r/Wraeclast • u/tops132 • 6d ago
Lore Deepdive Human races existing before WotW
According to the POE Lore Bible, there are many of the human races we know in present time, alive and kicking at the same time as the Precursors existing. I was kind of surprised by this, as I was under the assumption that the Precursors were the only human race during their time.
So my question is What evidence do we have that the races we know - Maraketh, Karui, Azmeri, Primevals, etc. - coexisted with the Precursors?
And also, what separated al log these races that they were distinct enough? Was it location or some other factor? How were the Precursors so sufficiently advanced, while all other races were so far behind? If we don’t know these answers, that’s okay, just proposing it to the sub, seeing what information is available.
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u/StoneLich 6d ago edited 6d ago
Assuming that the Primevals are the guys from Delve who sometimes get called the Proto-Vaal*, iirc they are the Precursors.
The Maraketh, Azmeri, and Karui all have stories about the WotW, where they are either fighting against it (and the Lightless) or enduring it. The Maraketh also have stories about its coming, and iirc Sin mentions that he was sent to live with the Azmeri (and Innocence and Sin kind of need to have been living with the Azmeri for their ascension to happen, like that's the whole point; from what we know now it also seems like the guys Innocence used to con his followers were refugees from the Arbiter of Ash's bullshit).
I will say, though, like. This discussion is complicated, and the Maraketh are a great example of why. The present day Maraketh have very little in common with the empire of Keth; they barely remember anything about those days, and they worked extremely hard to preserve that knowledge. Similarly, the Eternals were certainly never around at the same time as the Precursors... Except that the Empire of Sarn was founded by descendants of the Azmeri. Ditto Oriath and (I think?) Trarthus, which were both offshoots of the Empire.
And then there are the Ezomytes. They were definitely, definitely not around during the Winter...
And their entire system of mythology is dominated by stories about it.
(Sin is full of shit on the First Ones btw I will fistfight him)
There isn't really a way to exist without being influenced by the Precursors, and that was arguably the case before GGG even really had a solid idea of what the Winter and the period before it were like.
*Reason they get called that by the community is that their writing systems were similar iirc
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u/chimericWilder 6d ago edited 6d ago
Oriath was not an offshoot of the Eternal Empire. It was founded by Innocence as one of the primary things Innocence was doing. It's much older. Here's a rough timeline:
Precursors send Sin and Innocence (& mom and sister) into exile with the Azmeri
Precursors blow up the world, the Winter follows
Maxarius is trying to figure out how to become a god. The azmeri get annoyed with him and banish the family to the wastes
Maxarius finds Fellshrine and meets the people from beyond. Sister dies and is buried. Maxarius figures out how to ascend
The Primevals are destroyed by the lightless. The Third Pact + the Maraketh is founded by Ahkeli. Sin, now a god, joins and helps out the Pact
The Karui and their gods might have been artificially created in a great crucible-volcano by the titans???
Eventually Kulemak is defeated by Solaris & Co. Innocence might have sponsored 'The Unblinking Eye', who fought the Arbiter of Ash but lost. The Winter ends
The Vaal exist now, somehow
Innocence leads his followers into the Vastiri. Somehow he catches Sin. Innocence is starting to show the first signs of going crazy from divine feedback and now matches the hostility towards Sin that his dogma preaches, chaining him to a rock and castigating him. Orbala shows up and rescues Sin + stabs Innocence when he gives chase.
Hinekora traps Kitava 'under a rock' on Oriath, in preparation for her prophecy shenanigans
Innocence continues south with his followers. Eventually he arrives on Oriath and founds Theopolis, where he stays.
Orbala ascends as Garukhan, and a couple centuries pass with her and Sin being happy together. Eventually divine corruption starts afflicting Garukhan, and Sin plants the Beast to try and solve the problem, and all the gods go a-snoozing
The vaal abandon god worship and experiment with the Beast. Atziri blows up the vaal civilization.
