No soul still living remembers the world before the Darkest Night. Whether that is a mercy or a curse remains a matter of endless debate. Some claim the gods abandoned Creation.
Others swear they were betrayed by one of their own. A handful of scholars dare suggest a far more unsettling truth—that the gods were never immortal, only prisoners whose existence sustained the very laws of reality. No proof has ever settled the argument.
Only silence. For on that night, the heavens answered no prayer. The stars dimmed. The oceans stood still. The wind forgot its name. And before the coming of dawn, every god was dead.
History remembers that catastrophe as The Fracture. Ordinary folk speak of it more simply: The Darkest Night. The ancient Pacts that once held Creation together shattered alongside their makers. The world did not end. It merely forgot how it was meant to exist.
Mountains shifted where none had stood before. Forests swallowed kingdoms in a matter of days. Entire cities vanished beneath seas that had never existed. The bodies of the fallen gods never faded. They became part of the world itself. Their bones formed mountains. Their blood carved rivers. Their hearts still slumber beneath stone. Their final breath lingers in every corner of Creation.
From those divine remains emerged a force unlike any known before. Not a gift. Not a curse. But the very power through which the gods once wrote the laws of existence.
We call it The Current. Every spell. Every miracle. Every impossible thing. They are nothing more than a mortal hand reaching into the Current and daring, for a fleeting instant, to rewrite reality. Yet no mortal was ever fashioned to carry the weight of Creation. Every soul that touches the Current leaves with less of itself than it brought. What is taken cannot be measured. What is returned cannot be undone.
The oldest records speak of a slow transformation. A rewriting. The learned have given this fate a single name: The Price. No two souls suffer it alike. Some become saints. Some become monsters. Most become something for which no name has yet been written.
Even the smallest fragment of crystallised Current—known throughout Aureth as Cinder— has raised kingdoms, ended empires and condemned countless lives to war. Many seek it. Few survive it. All are changed by it. And so the world endures. Not because it has healed... ...but because it has not yet remembered how to die. Should these words find you, traveller, know this above all else: Do not fear the Current. Fear what it sees in you.