The Loss of the Sacred Water
Listen, children. Before The Long Night and our modern age with our histories, there are two stories you must hear, and they are too closely linked to be told separately.
After our Exile, the Makers vanished. We had known that they had walked the world while we served them, and some of us had gone with them. After our exile into the dead lands, we never saw them again. We saw their hands in things, finding and recognizing the work of our Makers in many places. We even found their hidden channels for the Sacred Water used to make us.
After The Night of Four Moons when the world was reborn and things grew in the Deadlands once more, we K'vut built our society. Our towns grew to cities and wood gave way to stone and we reached for the sky with our structures. In time though, the sacred water stopped flowing through its channels, and the world began to die.
As the world lay dying, our civilization flourished with every city having its own language, art and culture. People divided themselves into tribes by city of birth, and rarely left their cities to travel, as the wild beasts were dangerous and large. It was only the blight killing our crops that let us know that something must be done about the death of our natural world. Debates raged in every city, most wanted to use technology, and The Spire sought a magical solution.
In the end a band of four strangers traveled out into the wilds. No one knows what happened to them, but the Waters began to flow and the world thrived. Each city found the nearest conduit of the Sacred Water, and built a special reservoir to contain an emergency supply. Stories whispered by refugees say that some cities tried to use the Sacred Water, but no one knows how.
Several hundred years later, The Zut Invaded. When we fled our cities, some tried to take the Sacred Water with them. Every time, those refugees were slaughtered to the last. None who kept even a drop of the Sacred Water with them ever survived. The Zut wiped them all out and stole the Sacred Water from us. Driven as we were from every other city, the warriors made a last stand in our southernmost city on the coast while the children were escorted to the seashore to avoid destruction as those who would become the Niechela fled the Zut on ships from another city in the west. None of us know what happened to them.
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