...The bright white thing hung low, pressing its ghastly face against the skin of the earth like an angry, cold sun. We didn't know of the moon then- what were we to think? We were horrified, unsure of what else might come. This thing was the end of days to us. It was our death, staring down at us."
-Account from a survivor of the Vault's Unsealing.
It's an unfortunate truth that the end of the world as you know it is inevitable. An ever-looming threat, harrowing on the horizon. Equilibrium can, unfortunately, never be achieved. It was written into the very fiber of the mortals that walk the planet now. The end isn't always their fault, though. The scales aren't cursed to tip to the same side, at least. Often, at times, the end features cards played from both hands- god and mortal, alike.
The end of the Fifth Cycle, as it was called, was unfortunately one of these cases. The unsealing of the great Gaol which held the god of the Moon, Aphelia, was created by the heretics whose society was destroyed by her hand. What else could they expect? To cast a god from her throne and into the bowels of the earth was an unsustainable hope. And upon her unavoidable release, did they expect her to go gentle back into the night sky? For her to forgive them?
So she called upon the bygone Fifth a cataclysmic flood, a plague, creatures from the depths of the farthest dark to ensure those who came before us would feel her anger for centuries to come. She killed not only the mortals who walked the land, but the gods who allowed her imprisonment to take place. It took a long time for the world to recover, and those who survived did so by the skin of their teeth. Eventually, her anger was quelled. She felt the guilt of her actions in the weight of the innocents souls she had welcomed herself to the afterlife. She fell to a repentant quiet after, doing no more than watching and protecting those she had once yearned to see meet their demise, and the goddess of the Sun, Callista, was left to pick up the pieces in her wake.
The flame of the Gods fell, and as such a new Warden was to be chosen. Under her watchful eye, the gods' power- even that of one such as Aphelia- is kept in check, and we have found a new normalcy. In this new age known as the Sixth Cycle, on the bones of the Lunar Gaol (or the Vault, as some may call it) cities have risen and fell. Thousands of years have gone by, allowing progress unlike ever seen before- but yet, the future looms. None can be certain when the scales will tip again.
PROCEED
