Man.
It hardly matters, not in the long run. Suffice it to say that religion played its normal role in our lives, and although we do not have the impressive technological abilities that men from the Avatar’s world claim, we still survive.
It took many years for the first Chosen King to claim ownership, royal status, and to name this great continent. We know of only the one; it is surrounded by massive oceans, and no ship setting out to explore has ever returned. Perhaps they found new lands and colonized them; perhaps not. King Loki, the first Chosen, amassed an army built the largest fortress this world has ever seen, and named it Arnor, after the sage who foretold his rise to power.
To this day, scribes debate whether he truly had an army of demons which helped him to subjugate the land, but after his death, his son took the throne, and he was a good man, or at least, as good as such a position allows.
The land of Arnor thus flourished. We discovered the art of bookbinding, to distribute knowledge, and the art of alchemy, to cure the sick. We took the land of the plains and farmed it, and planted new trees to replace the ones we cut down. For time out of mind, we were a happy nation. With no other nations to fight with, we took pride in being as productive as time and ability would allow.
Then the Cæoth was born.
It is said that the night the Cæoth was born, calves died in their sleep. It is said that decent men found themselves with sudden, lustful urges, and slept with the wives of their friends. It is said that the moon fell from the sky, unable to shine on a world where true Evil had been created.
It is even said that the mother, realizing what she had spawned, took a knife and attempted to kill the Cæoth that very night, and that the Cæoth clasped the knife blade in its newborn hands and sent a bolt of such fury through it that the mother simply erupted blood from her every pore and died.
No matter what the truth is, the Cæoth lived, and such was its abnormality that it was shunned by every living thing in the world, from its fellows (insomuch as such a demon could be said to have ‘fellows’) to the smallest worm.
It is said that the Cæoth once dug for worms to fish with, and the land itself was so repulsed by its touch that it died, and that spot has been barren ever since. It is also said, with slightly less hyperbole, that the Cæoth is so evil, so truly immoral and malevolent, that Death herself refused to take it at the appropriate time. Since it has lived on since then, there must be some truth to that story.
For its abuses, the Cæoth vowed to hurt everyone who had wronged it, and of course that meant—everyone. Two hundred and ninety years after its birth, the Cæoth stormed the Fortress of Loki with a force of men so great that the land lay fallow for years after. The battle was extraordinary, and it is said that after the walls fell King Hubert himself, now a descendent of King Loki twenty times over, met the Cæoth in the courtyard and battled for the soul of the land.
He lost.
Although he had the powers of Arnor’s finest magicians and the best weapons and armor we could provide, the Cæoth’s might destroyed him as utterly as if he had fallen into the sun. The Cæoth stood victorious on the ramparts of Loki and screamed its will to the skies: Arnor would forever after be its plaything, to abuse and desecrate as it wished.
That is where it made its first, and thus far only, mistake. For in its might, with two hundred years of learning behind it, the Cæoth failed to recognize the weapons of King Hubert as magical, and they were stolen and lost.