Folklore 001: The World That Ended

Thaddeus, Cartographer of Sundering, wrote that Elarion had ended many times. Perhaps he meant that the world survived while every certainty inside it died. Roads broke their promises. Kingdoms disappeared between one sunrise and the next. Seas crossed old borders, mountains opened, and places once separated by months of travel became violent neighbors.

The last collapse was remembered simply as the Sundering. No surviving account agrees on its first cause. Some blamed kings, others gods, and others a wound inside the world itself. All agree on what followed: most known lands became the Wilderness, and the survivors gathered wherever soil, stone, frost, sand, or sky still permitted life.

Thaddeus mapped what remained, then vanished from the record. His final warning survived him: a map can prove that a place endured, but only people can prove that it lived.