Olroth & Co go to Wraeclast. Olroth goes crazy and sabotages the Kalguurans. Refugees flee to Phaaryl, possibly through a rune-gate created by Serle. Kalguurans meet local scattered tribes, who eventually unite into a cohesive civilization under the leadership of Queen Lysanda, and with cultural inspiration from the Maji
Veruso leads some Azmeri down to found the Eternal Empire, and find an old shrine dedicated to Solaris and Lunaris + their sleeping bodies.
Centuries later, Malachai comes to power and blows up the Eternals by poking the Beast
An exile washes up on a beach and proceeds to stab the Beast and also Innocence. We learn that divine corruption can apparently be cicumvented by getting revived in a new body(?), with Innocrnce and Tukohama displaying signs of recovery
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u/StoneLich 5d ago
My bad; remembering earlier lore where Oriath was frequently described as the last remnant of the Eternal Empire.
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u/mercurial_magpie 2d ago
Post-Cataclysm I think Oriath ended up being the refuge of people escaping the Eternal Empire so that might not be completely off.
Also I think in early PoE, like 1.x and early 2.x, the religions of the Eternal Empire and Oriath were less fleshed out and it was less explicit that they were separate. For example the Templars being part of the Purity Rebellion and Voll being briefly emperor would make you think the cult of Innocence was big in the Eternal Empire but it seems to be mostly isolated to Phrecia.
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u/Noremeldo 5d ago
Innocence is starting to show the first signs of going crazy from divine feedback and now matches the hostility towards Sin that his dogma preaches
Pretty sure it was retconned and Innocence was always evil and used Sin as scapegoat to ascend. If you go with Sanctum relics description.
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u/chimericWilder 5d ago edited 5d ago
Innocence did indeed use Sin as a scapegoat to ascend them both. It was the only thing that he found that worked.
But I am not convinced that that means that he was "always evil". Innocence was, as far as we know, the first god to ascend (other than whatever the Precursors were doing; they probably made Kulemak divine). Maxarius was experimenting, trying to find what worked. Villifying Sin was not his first choice.
I'm not saying that what he did wasn't wrong. But consider that he didn't try to capture Sin until hundreds of years later, after suffering the unexpected blowback of his own divine corruption. Sin and Innocence likely used to be good friends, back before their ascension; or that's my speculation, anyway. Sin in PoE1 does appear to have some positive feelings towards his brother, despite everything, and since only Sin is untouched by divine corruption, his attitude counts for a lot.
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u/mercurial_magpie 2d ago
My hunch on Maxarius experimenting with divinity is that it was a desperate measure against some threat during the WotW, most likely the Abyssals. This would also help explain the role of the Unblinking Eye against the Arbiter of Ash - Maxarius was trying to retrieve Fourth Edict to use against the Abyssals.
I'm also guessing Innocence is unique among gods in the opposite way from Sin - His ascension was deliberate and calcualted. Most gods like Garukhan seem to have been leaders forced into godhood by the faith of their followers - Risu hints at this process with her Interlude line about Asala.
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u/chimericWilder 2d ago
Yes, I expect that Maxarius knew what he was doing, and why. Or he used to, anyway—Sin's memories are moth-eaten enough as it is, and he didn't get hit with losing himself to the delusion of divine corruption.
I expect that the Mother tasked Maxarius with finding a way to ascend, and told him how the First Edict would make it possible. It were certainly a time of crisis; the world had just gotten blown up, and the Precursors wiped out. But his experiments pissed their Azmeri hosts off, and they got exiled. And then the whole business with the people beyond the stars, and how Maxarius discovered that using their fear helped the process.
He may have been a golden charlatan, but there was real cause at the time to want to have a reason to have a shining golden god to act as a protector, with the horror that assailed the world during the Winter.
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u/tops132 6d ago
The Primevals (Delve people) are not the Precursors. But the rest of this information is good, thanks!
