Hammer of Shokai

"And Shokai passed judgment upon the Archon for his sacrilege, striking the city of Merash from the heavens with his hammer of thunder. Even the farmers on the edge of town were struck blind from the terrible light of divine vengeance. When their sight returned, all of Merash - from the palace to the city walls - was destroyed.
The farms burned, entire forests were felled, the people lay dead, burned, blind or deaf. All of Merash had paid a terrible price for their Archon's wickedness."
-from "The Fall of Merash", an account of the Hammer of Shokai incident

The Hammer of Shokai is the commonly used term for a meteor strike that took place over the former city-state of Merash, in the southern Sapphire Coast, in 391 TE. In the evening, eyewitnesses reported seeing a large object - commonly described as a ball or bolt of lighting - fall from the sky over Merash, destroying the city. It is an rare instance of an asteroid directly hitting a city, and as such was of considerable cultural and religious importance to the people of the Sapphire Coast.

Incident

The object that fell from the sky was a nickel-iron asteroid of about 40 to 50 metres in diameter which had been captured by Annyrion's orbit after passing too close to the planet and brought down by the planet's gravitation pull. The asteroid came down over the Sapphire Coast, eventually exploding just above the populated city-state of Merash, in the southern Sapphire Coast. The air-burst explosion had a force of roughly five megatons of TNT, which in the middle of a populated area was an unmitigated catastrophe.
The city of Merash, being the epicentre of the meteor strike, was nearly completely obliterated by the asteroid. Merash was mostly made up of adobe-brick buildings, which were mostly either completely blasted apart or collapsed beneath the ensuing shockwave. Thousands of people perished; some were outright vaporised, while others caught fire. Those who were not killed were struck blind, or injured internally from the shockwave.
The effects went beyond the city itself, with hundreds of trees in the nearby forest flattened, with forest fires raging for days afterwards. Virtually all agricultural plots near the city were ruined, and wildlife died in horrific numbers. Even farmers and wanderers many kilometres away reported being knocked off their feet and struck unconscious. The ensuing tremor from the impact was felt in other city-states in the southern Sapphire Coast, with small tremors being felt as far away as the coastal city of Barkos.

Merath's location on the Sapphire Coast

Theory of divine retribution - Kergan's folly

In an attempt to explain what caused the Hammer of Shokai incident, the few survivors of Merash, along with the residents of other nearby cities, reached out to the Shokai Templar, the priesthood of the elemental thunder god Shokai- the rationale being the similarity of the incident to a lightning strike put the incident firmly in Shokai's purview. The Exarch of the Shokai Templar, after deliberation and meditations, proclaimed that the incident was an act of divine retribution.
Merash's reigning Archon, Kergan, had a reputation as a corrupt leader, and mere days before the Hammer, he had sought to marry a noble woman who was already wed. She spurned his advances, and Kergan sought to bribe her husband to divorce her, believing this would free him to marry her. When her husband not only refused, but told Kergan she wanted nothing to do with him and to leave her be, Kergan had him assassinated in a fit of rage.
This egregious act had already raised considerable anger in Merash's population, with the nobility on the verge of revolt and the common people set to join them, and the Helikan League debating summoning Kergan to explain himself to the Council of Archons. The timing of this incident coinciding with the Hammer of Shokai, along with a lack of understanding of the scientific processes behind what actually happened, made it appear clear - Shokai is regarded by the Elemental faith as a warden against injustice and a punisher of evildoers, and it seemed to the Templar a logical step to attribute the incident to his own wrath.
Not all Elementalists hold this theory, but as the Templar, the official hierarchical body of the god, have attributed it, making it the mainstream opinion of most adherents with little room to challenge it.
As a side-effect, this caused considerable ascendancy in Shokai - long considered the sternest and strictest of the Elemental gods - among the pantheon, with a great increase in religious tributes, prayers, and a general fear of committing acts that would incite his anger. The Templar themselves benefited from this, enjoying uneven political influence for many years in many of the cities of the Sapphire Coast.

Alternate theories

"It seems to me that if Shokai killed a city every time it had a degenerate for an archon, mankind would not have any cities. But how else can we explain it? Something fell from the sky and struck Merash that day. Whether it was an angry god... I don't know. Maybe a piece of the moon broke off and fell on it? Gods, I don't know."
-a natural philosopher attempting and failing to explain the cause of the Hammer of Shokai incident

Whilst the divine wrath of the Elemental god of thunder is the most commonly accepted explanation for what happened to Merash, it is not the only explanation. Followers of other faiths such as the Solar Faith or the Avadian pantheon do not accept this explanation. The Solars - no doubt spurred by their own ambitions in the Sapphire Coast - attribute the action to their sun god, Venderus, and believed it to be a sign of his displeasure for the decadence of the Sapphran nations, which the Kalriv were obligated to temper.
Natural philosophers, who either were of moderate Elemental belief or held no particular religious beliefs, found it unlikely to believe that a single god would choose this particular incident to destroy a city and kill thousands of people with no involvement in their Archon's misdeeds. They believed another cause would be likely, probably an accident of nature - a belief shared by the Druids of the Vessa, the other major body studying natural events.
Hypotheses of what could have caused the incident varied. A common belief was that a piece of the moon may have broken off and simply hit the city, while some speculated on a possible weapon available to the Kalriv. The situation is generally considered in natural philosophical circles to be a mystery that cannot yet be fully explained.

Aftermath

The news of the complete destruction of an entire city in the blink of an eye rocked the Sapphire Coast to its core - and given its after-effects were felt for considerable distance, the powers that be could not simply ignore it.
A crisis meeting of the Council of Archons of the Helikan League, of which Merash was a member, was called immediately, and once news spread to other cities, small-scale revolts broke out among the people, fearing Shokai would punish other cities for their Archons' perceived misdeeds. The various Archons and kings/queens of the Sapphire Coast also reined in their own grips on power, many of them shaken at the idea that they were not untouchable and that there was an invisible line that they could be destroyed for crossing.
The survivors of Merash who were able to left the city, believing it to be cursed - and fearing the potential wrath of Shokai should anybody attempt to rebuild the city. Some of these survivors were attacked by bandits, while others reached other cities such as Helik, Teldum and Ekos and were taken in as citizens there - with their reception varied depending on the city and people. Merash never recovered from the incident, and to this day it has never been resettled, with no refugees willing to return and with no prospective settlers willing to risk defying the will of Shokai by rebuilding.
In the eighty years since the attack, a small number of people have returned to Merash's ruins- but never permanently. The first people visiting the ruins were natural philosophers, seeking to assess the incident and understand potential causes. Once the natural philosophers were able to visit without ill effect, the newly-formed Helikan Public Service sent out their own scholars to investigate.
Finally, the priests and scholars of the Shokai Templar, seeking to understand what happened and how to alleviate the god's alleged anger, made pilgrimages periodically. The city has also drawn the attention of treasure-hunters and grave robbers, seeking a virtually unguarded trove of treasures. The Templar cracked down on this however, hunting down people who would disturb the site, and by and large other than a few people lucky enough to get in and out unseen, Merash remains abandoned.

Type

Natural