Long ago, when the First Kingdoms were being built in the Melange Layer, the Weavers were hard at work crafting Ethea. As civilization was blossoming, so were the different interactions, trades, stories, and causes that drive humans forward with passion, purpose, and Will. Hunters, seamstresses, conmen, priests, prostitutes, warriors, kings and even beggars were all paths that would be sought, and the Weavers worked tirelessly to provide the tools to pursue them wholeheartedly. The different Sources formed by the Progenitors provided flexibility and strength to Ethea of all different shapes and sizes, to help fulfill desires both subtle and gross.
One of the most talented Weavers at that time was known as Manoth the Compassionate. He deeply cared for the humans, and was continually inspired to create new Ethea to meet their needs. He had a true gift for manipulating and combining Essence, Pithe, Concordance, Flow, and Oaths into a variety of creative and useful tools. Some of his more Common designs are still distributed to the masses to this day. He was even occasionally commissioned by the Gods to create a Unique Ethos for one of their chosen followers.
It was on one such occasion where a God requested Manoth's assistance. A promising young warrior, devoted to the sword, had been ambushed by the cohort of a jealous rival, who maliciously cut off the warrior's hand "to correct the error of the assignment of such talent to an upstart peasant." An Essence healer managed to save the warrior's life, but the restoration of the hand was beyond the talents of anyone in the village and beyond reasonable expense to seek one out. Possibly more crucially, in three days' time the warrior was receive his Ethos, and he had cried out to his God to either grant him a means to be of worth, or to strike him down dead, for he felt it would be better to feed the crows than to left like this.
Manoth looked into the warrior's heart to see what Ethae would have a chance of binding to him, and was saddened at the pitiful selection that the warrior would barely resonate with. Ethae seek to enhance the momentum of the mortals they bind to, but where there is despair and rage with no recourse, all momentum of one's life comes to a halt. Still, the warrior's wrath had sufficient Will for a solution. Manoth worked tirelessly for three days and three nights, and finally crafted an Apothetic Ethos that would channel the warrior's boundless rage into forming a hand and blade of fire to strike down his enemies. This warrior would come to be known as Gregor of the Flame, and he would go on to perform many deeds of bravery and valor in the First Crusade.
Still, Manoth's eyes had been opened to a grave problem, and he put aside his work for a time to wander the mortal plane. He found that situations like the warrior had faced were not unknown. Not only would untimely tragedies end up limiting the Ethae selection of promising mortals, but the God's Tools would sometimes grow to be little more than yokes around a mortal's neck. In some cases, the hopes of childhood were dashed by the cruel realities of adulthood, leaving poets and sculptors to starve in times of war and famine. Other times, a bottleneck in the Ethos would form that a mortal would never have the opportunity to clear, such as a budding researcher being indefinitely denied access to further books by those with power over them.
In the most extreme cases, the mortal would twist and strain with their Ethos like a man squeezing into a jacket that no longer fits, until maximum Divergence is reached, causing the Ethos to rip at the seams, leaving…nothing. The poor soul would become a Talentless, and their lifespan would be measured in weeks. Not due to reasons of health, mind you (all men are born without Ethos and few would need it to keep their hearts beating and their lungs breathing), but of obsolescence. A [Tireless Laborer] could do more work, a [Deviant Wanderer] could pick more pockets, and even a [Threadbare Charmer] could gain more alms. The fate of the Talentless was to either starve, hang as an easily caught thief, or…leave on their own terms.
But what broke Manoth's heart most of all was the response of one's fellow man to this seeming oversight of the Grand Design. They saw this state of affairs not as a tragedy to be prevented, but a weakness to be exploited. "Let us maim and murder, rob and rape with reckless abandon," cried the bandit, the torturer, and the tyrant. "There will be no reckoning and no uprising if we choose our victims carefully. For plowshares may be beaten into swords, but no matter how a farmer is beaten, they will never have a prayer of raising weapons against us. Those who chose to be powerless at the age of majority deserve to be slaves of the powerful forevermore. And best of all, they will still work with their sickles and pitchforks regardless, for even a tool that causes bleeding and blisters is better than no tool at all."