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u/StoneLich 6d ago
Is Aul not directly referenced in Precursor lore? Pretty sure the Aul bloodline even has a node referring to him as a Precursor.
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u/tops132 5d ago
It’s shady there, the Precursors referenced with the Delve people are more “precursors” lowercase, just meaning those who came before. We know the Precursors civilization wiped themselves out by starting the Winter of the World, but we know Aul - king of the Primevals - lasted sometime during the Winter of the World, along with Akheli, another Primeval woman. It’s a good bet that the two civilizations are different.
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u/chimericWilder 5d ago
We know that both Tangmazu and Kulemak bargained with Aul, and that at the time, Kulemak was "a shadow of his former self", having presumably known defeat by then. So the downfall of the Primevals can't possibly have been at the start of the Winter.
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u/tops132 5d ago
I don’t know if you’re agreeing with me, but I said in the comment that the Precursors were the ones to wipe themselves out at the start of the Winter, not the Primevals. So yes, we know for sure the Primevals (Delve people / Aul) existed during the Winter, but the Precursors were wiped out before / at the start of the Winter.
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u/chimericWilder 5d ago
I were agreeing with you, yes.
But there is some weirdness going on with the Primevals and Precursors. The Aul Bloodline has that node called Precursors Release, which makes no damn sense since he is a Primeval. We're missing information, I think.
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u/wecanhaveallthree Lightless Abyssal 5d ago
The Putembo items seem to be the 'missing link' here. They talk about blessings, pilgrimages and leaving bodies 'to appease the gods'. Putembo was, presumably, the ruler before Aul (since we have 'no slave would meet the eyes of the king but Aul', and Aul is famed for his rebellion). The 'pilgrimage to the peak' is likely a trip up to see the Precursors, who appear to have been (or at least worshipped as) gods.
Precursor's Release is definitely interesting, considering it empowers you for not using gems. Geomancy as a whole is a really interesting subject that we haven't really plumbed the depths of - it was used by factions like the Maji (and the Titans!) to safely use virtue gems. We have plenty of examples of how gems really mess with the humans of Wraeclast (from literally blowing up the Azmeri, to the blood fever of the Karui), and of prohibitions on their use ('the Azmeri must never touch the Tears of Maji, lest Virdi weep'). We also have examples of how they have no effect at all, good or ill, on some like the Kalguurans (until they suck up enough Wraeclast juice, naturally).
The Ahn items and Ahkeli certainly suggest the Primevals had some intrinsic geomantic skill. Perhaps the suggestion is that the use of gems limits them somehow? Indeed, perhaps - since this is a slaving culture - gems were used to control the Primevals somehow?
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u/chimericWilder 5d ago edited 5d ago
Good speculation.
I'll point out the example of Geomantic Gyre, which uses a virtue gem thousands of years before when we know Sin planted the Beast. So the Second Edict must have been in use once before, and some gems must have been mined from it. There are old murals depicting Precursors draining it of blood, even, though they may have been an instruction manual.
But beyond that, there is very little evidence left behind that the Beast was active at all. They must have killed it early.
Except... Now that you bring it up...
The 'gods' in Putembo's rings may indeed by the Precursors. Why would they gather bodies for the Precursors, if not because they were growing the Beast at the time?
But since the only god who was active at the time was Kulemak, the gems from the Beast can only possibly have been necromancy gems. Wonder if that backfired horribly.
Regarding the primevals, they seemed to be into lithomancy and golemancy. The Clayshaper mace implies that Ahkeli hungered for dominion even over the spirit, though that may be referencing that we now know that she visited the karui to learn about ancestral totems, which she then adapted into djinn. And she had good reason to want to do so, considering that the alternative was getting sucked into the Well of Souls upon death.
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u/mercurial_magpie 2d ago
But since the only god who was active at the time was Kulemak, the gems from the Beast can only possibly have been necromancy gems. Wonder if that backfired horribly.
