Ash and the Fox

On the Third Saga of Zymeris
by Ren-Zhao Jinhai, Son of the Sea-Queen
It is said that the world has ended three times. The priests of Rim will tell you it ended in fire. The alchemists' guilds will insist it ended in imbalance. The bards claim it ended in betrayal.
If the world has ended, it has ended not in flame, but in excess. We live now in what I call the Third Saga of Zymeris. Others call it an age. The scholars of Rosaria prefer the term "Restoration." My mother laughed when I used that word in her hall and said, "Nothing is restored. It is only replaced."
I believe she was half right. The First Saga was the Age of Emergence, when belief itself walked unshaped and men mistook their fears and hopes for gods. From that confusion rose powers that bent the firmament and crowned kings.
The Second Saga was the Age of Convergence; when those powers gathered into singular hands, and cities shone like polished bronze beneath the heavens. It was also the age that collapsed beneath its own certainty.
We are born into the Third Saga - the Age of Fracture to some, and to others, the Age of Enlightenment. Truly, it is all in the eyes of the beholder, for trade binds what faith no longer can. Guilds rise where temples once ruled. Privateers hold straits that emperors cannot. And belief, though diminished, remains the most dangerous currency of all.
I was raised to inherit fleets. Instead, I have inherited patterns.
This chronicle is not written to glorify my mother, though her shadow stretches across every page. It is written so that when the Fourth Saga begins - as it inevitably will - there will remain some account of how we came to stand upon the bones of two worlds before us.