The Third Dawn
The world wept long before the ears of mortals heard the news. Nature knew, instinctually, that some great force had shifted, that it was once again time for the world to reorient itself, that some grave act had immutably altered everything. The leaves wilted and floated down from the trees, the grass below dying as the rotten leaves fell to the plains. The clouds above convened to mourn in the great grey sky, the sun too ashamed to show its face, the heavens sobbing a torrential downpour. And as the rain struck the ground it splashed with an ethereal green light, the very essence of Caelethus dissipating into the soil. The morning birds dared not chirp, not a single creature dared stir or make a single sound, as a great stillness enveloped the world, one that rivalled the silence of the First Dawn, that accursed time when there was only darkness, before the Grace of Uries touched the planet and sparked the first light of goodness.
The Great God Eorr had wounded the world, the life which he had vowed to protect since the Second Dawn. But on this day a foul deed had soured his heart and had invoked in him a prodigious maddening hurt, for his own son had betrayed him in the most vile manner. His own son had met with a dark goddess in the blackest of nights, and together shaped a new creation. These new beings were heinous and twisted, dark wretches from the deepest reaches of the underworld, a pervasive evil. And so Eorr looked upon his child and did not recognise him; for he now saw a degenerate, a disgraceful fool whom in his tempestuous anger he sought to destroy.Â
And so as the world wept the great stillness broke, for a colossal comet shot through the heavens, glimmering bright green, raging towards the earth below. As it crashed, great sparks flew and dissipated into ephemeral light, and the soil lay charred around it. And a great shockwave burst forth through the still, dim world, and as it did all it touched wilted and died. It spread through the plains and the farmlands, and soon to be bountiful harvests were rendered corrupt, and the soil no longer bore nutrients or water to support life. In the forests the trees cracked and fell in an instant, and hundreds of woodland creatures attempted to dash madly from the terrible sight before they themselves thudded to the ground, cold and dead, in an instant. The soil turned grey and lifeless, and around the gargantuan crater was an even larger scar upon the world, a vast wasteland born of the impact of the comet. This land was now devoid of any life, save a small stone that glowed green in the centre of the crater. It shook back and forth as though something inside it were trying to escape.
The explosion woke the men of the world from their slumber, and when they emerged from their homes they saw The World Star upon the horizon, illuminating all in a deep crimson, and they knew the Third Dawn was upon them. At first there were hushed whispers, but eventually more and more people made their way into the red light of the star and the crowd began to stir up quite the raucous. As they ventured out into the world even they could sense it was now different, as nature had for long before them, and it was then that they saw the destruction wrought by the enormous crater before them, the seemingly unending wasteland before them. Curious as ever, men ventured into the crater, and there it lay. The small stone. They gave it a name: Churnebus, The Life Stone, The Great Corrupter, The Rejected Son. And so the story was told, narrated by the sages and the pious who had deciphered it through prayer and prophecy, that Eorr had cast his own son from the heavens for creating the scourge of the daemons.
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