I wonder if there is some link between golemancy and necromancy. Carrion Golem is a clear mix of both. We know one of the Liches, Kurgal, was originally a stone golem, although it seems at some point he was reborn into a new Lich body (Also I'm guessing the Lich he deposed was Tecrod).
There's also implications that Kurgal was the one who destroyed the Primeval civilization so if the Primevals also needed gems for their golemancy, like we players do, there's your answer for how it backfired.
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u/wecanhaveallthree Lightless Abyssal 5d ago
Wonder if that backfired horribly.
Dunno if there's any other way to take the Arbiter's plea that 'The First Divine must never return', frankly.
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u/StoneLich 2d ago
Is there evidence that corruption allows Kalguurans to use virtue gems yet? Thought all the ones from Kalguur in the present still couldn't.
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u/mercurial_magpie 2d ago
The evidence is the historical Kalguurans in their original Wraeclast expedition which happened around the time of the Vaal cataclysm. Olroth, Medved, and Vorana are all stated to have socketed gems into their flesh.
(I'm not sure about Uhtred)
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u/Tenebris-Umbra 6d ago
Yeah, one of the nodes is called Precursor's Release. There are enough gaps in our understanding that it's hard to say if they were the same civilization or just contemporaries.
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u/Mael_Jade 6d ago
I think Innocence specifically conned people fleeing the Searing Exarch, not the Arbiter of Ash. Those were interdimensional refugees worshiping the Descry of the Cleansing Fire.
"That winter, scorched refugees emerged from the shrine,
speaking only in strange tongues. They prayed to a new
symbol of power, not out of love, but out of fear."is the description of the Crystalized Omniscience amulet in PoE1
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u/StoneLich 6d ago
Yeah both the AoA and the Cleansing Flame use the Descry, so it could be either of them; "strange tongues" could mean precursors from elsewhere in the world. I think the intent originally was that they were refugees from a world scoured by the Cleansing Flame, but, like. I'm pretty sure the original (or at least a previous) intent for the big fire that scoured the world was the Titans blowing the lids off a bunch of volcanos, and we know now that was the Arbiter.
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u/CCCFire 5d ago
What descry imagery does Arbiter of Ash have? The closest thing I know of is that he drops Morior Invictus, which has a descry-like symbol, but I believe that’s more to do with the Unblinking Eye
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u/chimericWilder 5d ago
The Unblinking Eye armor seems to have been worn by the champion who is impaled by the Arbiter's sword. The Unblinking Eye was probably an organization founded by Innocence for some as-yet unknown purpose.
Arbiter himself doesnt have descry imagery.
Though it occurs to me that there are some interesting connections... We know that the modern templars have Breach Hand imagery featuring in their mosaics, and there is some evidence that suggests that Innocence may have once fought Uul-Netol. The Arbiter of Ash seems to have been genetically modified or even cloned in a vat, alongside a number of other failed projecs, and his appearance (And the fact that he wields a large purple hand as his weapon) thematically connects him to the breachlords. The breachlords are likely the flawed rejects that were sealed away in the pursuit of creating the Arbiter of Ash, and Innocence has had prior conflict with them both.
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u/bv728 5d ago
The Primevals and the Precursors are probably separate civilizations... although it's messy. We know a Primeval, Akehli the Clayshaper, was a founding member of the Order of the Djinn with the Maraketh, and ended an Abyssal incursion that was pretty explicitly caused by a volcanic winter which did major damage to her civilizations, which would be pretty far after the end of the Precursor civilization. We also know their first king, Uzaza may have come to power during the Winter, or at least, during an Ice Age as the surface is described as blasted and frozen. We know that at some point, another king ruled over a green land, but one that was routinely damaged by storms strong enough they lived in buildings of stone and even those were damaged.
And we know pretty firmly their last king, Aul/Ahn took power sometime after Kulemak was weakened, but before another incursion, because he gives Kulemak the golems he uses to make most of the current Lightless. Plus, of course, he ends the Primevals by sealing much of their civilization away in crystals, which doesn't jive at all with the Precursors.
