Bleeding some ideas on Uuluu:
They came from fire, that first flame. The flame burned hot, and burned bright, so bright the shadows it cast lingered after the flame was gone. These shadows we call the gods, and they ruled over the ashes of the flame for many years. The smoke that rose from the flame became the stars, and a few gods played with the flame's ashes, rolling them into balls with their spit. These became the planets. And on these planets, birds and beasts and men of ash came to be. They flew and sang and danced, but the ashes held no divinity like the shadows did. These were mortals, doomed to die true deaths without hope of return. One goddess heard their singing, and fell in love with the sweet sound and the clumsy dances these mortals made. And the mortals she watched over lived long lives, with her divine hand stopping up the volcanoes and scattering the storms. But when she looked away for only a blink, she would look back to see cities swept away, islands sunken beneath the waves, years gone in a moment, lives snuffed out by nature or by the whims of some other bored god. As long as men were mortal, they would be lost forever. So she swallowed the worlds, every star and every planet with life, taking them into her belly where they would be safe, and bleeding her divinity into them in her womb.
The other gods did not want to share the world with mortals or have them as anything more than playthings, and they feared what would happen if the mortals were reborn with her divinity. So they bound her legs with unbreakable chains, and she could not give birth.
Here is where stories diverge. The imperials believe that her sister forged a blade of her own blood's iron and cut open the Mother’s womb, and we emerged blinking into the world again. The elves believe that the Mother died with us inside her, for they remember eating her corpse as their eyes opened for the first time.
All the world as we know it is inside her corpse, the great vault of her ribs, the lungs filled with the gases of eternal decay, the womb still pulsing in death as those who die inside her are reborn. Even a dead god holds great power.
The scent of this death brought things from further beyond, the Maggots. These set upon the mother's corpse and ate her flesh, and as they did the mother's love for her children filled them. These maggots are now the stewards of death, feeding off of it as they shepherd souls to rebirth inside her festering womb, and when they take human faces and human voices, we call them elves.
