Prologues
A thousand years ago, the sky was not a sheet of iron, but a boundless, brilliant sapphire. Three suns—one golden, one silver, and one a pulsing crimson—wove the seasons, and the Loom of Existence spun perfectly.
Then, the Fallen God spoke a word that was not meant for creation.
It was a word of Void.
The First Sun, glorious and innocent, shuddered. Its light dimmed not because a shadow crossed it, but because a fracture opened within its very being. The heavens shrieked, a sound of tearing silk amplified across all planes.
The Void did not consume; it unmade. The divine law woven into the sun—the Law of Absolute Light—was instantly undone. In the resulting, blinding cataclysm, reality itself cracked.
The power of the sun, now a raw, bleeding, divine essence, shattered into seven unequal, burning fragments: the Eclipsed Shards.
They did not fall into the world. They were hurled through the dimensional space, each fragment seeking a realm aligned with a different, elemental Law of Creation—Time, Death, Dream, Flame, Flesh, Shadow, and Silence.
The remaining two suns fled behind the new, eternal night, and the sky wept ash. The Aether Veil, the shield between gods and mortals, tore like old parchment, allowing the raw, destabilizing energies to rain upon the Mortal Plane.
Existence was rewritten in an instant. The age of perfect creation ended, and the Age of the Eclipse began.
For a millennium, the Mortal Plane choked on dust.
The power of the Eclipsed Shards was too pure, too destabilizing for the mortal mind. Every time a Shard landed, its Law was momentarily imposed on the surrounding land, twisting reality into a knot of impossible geometries and shattered memories. The ground where a Shard struck would become a gateway to an Eclipse Realm.
The gods, humbled and terrified, sealed the greatest tear in the Veil with the sacrifice of their own Aether Threads, but the damage was done. The vast continent split, the oceans boiled, and the once-harmonious flow of creation energy, the Aether Threads, became turbulent, unpredictable, and dangerous to manipulate.
The few who found the scattered Shards—often by accident—were instantly annihilated, their Aether Threads irrevocably severed from the Loom. They became nothing more than a momentary spike of catastrophic energy.
Legend held that the fragments possessed a collective consciousness: a desperate, fading echo of the First Sun's Law. It sought a vessel: a mortal strong enough not to be destroyed, but fractured. A being capable of holding a piece of the divine without succumbing to immediate oblivion.
The Loom of Existence held its breath. It spun a single, fragile new thread of destiny, tracing its path to a ruined land where only the forgotten dared to dwell.
It spun toward the Obsidian Wastes.