The first Defender ever recorded was a young boy named Ceres, although the accuracy of the name's spelling or pronunciation was definitely in question given, he'd lived two thousand years ago in a civilian long gone from the rock.
He'd died at the age of sixteen and while it was confirmed that he had a mark from his magic, that reportedly resemble a sun that was now the symbol of the monotheistic religion that had sprung from his story, there was no surviving illustration from the time period during which he lived.
His story was that of a poor boy, orphaned at a young age and taken in and raised by a village shaman who recognized the potential for greatness (i.e. magic) in him as a toddler. The stories depicted him as a kind, too kind in Eirian's opinion, turning a blind eye to his own mistreatment in favor of defending others from their own. His first use of magic was supposedly an accident, an automatic reaction to an attack from a bully that had gained him even more notoriety and envy when he was somewhere between ten and thirteen.
Sometime after that he'd stories had started about his ability to communicate with all manner of creatures on the rock and he'd begun to face further isolation when he started to warn of a massive natural disaster that was building beneath the quiet surface of the rock.
At that time, the last recorded volcanic eruption on the rock was far south in the heart of what was now called the Wasteland. In the Red Waste, a small desert at the very tip of the southern portion and the oldest desert on the rock, a massive volcanic eruption had turned the entire world dark for several years and completely annihilated the dense forests that covered the southern portion of the rock. An untold number of species and civilizations had been wiped out in the weeks immediately following the eruption or they'd died out slowly over the years of darkness that followed.
When Ceres had started to warn of another eruption most believed it wasn't possible. Not only was that eruption considered one of a kind, because historical records tended to start nearly a thousand years after, but Ceres lived in the area now known as the Hearthland. A significant portion of the rock southwest of the Still Water that surrounded Aontacht and north of the Wasteland. It was flat, with the Burning Hills along the southern edge of the Still Water its closest true mountains and the Isles of Trees even further west and the Forest of Rhiannon along the northern edge of the Still Water its closest forest with a capital F.
If the Still Water was the center of the rock on a map, which it was if the map didn't include the lands West of the Spine of the world, which dissected the rock into two nearly equally sized land portions, than the Hearthland was just off the center to the southwest and taking up nearly a quarter of the landmass east of the Spine.
It was mostly flat, with a few rolling hills and gentle valleys and glens that were the stuff of comfortable folk stories where truly bad things never really happened, and everyone had six meals a day and weekends dancing to lively music. It was a rather quaint life compared to what Eirian was used to, but there were some beautiful Vermeer paintings done of the endless fields of golden wheat and green orchards dotted with brightly colored fruit that went on for miles.
It also supplied food to everyone other land on the rock east of the Spine which was how a land of farmers with a very, very small military force had remained independent for so long. When Ceres had lived it had been a loose conglomeration of tribes that had been slowly settling into farming villages over the course of several generations. They'd still carried many of the old practices of many gods, superstitions and shamans with them.
Ceres had foretold of a huge volcano lying dormant underneath the agricultural fields of the Hearthland and it made sense looking at a map now, where the entirety of the Hearthland was depicted inside the caldera of a huge volcano.
It had finally erupted when Ceres was sixteen, heralded by weeks of smoke billowing from vents in the ground and ominous rumbling. Ceres' warnings were finally headed in the days leading up to the actual eruption and his magic managed to protect enough of the farmland that it prevented what would have been a mass extinction if all that food that had been destroyed.
Ceres himself had been killed attempting to evacuate one of the villages that hadn't headed his warning. He'd turned into a folk hero over night and a few hundred years and one very distorted story later, he'd become the god of the first monotheistic religion on the rock, credited with creating the whole damn thing as far as the Followers of the Sun were concerned.
Oddly enough, the religion still carried the story of his childhood and victory over the volcano as one of its founding fables.
It was a rather obvious contradiction to the idea that he'd created the rock but that didn't seem to bother those who followed the religion as much as it bothered everyone who didn't.
Not to mention, he hadn't been the first Defender, just the first one remembered when humans had started writing down what they deemed important events.
In Eirian's time, the Followers of the Sun were the largest monotheistic religion on the rock and still the primary religion of the Hearthland, though they'd failed to make any headway in the Wasteland or the wild lands west of the Spine. There was a small conglomerate of them in the Land of Song and Snow, but those lands were older than Ceres himself and never took kindly to change. Sorrow had been more welcoming, and it was the second largest religion in Aontacht, but no king willingly shared his power and all of their attempts at getting some foothold in the ruling government failed.
Eirian had never even seen her uncle grant their leadership an audience, despite seasonal requests.
They were too similar to the City of Illumination in that they believed their followers answered only to them and no one else.
And they had very odd ideas about magic and gender and societal roles that Eirian didn't like. Anyone who thought what someone else had belonged to them because some omniscient figure that spoke through only a select few said so was an idiot in her opinion.
And what it was today, didn't seem anything like what the non-religious writing described Ceres as. He wasn't even the tanned skinned dark-haired boy that would have existed in the Hearthland back then, he was usually depicted as a tall, pale skinned, blond man that had definitely never spent a single day working out in the sun.
~ tbc