The Third Cataclysm

The Age of Divine Scholarship

In the ages following the Forge Rebellion, mortal civilizations had rebuilt once more. They had learned the lessons of the First and Second Cataclysms—or so they thought. Magic was practiced with humility, and technology was developed in harmony with nature.

But a new form of ambition emerged within the temples. Scholars and priests began to study the gods not as objects of worship, but as subjects of research. They sought to understand the mechanisms of divine power, believing that such knowledge would bring them closer to their patrons.

At first, their studies seemed harmless—even beneficial. They developed more effective prayers and rituals, better understood the nature of divine blessings, and deepened their theological knowledge. But slowly, understanding gave way to something darker: the desire for control.

The Doctrine of Divine Binding

A council of high priests, drawn from temples across the world, developed a heretical doctrine in secret. They reasoned that if mortals could understand divine power, they could also harness it—and if they could harness it, they could control those who wielded it.

They studied the ancient oaths that Verath had bound upon the gods at creation. They researched the fundamental laws that governed divine interaction with the mortal realm. They developed rituals designed not to petition the gods for favor, but to compel divine obedience.

The Grand Ritual

For decades, the Binding Conclave worked in secret, perfecting their rituals and gathering the resources needed for their greatest working. They constructed massive temple complexes designed as divine prisons, with binding circles etched in materials both sacred and profane.

When the high priests finally assembled to perform the Grand Ritual, they believed themselves ready to command the very architects of reality. Their target was audacious beyond measure—they sought to bind Soltharion, bearer of radiant justice, and Malakai, embodiment of entropy, simultaneously.

The Starfall

Soltharion and Malakai had existed in eternal opposition since the dawn of creation. Light and darkness, justice and entropy—they had never agreed on anything. But in the face of such supreme mortal arrogance, they found unprecedented common ground.

Their response was immediate and absolute. The skies above Aethoria darkened, then blazed with terrible light as meteors began to rain from the heavens. This was the Starfall—the divine judgment of two Primordials acting in perfect, devastating unity.

The first impacts obliterated the temples of the Binding Conclave in an instant. But the Starfall did not end there. It continued, night after night, year after year, as if the heavens themselves had declared war upon the world below.

Three Hundred Years of Devastation

For three hundred years, Aethoria existed in a constant state of destruction and rebirth. The world was remade not once, but countless times, as if the Primordials sought to erase every trace of the civilization that had dared to challenge them.

Volcanoes erupted without cease, covering entire regions in ash and molten rock. The very shape of the world changed—oceans became deserts as water boiled away or drained into newly formed chasms, while other deserts flooded to become new seas. Continents were broken apart by tremendous forces, then slowly mended back together in new configurations.

The climate became unrecognizable. Regions that had known only warmth were buried under ice. Frozen lands thawed and became tropical. Seasons lost all meaning as the world convulsed through its long transformation.

The Survivors

Despite the magnitude of the devastation, not all was lost. The Primordials, for all their fury, did not seek the complete annihilation of mortal life—only the absolute humbling of those who had dared to challenge the cosmic order.

The majority of the sapient races had survivors, though often only scattered handfuls who had found shelter in the deepest caves, the highest mountains, or the most remote islands. They emerged into an unrecognizable world, stripped of all the achievements of their ancestors.

Some races were not so fortunate. Several peoples were lost entirely during the three centuries of destruction, their names and cultures erased from history. Today, we know of them only through fragmentary references in the oldest surviving texts—shadows of peoples we will never truly understand.

A World Reborn

New beasts arose to fill the ecological niches left by those that had been completely destroyed. Some evolved from the survivors of the cataclysm, adapting to the transformed world with remarkable speed. Others seemed to emerge from nowhere, as if the reshaping of the world had created new forms of life alongside new lands and seas.

The land itself was unrecognizable. The continents that exist today bear little resemblance to those that existed before the Starfall. New mountain ranges had risen where plains once stood. River systems had been completely redrawn. The very coastlines of the world had been rewritten.

The Quieting

After three hundred years of unrelenting destruction, Aethoria finally grew quiet. The meteors ceased their fall. The volcanoes settled into dormancy. The seas found their new levels and the continents their final shapes—at least, for this age of the world.

The survivors emerged from their shelters into a world that was simultaneously ancient and newborn. Everything they had known was gone. Their cities, their libraries, their temples, their tools, their accumulated wisdom—all had been swept away by the divine judgment.

And so began the long struggle that continues to this day: the effort to remember what was lost, to rebuild what was destroyed, and to relearn what had been forgotten. The sapient races of Aethoria started again, from the very beginning, with nothing but their determination and their humility to guide them.

The Current Age

Almost three thousand years have passed since the Quieting. In that time, the sapient races have rebuilt much of what was lost—though they know, now, that they will never recover everything. Some knowledge is gone forever. Some peoples will never return.

The world that exists today is the product of those three hundred years of divine reshaping and the nearly three millennia of mortal rebuilding that followed. It is a world that remembers, even if imperfectly, the price of hubris.