The Drawing-Down

The true, hidden cause of the Sundering: not a broken working but a theft. The elder Vyr of Aelvyrenn, with Athra's art, built a great engine to draw on the god Vallen's own strength and lift their cities into the sky. The draw went too deep. It cracked him, and the Vale has been failing by inches ever since.

The Vale's histories say only that the Imperium 'came east to bind its god closer and instead unmade him.' They do not say how, or by whose hand, because the hand survived and has kept its silence in the sky for four hundred years. The how was an engine, not a working of faith: Vallen the Wright could be reached only through what his own people had raised in his name, and only the elder Vyr, with Athra the Endless Design's art, had the craft to build the machinery that reached him. The Riven King directed it. Whether the god was already failing, whether the engine was greed dressed as rescue, or whether the draw simply outran what any maker can survive, the engine did not bind him closer — it drank him, the way a town taps a spring until the spring gives out. The Vyr fled upward in horror and guilt, raised Aelvyrenn out of reach, and never told the peoples below what they had done — so the rest of the Vale grieves a catastrophe the people who caused it watch from above, and calls the cause a mystery.