The Sundering

The founding catastrophe, some four centuries gone — the day the world's making faltered and never recovered. Every creed agrees the god broke; none agree why. The true cause is buried under the sky, and almost no one alive has climbed to it.

Ask anyone in the Vale what the Sundering was and you will get a shrug and a bad harvest. Something broke, long ago — the roads, the reach of the capital, the luck of the land — and it has been getting worse by inches ever since. The priests put it plainest and least helpfully: the god broke. Vallen the Wright, who made humankind and witnessed its oaths, is dead, and a made thing outlives its maker only so long before it starts to come apart at the seams. That is the whole of the Sundering, for the whole of the Vale. Most people never think past it; a flooded mine and a lean winter need no god to explain them.

The truth is under the sky, and it is worse. In the golden centuries the Vyr raised cities that hung in the air, and the power that held them up was never their own. With Athra's art — the Endless Design, the Vyr's god of making — they built a great engine and turned it on the humans' god, drawing on Vallen's strength the way a town taps a spring: to fuel a heaven none of the peoples below could dream of. The draw went too deep. It cracked him. They did not set out to kill a god; they set out to use one, and in four hundred years they have never been able to say the difference aloud. The elite mined the commons' god to light their own heaven, and let the world below go on believing it simply broke.

So the Vale grieves a maker it thinks died of old age, while above it the ones who bled him keep their silence and their altitude. The rare scholar who reaches the shape of the real event names it the Drawing-Down. Fewer still learn the last thing under even that: that the design was Athra's, and that the god of making has never stopped handing designs down.