The Vanir

The Avatars
At the forming of the world, the Twelve Titans created a perfectly balanced natural habitat, filled with abundant plant and animal life, and sustained by cyclical systems.

After observing their creation for imperfections, the time came for them to move on, and they decided to leave representatives to govern their creation. They each chose two species of animal to represent the opposing characteristics of their primary traits, granting great power to paramount individuals within those species. Those individuals became the Avatars of their kind. They infused the rest of their kind with their own being, each of them ultimately creating an entire race of children who followed their lead.

The Lost Ones
Over time, some of the Avatars began to go too far in how they governed their children, becoming singularly obsessed with their own domains. They became fixated on their traits, coming to believe that all life should be like them. They pushed their thinking into their children and watched them change to match, distorting their own perspective of the world around them as they confirmed their new beliefs.

These corruptions inevitably created conflicts between the Avatars. Some of the Avatars did not want conflict and had peaceful children, others demanded peace, and still others were also corrupted and insisted their own dominance was better.

The corrupted Avatars first attacked each other, sending their children against one another and clashing in enormous explosions of power that altered the form of the very earth. The warring pushed the peaceful Avatars and their children away from the battlefronts but, with such many great and violent clashes, very little of the world was safe. The peaceful Avatars retracted into smaller nations to protect themselves.

Eventually the corrupted Avatars grew tired of the volleys and stalemates. They saw the peaceful Avatars as weak and began to seek victory over them. Some were defiant and fought back out of justice. Some retracted even further. In the end, the desire to maintain peace could not compete with the desire to conquer, and the peaceful Avatars were all driven into hiding with their children.

Two times per century the peaceful Avatars met in secret locations to discuss what was happening around them. As the years passed, the meetings shifted from resistance, to survival, to reflection. Over years and years of reflecting together, the peaceful Avatars discovered that they had contributed to the problem. The corrupted Avatars had become lustfully fixated on their own characteristics, and the peaceful Avatars realized that they were a counterbalance to this obsession. They had failed to step in when their counterparts started to fixate. They were guilty, as well.

In time, the peaceful Avatars began to call the corrupted Avatars Vanir, a word meaning "the lost ones". They had come to understand that the Vanir had degraded from their purpose and lost their way. In turn, they began to call themselves Aesir, meaning "the humiliated ones". Their humiliation over their failure was great, and they humbly recognized their weakness.