Chapter Text
“Be for Man the memory of Earth and Origin. Remember this Earth. Never forget her, but — never come back. If you come back, you might meet the Archangel at the east end of Earth, guarding her passes with a sword of flame. I feel it. Space is your home hereafter. It’s a lonelier desert than ours. God bless you, and pray for us.”
-A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller
Taken from a lecture given by Magister Parvana Madani in 1324 AE for a class on the subject of human history.
Where is humanity from? Where does mankind place its point of origin?
If the followers of the Six Gods are to be believed, we came from Orr out of the Mists. If we believe an anthropological study conducted nearly a century ago, humanity originated somewhere on a landmass to the West of Cantha and slowly migrated up into Elona to Tyria and perhaps to places beyond our reach.
According to few and fragmented accounts given by Jotun storytellers, humanity came west from across the sea in ships before settling on the coasts. Worth noting in these stories is that the gods did not favor us, only the Jotun and the Norn before abandoning them and guiding humanity from primitives to a great civilization.
Now, after our murky origins, we know that the gods left mankind and either returned, fled, or vanished into the Mists, an event known to us as the Exodus of the Gods. Human civilization fell to war and eventual ruin as the Charr and other races took advantage of our disunity and reliance on powerful beings to shepherd us.
We also know that the gods, if so they can be called, did not create the bloodstone. Rather, they took it from somewhere and split it into six pieces within the city of Arah. Definite proof of this statement is rather hard to obtain, thanks to an Elder Dragon parking his rotting bum right on Arah. We also know that they erased Abbadon from the pantheon, to the point of purging his name from all records and destroying his temples and statues. Were you to ask a priest before the events of Nightfall, Abbadon never existed.
With these facts in mind, the question of humanity’s origins may never be truly answered beyond the simple fact that we- humans, may not be part of Tyria at all.