Recovered from the Saltscar Plains, author unknown. The text is cracked and incomplete.
“…and the sky was no longer whole.
I saw it break — not as glass breaks, but as a promise breaks.
Fire fell like rain, and rain rose like flame. The sea fled from itself. Stone screamed as it was torn from its roots, and the wind carried names it should not have remembered.
They told us the gods were eternal. I watched them bleed.
Pyrion burned with a light that had no warmth left in it. Thalyra wept tides that drowned even memory. And the others — the others did not flee. They endured. They raged. They knew.
When the last mountain fell and the world opened its bones, I understood too late: this was not a war for dominion. It was a war over truth.
If this fragment survives where I do not, let it be known — the world did not shatter because three gods betrayed us.
It shattered because five gods could not agree on what must be saved.”
(The remainder of the text has been vitrified by intense heat.)
Banned poem. Circulated secretly in coastal cities. Authorship unknown.
The wind still knows my mother’s name.
It learned it before the law was written,
before the Watchers learned to listen.The stones remember where we buried our kings,
though the priests say stone is deaf.And in the long hour before sleep,
when fire dims and the sea goes still,
a shadow stands at the edge of thought
and asks what we were promised.They tell us the world was saved.
I have walked the salt where cities drowned.They tell us silence is balance.
I have heard the mountains breathe beneath their chains.If this is order, then chaos must have loved us.