Before the gods, there was no peace to disturb.

I keep coming back to the Fomorians because they are not easy to flatten into a simple shape. In later storytelling, chaos is often made to look decorative – a force to be conquered, tidied up, put in its place so the world can be restored to order. Irish mythology is less obedient than that. It does not always insist that order is the default state and chaos the interruption. Sometimes it suggests the opposite.

The Fomorians are there before the bright world settles into anything like balance. They belong to a deeper layer of the story, one that feels less like a warning than a reminder. Not everything begins in harmony. Not everything that is dark is foreign. Some things are simply older than the structures we prefer to trust.

That is what makes them interesting to me, and maybe why I keep returning to them while building Fili. Not because I want to turn mythology into a design lesson, but because myth works similarly to my instincts. I do not need clean categories. I do not need clear separations. I do not need the comfort of knowing where one thing ends and another begins.

Myths sometimes do agree.

The Fomorians are not a neat opposite to the Tuatha Dé Danann. They are not the simple dark side of a cleanly ordered world. They are part of the same mythic fabric, part of a world where power, ancestry, and conflict are woven together more tightly than modern stories often allow. In that sense, they are less a monster class than a pressure in the world – a reminder that order never arrives unchallenged, and perhaps never fully owns the ground beneath it.

That idea matters to me because it keeps the myth alive. If a story makes chaos too legible, it becomes safe. If it makes order too complete, it becomes thin. The older stories feel richer because they leave room for unease. They let the world remain unfinished.

Maybe that is the real gift of the Fomorians – not fear, but depth. They give the world a floor beneath the floor. They remind us that what we call stability is often just the visible surface of something more ancient, less tidy, and harder to control.

And maybe that is why they still matter. Not because they can be defeated in the end, but because they make the world feel like it has weathered something before we arrived.

From the Mead-Hall
Ull Sande / Dániel Lukács • June 2026