City of Light:Makia:Sky Light

Found written in a book currently possesed by the Pardoner Zared

“Now as I have explained earlier things were very different before the Fall. I was a student in a center of learning that was divorced as entirely as it could be from the Churches; not to say the weren't around, but rather unlike today the institutions of learning, could be separate. We all lived in the same halls and buildings in a small complex in the farmlands outside one of the major cities, there we studied and grew as people. We refined our Logic and our Will, we learned languages, the science of arts and the art of science; certainly some there pursued religious studies, but I had fallen from the path by then; even during the Services my participation was only so much parroting and mimicry.

In my youth I spent much of my time working for the betterment of the Nation I was a citizen of; I was part of a youth group founded by the Church to keep the citizens happy and education, I went to political rallies with my family and cheered during the parades as our soldiers went off to war. It was great time, a time of Empire and of promise! Certainly you can conceive the size of the cities back then, you've seen the ruins after all, but for just a moment try to imagine what they looked like, the incredible beauty of their steel and glass spires reaching in to the city. It was like we were aiming spears against Heaven itself, daring them to try and stop us.

Our scholars were great and powerful men who ruled from the cities, and yes they were exclusively men. There was a divine mandate that pointed out that only men could rule, since they were closer in image to the Creator. I mention these things not so much so that you have an finely detailed picture of life then, but more so that things will be clear when I relate the story of the day that the sun crashed into the mountains.

The first thing to understand is that my nation was an Empire in every sense of the world; what started as a small band of soldiers moved from land mass to land mass first offering the chance to join peacefully, then taking by right of the sword and the flame what wouldn't willingly be given over. They were disciplined and wildly successful, and every land they took began to sprout militants in a generation of two. At the university I attended, the aforementioned house of learning, some had begun to doubt the intelligence of this approach and indeed some, such as myself, found this to be a sin against free will and the Human intellect, the highest powers I could imagine at that time.

So we formed a secret organization, we called ourselves the 'Collegium Nocte', looking at it now I see how foolish a name is was but such are the fancies of youth. In some ways it was fitting as we did meet at night and did conduct our experiments then, thought perhaps 'Collegium Excrementum' or 'Collegium Tenabrarum' would have been a more accurate description of what I and my fellow 'Scientists' were doing. We were all Physics students you see, and particularly interested in a Primal Element that we called Aether, because this element was especially reactive to the exertion of the Will of a person on it. This was, we assumed, the best way to make our voices heard and the fastest way to lift arms against the oppressors that we saw in our state.

We were arrogant and headstrong as only young men can be, and we didn't know what we were dealing with. Eventually it came to light that each of us had been using his studies to further some ... less than honorable goal. For some it was harming others, but for most it was to contact entities that we had found traces of in the Aethric mapping around the University. They would attempt to coerce secrets from them, or have them perform tasks (some fairly normal, some violent ... for my part it was .. well perhaps later I will talk about my 'interest' in them.) I offered the alternate titles for our little group earlier because what we were doing was not as straightforward as might have been assumed when I was describing a group of scientific revolutionaries; what we did in those days was wrong.

We began as a group of idealists you see, we thought that if we empowered the people than the tyranny of this Empire could be shrugged off; what happened was that we began a tyranny of our own. These creatures, entities, were the agents of creation and we were treating them like slaves, assassins and sex toys. They were the reason that the sun rose and set in a predictable pattern, they were the reason that fire started from sparks they were agents of causality; they were the angels of the Creator that we were taught in our catechism.

Still our using them as we chose didn't seem to do much to the world around us, indeed everything continued much the same for several years. Eventually we all left our university and our little 'college' broke up, it was years before I heard or saw anything about one of the others. At that time it was in a broadcast ... try to imagine a moving lithograph with sound ... about a final strike being planed on one of the enemy states. They had a new weapon and were going to use it to annihilate the sinners of that far land, and in the background I saw one of my former 'researcher' leading a group of other men in motions and gestures that I recognized as rituals to compel the entities.

The sky went dark almost immediately and the broadcast ceased; it would be weeks before we found out what happened. Half of the world's population died in an instant and another quarter disappeared, leaving only a few behind, I heard from others like myself that the sun had been moved from the sky and unleashed into the heart of that dark and evil nation, but I see it in the sky still so I'm not sure what really happened. I do know that the entities no longer answers the commands we once had for them, but that now they come whenever blood is spilled.

It all revolves around blood now, I'm not sure what it means but our salvation lies in it.”