Our Little Gods 1: RABATEA, the first World of the Daughters.

Chapter 1

No one remembers the names of the cities, let alone of those who lived there.

These were the last lands before the open ocean, where the days are always equal to the nights, the sea never cold and the rains predictable to the day. In the pleasant towns built there by the nobility of the Rabatean empire, all prettier than the next, life had that odd quality that the poet Erestin Ettin captured when he wrote that 'there, mere men, could have a sense of touching eternity' he dedicated a large volume of free verse poems called 'The Elation' to this particular area and thus it became that the splendid coast of austral Rabatea came to be known as Elation Littoral. These lands had never known the conflicts that the borderlands with Ziom had once suffered from. Most towns had no defensive walls and cultivated fruits in vast orchards and sweet wine in vineyards that followed the gentle slope of the land down to the ocean shores. The traveling wiseman Narilis of Gegara, though born in Ziom, had once called these lands 'the most civilized place in the world', in an attempt at outdoing the influence of Ettin.

From the pretty squares adorned with flower-bush and the alleys bordered with fragrant whispering trees balancing in the soft wind; from the many columned courtyards animated with the gentle chatter of fountains and the shaded streets with merchants and peddlers selling expensive goods from all across the Triadic Lands, they all looked up at the sky as it took fire on that day. They heard the long screeching sound preceded by the deafening bangs of their world's atmosphere being perforated by the star that had been turning their nights into days for so long now.

The original sighting of the new prick of light had taken place almost twenty year before, it had grown ever so slowly years after years until the year of the eclipse. That had been the moment the interest shifted from learned intellectuals debating in smooth marbled floor courtyards to the general public who was taught on that day that the 'object' had entered their very own star system, a notion that most had never grappled before with, and that it was heading directly toward the world and should according to sources either disintegrate in the atmosphere itself or destroy all life and maybe the world with it. The emperor had three vocal naturalists spreading the theory of impending doom put to death and the following conversations focused on variations on the mathematical method for calculating the true size of the object from the observations made over the past twenty years in order to ascertain its insignificance.

Almost a full year later and they were as divided about it as then. There were those who still heralded it a harbinger of death and destruction who were in constant fear of the merciless imperial condemnation, not the most numerous, and those, popular at court, who welcomed it as a sign of rejuvenation and reckoning. In the last days, as the overbearing presence filled the sky ever so much, fewer were the elated voices and the din of the celebrations vanished, replaced by the silence of suspended activities, suspended conversations, suspended routine as all took to watching the star that was falling onto them while the monks of the three churches kept chanting hymns to the three goddesses seeking advice or maybe an intercession.

There was the shockwave and it began burning and it seems to broke into pieces but it kept coming down right on top of them and they only saw it become larger and larger as the sensation of oppression and the winds increased. Then, they felt the heat from the incandescent rock just after a blinding flash of light that left many sightless, though their plight was short-lived as the star collided with the world and obliterated any and all that had lived and toiled in what had once been called Rabatea, the Realm of the children of Dinié, the Shy Goddess.

Far from the balmy shores of the empire where the disaster was unfolding, all the way past the Ignaien Mountains and the Descot sea, in the forested plains of mainland Limore, the ground shook and the beast became restless. A few of the Tall-House Lords' estates collapsed as they saw the sky change color as if a dirty veil obscured the sun. Odd winds began blowing and many had the feeling that death had come and reaped such a score that the world would be never be the same again.