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The Fall of Terra and the Coming of the Dark Age
The Fall of Terra and the Coming of the Dark Age
In the days before ruin, before the coming of the Dark Age, mankind was a race of ambition and ceaseless striving. Theirs was a spirit unyielding, ever seeking to perfect the frail vessels of flesh they had been given. For millennia, they sought the strength of titans through discipline, the endurance of the ageless through alchemy, yet ever were they bound by the cruel chains of mortality. Each generation labored against the great specter of death, seeking to etch their names into the annals of time through dominion, through wealth, through war.
But it was not through the body that men would at last break their chains, but through the mind. A single generation, forsaking the old pursuits of conquest and vanity, turned their hearts toward knowledge. In their searching, they unlocked the full breadth of their own thought, breaking the barriers of understanding that had kept them tethered to the dust. Thus was born the science later known as Affinity—a communion with the very essence of reality, a mastery over the unseen forces that wove the cosmos together. Through it, they achieved that which their forebears had long sought but never grasped: the banishment of time itself from their flesh.
Foremost among them was the man called Prophet Malak, who first walked the path of Affinity and, in his wisdom, bequeathed its gift to all. It was he who declared that, in the face of eternity, war was without purpose, and hatred a folly. And so, under his banner, the world was united, its factions and nations bound together in peace, their quarrels stilled by the promise of an undying future.
Yet with the triumph of life came the burden of its excess. The world, once ravaged by war, now groaned beneath the weight of its children. The fields could not sustain them, nor the seas, nor the air. And so, they turned their gaze beyond their mother-world, to the cold embrace of the heavens. They became wanderers of the void, builders of cities upon the barren rock of forgotten worlds, forging empires amidst the stars.
But in their endless expansion, they woke something that should have remained undisturbed. The affliction came without warning, striking down the undying with a sickness unknown. Their perfect bodies withered; their endless minds grew dull. The scourge spread from world to world, and fear took root in their hearts. Desperate, they turned to Malak, now as a god enthroned among them, to deliver them from this unseen doom.
Malak, in his wisdom, decreed that the afflicted be cast into exile, lest the plague devour all. To the moon, the sick were sent, and there they waited, praying for salvation while those still whole retreated to Terra. For ten years, Malak labored in solitude, seeking a cure. Yet in that time, the dead rose. Mindless, relentless, they wandered the lunar wastes, harbingers of an evil that could not be undone.
Then, in the fullness of time, Malak descended to the moon, bearing the salvation he had wrought. But the fates are cruel, and what was meant to heal became the instrument of ruin. A single miscalculation—a flaw unseen—turned his cure to poison, and the heavens themselves bore witness to the folly of gods. A great and terrible flame, the hue of sapphire, consumed the moon, its fire unrelenting, its wrath unquenched. For a full year, the lunar inferno raged, and though the dead did not perish, the living surely did.
On Terra, the people turned their eyes skyward, not in mourning for their lost kin, but in horror. The tides rose in fury, the skies darkened, and the paradise they had built began to crumble beneath their feet. The Golden Age, which had seen the rise of man to the pinnacle of existence, shattered like brittle glass. The dreamers, the scholars, the poets—all were swept away, for theirs were spirits unfit for the world that came after. Only the strong endured, those whose hearts beat to the drums of war, whose hands grasped steel, whose will refused to break.
It was then that the Reanimators emerged. Ancient and silent, they had slumbered beneath the dust of ages, undisturbed while mankind spun their empire from the bones of the stars. But they were creatures of stasis, devoted to the worship of unlife, and they would not suffer the noise of the living to disrupt their eternal rest. Now, clad in the rotting husks of the fallen, they marched forth, proclaiming their grim gospel: the stillness of death, the silence of oblivion.
Thus ended the reign of peace, and the Dark Age began—an age of war, of ruin, of savage desperation. And in the shadow of his greatest failure, Prophet Malak, the god-made-man, was nowhere to be found.
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