It's a quiet world, hemmed in by duty, responsibility, and allegiances both familial and noble. Your community is one of a handful of villages, strung together like spokes on a wheel. At one point, the old wives say, travel between the villages was common, but during the last several generations, the roads between have become treacherous. Wild beasts, wicked storms and dense forests have made the routes impassible ... except during the three days surrounding the High Solstice, or Midsummer. At that time, and only then, all paths to the Sacred Meadow, the central place of meeting, are open, and so is travel to the other villages. No one can explain how this is possible and, as it's been fact for a hundred years or more, it's no longer a matter for speculation, only of reliability.
While there are signs, mysterious and unfathomable, of different cultures having lived in your realms in the long distant past, their rarely-found artifacts and detritus are unusable (except as scrap metal, or for recycling into something useful like bottles or ploughshares). Your metallurgists can forge pots, weapons, horseshoes and jewelry, but there is nothing high-tech about this place. Electronics are unheard of, and grand sorcery is unbelievable. Hedge mages can birth babies, brew a love potion, or cure warts, but conjuration is legend not reality.
Some of the villages are governed by those deemed as Nobility, others by community Elders, and some by religious hierarchy. Power, as always, comes in many forms, and caste is prevalent. While this is true, ignorance is not necessarily the rule for the peasants ... stupid people make less effective workers and everyone has hobbies.
Into this world you were born, and have lived all of your life ... and all your life you have known that, somehow, you are just a little bit different from those around you.
The Creation Myth
-as told by Storyteller Darwin
In the darkness before time, there was the Maelstrom. Bitterly cold yet eternally hot, empty yet full of all that would become life, it was the cauldron of Being. Into that darkness, there came a Wanderer. Full of the Maelstrom's own power, he was, and master over all that was held in this cauldron. He called forth thought and dreams -- and from the maelstrom, the order of Idea grew. In anguish at the rigor and constrains placed upon it, the Maelstrom spat forth the Wanderer and his orderly concepts far across the firmament. Hurling through time, as the Wanderer crossed the darkness sparks flew from the hem of his robe, and the stars came into being. Of those which shimmered in the newly created sky, eleven he considered the brightest and most fair. Before he fell into oblivion, His Idea spread before him, and cradled him gently from his fall.
For aeons the Wanderer nurtured his Idea, and the order of it grew, magnified and spread until it rivaled the great Maelstrom which birthed it. He created the beasts of the fields, the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, the moon at night and the sun to warm his way. But for all this splendor, the Wanderer, the only of his kind, grew lonely. In his loneliness, he dreamed, and in his dream he beheld a Being of surpassing beauty. They came together, and all the realms sprang from their union.
When the Wanderer woke, the Being was gone, but a child, a boy lay swathed beside him ... his son. To him, the Wanderer gave dominion over all the realms and the beasts of the field, and birds of the air, and the fish of the sea. And under the Son's hand, all was given to Order.
Time passed, and the Son, too, grew lonely. He looked into the night's sky and saw the eleven stars, the brightest and most fair. He told his father that with those stars at his hand, he would never feel loneliness again. So the Wanderer held forth his will and caused the stars to fall to the earth, to become woman incarnate. Scattered they were, across all the realms, and where they came to rest, shards of starlight fell, bringing each place the power of its Mistress. One by one, the Son took the Stars to wife, though his loneliness was never quite assuaged.
In the fullness of time, the Stars gave birth to their own children which peopled the lands. Eventually, they grew weary of their land-bound home. Some, reconciled to their fate, returned to their own realms. A few let the light of their origin flicker and die and so passed from this world completely. The rest diminished and returned into the firmament, never to be seen as woman again.
The Son ruled over all the realms for time upon time, and so until the end of his days. The Wanderer, never resting, is said to be wandering still.