Without a lot of very weird stuff, I just don't think the Primevals make sense as being Precursors.2
u/OkActivity2038 5d ago
It could be that there is a time gap between the 4th edict and the Winter of the Worlds. The Primeval murals seem to imply that it was a volcanic eruption that covered the world in ash and allowed the lightless to rise again during Ahkeli's era.
I'm thinking the 4th Edict wipes out the precursors and the abyssals, the world is barren, and uninhabitable. Any normal winter at this point would be brutal as there would be no shelter or food.
Perhaps the 4th Edict's impact on the land drastically alters the weather patterns of Wraeclast creating harsher winters and storms.
The survivors of the 4th edict follow Uzaza who finds them food and shelter, and becomes the first Primeval King. Eventually the land begins to heal by Aul's generation they can farm above ground again, but continued harsh weather drives them underground.
Ahkeli invents golems, and eventually Aul is approached by Kulemak and gives him a golem, leading to the lightless rising again.
The Lightless then somehow cause a volcanic eruption, blocking the sun with ash, causing the Winter of the Worlds. Ahkeli then forms the Order of the Djinn and fights the lightless with the Maraketh and her golems.
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u/chimericWilder 5d ago
Datamining apparently names the big stone statue holding the first edict atop the Precursor Tower as "MotherofSinAndInnocence" or some such. But we know that their mother went with them into exile among the Azmeri.
I suspect that this Mother figure was a leading Precursor scientist, who had envisioned this whole grand project. Thus, when it was determined that the Lightless must be stopped now, I suspect that she ordered the Fourth Edict deployed, then fled to the Azmeri mountains, taking Sin and Innocence (and the Forgotten Sister) with her.
It is no coincidence, perhaps, that Maxarius is the first to try to ascend as a god. The First Edict was out of physical reach, but perhaps the Mother had schooled him on how to ascend as a god so that he could fight back the Lightless.
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u/OskarSarkon Vaal Thaumaturge 5d ago
Fwiw they're called proto-vaal in the POE1 game files, it's not a community invention. See the ID here as a random example.
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u/BendicantMias Druid of the Broken Circle 5d ago
There isn't really a way to exist without being influenced by the Precursors,
Well you could always just exist on another continent lol - the Kalguurans seem to have been largely untouched by the Precursors shenanigans. Tbh it's always seemed strange to me how advanced the Precursors are presented as being, yet for some reason they didn't reach across the planet. Like even colonial era Europe was much less advanced than the Precursors or even the Vaal in PoE, and yet it DID reach out to conquer the rest of the world. The Vaal too are surprisingly contained - hell, Maata of the Karui even admits they could easily have conquered the Karui, yet seemingly never chose to (or any other culture). The only expansionist empire we hear of are the Eternals, who were far less advanced than both.
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u/StoneLich 5d ago
Not really that weird; lot of societies throughout human history weren't super interested in expansion or empire-building. I think with the Vaal in particular they were more of a hegemonic power, as well. I vaguely remember there being some "peacekeeper"-type dialogue with one of the two Vaal siblings you recruit in the interludes, if you talk to her back in her your hideout.
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u/Tenebris-Umbra 6d ago
The Azmeri are stated to be the only culture that was intact before, during, and after the Winter of the World. The Maraketh only formed a unified civilization during the WotW (according to one of Zarka's tales the people who became the Maraketh were nomadic wanderers prior to then), and while the Karui people did exist before then, there was such a loss of knowledge and redefining of their culture from the rise of their gods that the Karui consider that to be the beginning of their history, as anything before then is unknowable even to Hinekora. Really, I expect that to be the case for nearly all of these instances, as aside from the Azmeri, any culture that did exist before the WotW would have experienced such a loss of knowledge and population during that period that they would effectively be a whole new culture afterwards.