Manoth wept at the injustice and misery that had befallen his beloved mortals, and he rushed back to his workshop to try and craft solutions for this problem. His mind was full of ideas, but time and time again he found that he could not make the Sources behave as he wished. It seemed that the Progenitors, for all their foresight, had not created their Sources to be worked to Ethae addressing despair, rage and rebellion. Solutions could be crafted eventually, but there was not enough time in the world to begin to meet the demands of the vast stretches of dissatisfied and hopeless humanity. In frustration, Manoth tore a ribbon of Pithe apart, and was surprised that instead of being diminished, the Pithe started to wildly expand in strange and unnatural directions. With great effort, the mutated Pithe was eventually neutralized, but as Manoth lay amongst the wreckage of his workshop, he felt the most strange and terrible of emotions…hope.
After careful experimentation, Manoth found that some of the limitations of the Sources could be subverted to create Inversions of the Sources: pliable, powerful, but unfortunately unstable. An imperfect solution, but one that would serve his purposes. He found that while a Talentless would never be able to attain another Ethos crafted by the Sources, the absence in their soul would allow one to slot in a dark reflection of its original design. An unappreciated [Lamenter] spitting out pain instead of diminishing it, a disgraced [Oathkeeper] being able to compel others to break their promises, an abused [Server of Man] being able to hurt their husband in a thousand personal ways. Manoth was able to quickly craft Ethae to meet the unmet Wills and desires of all the poor unfortunate souls he had encountered on his travels. Finally, as dawn broke at the end of the next Long Night, he distributed his Inverted Ethos to many of the Talentless, a symbolic beacon of hope in a time of despair, agency in a time of sloth, new life in a time of death.
The mortals, of course, misinterpreted his gifts, and the event eventually came to be referred to as the Dawn of Terror. Manoth was dragged in front of the Council to answer for his actions. He offered no excuses and made no pleas of mercy. He had gazed over the mortals as the Dawn broke, and for every burst of confusion and terror, he had also felt passion, vindication, and in a few instances, peace at finding one's purpose in life. He pointed down to the smiling face of another crippled warrior whose Ethos took but an hour to craft with Inverted Sources instead of 3 tireless days (history would remember this warrior as The Ripper). His deepest regret was that for most of the mortals, his gifts would only be able to fulfill their Wills for only a short time before madness and death overtook them. If he had had more time to experiment, surely he could do better.
The Council held a recess to deliberate. Some were repulsed by the "perversion" of the Sources granted by the Progenitors, while others decried granting a second chance to those that had "squandered" their prior gifts. As they pondered, the Council looked down to the Melange Layer to see the reaction of the mortals to the Dawn. Monsters capable of wiping out villages singlehandedly. Heroes evolving their Ethos to meet surprising new challenges. Guardmen providing the first full meal that their prisoners had ever received. Priests already declaring the Dawn as "a punishment from the Gods" for leaving their brothers and sisters to suffer in silence. Those Above saw a deterrent from excess abuse; those Below saw a means to grant monstrous power to the ambitious and the desperate. Both saw a way for those with ill-fitting Ethos to be granted a way to work their Will. A decision was made; these strange Inverted Ethos would be incorporated into the Grand Design.
The Council came back to pass their sentence. For the crime of distributing unauthorized Ethos, Manoth would be banned from creating Ethos using the traditional Sources, and to be confined to his workshop until the next passing of the Age. His penance would be the endless creation of Inverted Ethos, one to mirror every regular Ethos that had been created, as well as others suitable for gaining at the cusp of adulthood. These would act as "a last resort of purpose to those who have none." Manoth smiled as he was led away to his new "prison", his mind racing at all the different ways he could help the hopeless and forlorn.
