Ard Tala

The world was not always as it is now...

The years come and go in their seasons. The tides ebb and flow beneath the moon. But once, there were no seasons. Once, there was no moon. The whole of the earth lay locked below snow and ice, save for a thin belt of warmth where lived a people of ancient days and ancient memories. They alone recall what it was like then, six thousand years ago, at the end of one age of the earth and the beginning of another, when a dark star passed over the world, blotting out the sun.

For nine days, it was as night. Darker than night, for night comes with the hope of dawn. Beasts howled in the pitch black. Great trees curled and shed their evergreen leaves. In the torchlight, the ancient folk looked to their houses of wisdom and found them empty of all but despair.

But on the tenth day, the Dark Star receded in the heavens, and after came the morning again. The Elder Folk awoke to find the world changed. The sun, its course once steady, now veered across a sky roiling in shifting seasons. Their warm, green country slowly turned to desert.

Above the belt of day, long-frozen lands thawed, and strange seeds sprouted from the steaming earth. From dens and caves never before opened, strange creatures loped on terrible claws and eyed the whimpering wolves unsure of what now shared the wilderness with them.

Beyond and behind the new nature of things, needles of ætherial magic, thread by whatever mind lay at the heart of that Dark Star, knit themselves into the weft and weave of the world's mortal fabric. New powers came to the hands of the Elder Folk, new knowledge to command the mundane by tugging at the strands of the arcane.

And lighting the night, a lonesome child of that shadowy wanderer hung high in the sky, left behind to gaze down on tempestuous new tides, blinking away its months, years, and centuries, ominous and slow, beholding this new Ætherian Age.