by Apprentice Mage Theron of the Eastern Guild, Year 15 After the First Gate
They say the traders found it first.
A shimmer in the air, they said. Like heat rising from summer roads, but wrong somehow. The caravan master sent word to the capital- a curiosity, perhaps worth investigating. The Mage scholars arrived three weeks later.
By then, the shimmer had become a crack.
I was not there. I was young then, barely past my apprenticeship, studying weather patterns in the Eastern College when the news arrived. But I spoke to those who were. The senior mages, the ones who survived.
They said the crack grew. That reality itself seemed to tear, slowly, methodically, over months. They measured it. Studied it. Theorized about its nature. Some thought it a natural phenomenon. Others whispered of ancient magic awakening.
No one predicted what would happen when it opened.
The reports say two hundred mages were present that day. The kingdom's finest minds, gathered to witness history. They had instruments prepared. Containment circles drawn. Protocols established.
Thirty-seven came back.
The stories differ on what emerged first. Some say it was a creature of nightmare, all teeth and rage. Others claim it was something worse- something that looked almost human until it moved. The details blur in the telling, filtered through trauma and terror.
What's certain is this: ten thousand soldiers died in the first clear. Two months of continuous fighting before the tide finally stopped. Before they could establish the garrison that stands there still, over a decade later, waiting for the next wave.
Six gates have opened since. Each one announced by that same shimmer, that same tearing of the world. We know the signs now. We prepare as best we can.
But I think of those first mages sometimes. The ones who stood before that crack with their instruments and theories, believing they could understand it. Contain it.
I wonder if they felt the moment turn. If they knew, in that last second before it opened, that they had been catastrophically, fatally wrong.
I wonder if we still are.