The cataclysm did not end the dying — it began it. The first two centuries after the Deity's Sacrifice are remembered as the Years of Ash: the long, grey, godless collapse in which more of Kworgale's children died than in all its wars combined.
"The gods did not abandon us in a day. They abandoned us slowly, while we watched."
Three Elders had survived the Conflagration: the Ruby, the Warden, and the Hammer. But they were broken powers, grieving and diminished, and they could not mend what had been done. One by one, across some two hundred years, they withdrew from the material world — retreating from the sight of mortals into silence, exile, and hidden places. The age in which gods walked among their children, taught in their cities, and marched in their wars was simply, quietly, over. No mortal living today has ever seen an Elder.
Without the gods, the order they had built came apart. Cross-continental trade collapsed. Famine and plague stalked the ruined provinces. Cities emptied; roads were lost; whole bodies of knowledge vanished with the scholars who carried them. The proud peoples of the Fivefold Fleets were thrown back into isolation and want, each branch left to survive alone amid the wreckage of a golden age it could barely remember.
It was, the chroniclers agree, the lowest the world has ever fallen. And yet a people that has lost everything will always, in time, reach for something to believe in again. Out of the ash and grief of these centuries, the great new faiths of the world were born — and the Age of Faiths began.
5:01The World & Its Chronicle ·
The burning that broke the balance and began the Years of Ash — the first movement of Kworgale's darkest chapter.
5:14The World & Its Chronicle ·
The age when the powers that made the world withdrew from it, leaving only their shadows behind.
LoreThe Deity's SacrificeThe world counts its years from a single instant. Everything before it is reckoned in the long shadow of the gods; everything after is the struggle of their orphaned children.…
LoreThe Age of FaithsA world that has buried its gods does not stop praying. In the long recovery after the Years of Ash, the survivors raised new faiths over the silence the Elders had left — and…
LoreThe ConflagrationFor eighteen centuries the Elder gods guided their children. Then they destroyed each other, and the world with them. The war that ended the divine age is remembered, with dread,…
LoreThe Religion of the RubyThe Ruby is the most beloved and most feared of the gods of the human south — and of all the divine powers of Kworgale, she alone is worshipped not as a distant maker but as a…
LoreThe Five Elder GodsBefore they were gods, they were exiles. The powers the world calls the Elder Elehath — the Elders — were once members of a deathless race of star-born beings who came to…
LoreThe Fivefold FleetsFive and a half centuries after the founding of Vadesh, the children of the Ur-City set out to inherit the world. The great dispersal is remembered as the Fivefold Fleets, and…
PeopleElehathThe deathless people of Elehaya, a world that destroyed itself. Some fifty thousand crossed the Veil to Kworgale in Crystal Ships; in the Great Renewal nearly all of them chose…