Grand Celestial Collapse

• UVG • Red Sky • Mythos • History •

Far ago, long away, before even grammar reigned, a semi-mythical dark age saw the disappearance of great civilizations. The Transparent Union of the Shtrakha, the Eternal Forest of the Infinite Skies, and the Builders in the Silent Places. All and more faded away in that time of dimming stars.

The Ebéteen hold that they are descended from survivors of that time, guided and preserved by the Solar Deity for many generations.

Academic Positions on the GCC

Every educated citizen knows that ours is not the first civilization to arise upon our Given World. Many nearly-heretics even dare argue that our Given World may not be the only world. But one dark age still looms above all others in the annals of the schooled: the Grand Celestial Collapse.

Until recently, this catastrophe was considered a part of the archetypal human creation myth. Together with the Great Flood and the Breaking of Heaven’s Ladder, many psycho-historians considered these myths an echo of the first traumatic awakening of humanity into sentience and awareness of the tragedy of death.

However, the findings of a series of archaeological and paleontological expeditions into the Second Circle region have cast doubts on the dogmas of the psychoprimalist schools. Most materialist historians now openly debate the consequences of the grand celestial collapse for both the scholarly disciplines and the technological trajectory of our own golem-industrial civilization.

—Maire Le Duc, Sapifex Primary, Emerald City College of Progress.

Legends of the Grand Celestial Collapse

The sun went away, and the world was shrouded in darkness for many years.
Where once fell rain, then fell snow and ice.
Absent the sun, vampiric creatures, collapsed false-humans, emerged to rule the world.
The underlying void lines of the Given World shifted and snapped, cutting the fast stars apart from one another, and the World apart from the Fast Stars.
Before the Collapse, parents never lost children, the ancestors lived among us, and for the smallest worry, you could talk to your forebear upon a star. Now we can only wish upon the stars.
The purple sky turned white, and all was noise. The great givers went silent, and many starved.
When the sun returned, it was too fierce. Crops burned and withered, deserts spread, and seas rose to flood the pleasure parks of the Gentle Humans.
The gods grew angry at the wickedness and sloth of the Vile First Humans. They sentenced them to rediscover the tribulations of their youth.
The tunnels to the other worlds snapped and tore. As each tunnel snapped, it tore and clawed at our Vast World. Hills collapsed into towns collapsed into fields. Our world grew small. Many died, many more were horribly disfigured. In our tribe, we remember the Great Silencing when we gave our ancestors the final sleep to ease their suffering.
The herds failed to return, the shepherds of the sky flocks lost among the fast stars. That is when the clan of the mink-bear joined the maintainers and the hunt-vome, and we became a tripartite society.
From those hungry times were born the ghouls.
In the dark, the scared people burned the ladders of the Gods.
During that terrible time, even the gods went hungry. Some hunted the ka-souls of humans to sustain themselves. We cursed them and called them Vile.
We turned to the necromancers then, and we chose to chain our ancestors to bodies of clay and iron. Those were the first golems. They built our cities beneath the ice mountains. So we worship still the memory of our ancestors who surrendered heaven to toil for us.

What was will be.
Again, and again, and ever again.
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Until what will be was.