Broken Bronze

Five years ago something happened... something that shook the world to its core and irreversibly broke a crucial part of it.   What part it was and how it was broken remains unknown, yet from this fateful day onwards, the world slowly but seemingly inescapably started to go to pieces.   At first, it was merely an uptick in smaller, localized happenings, such as fires destroying a grand library, the assassination of a beloved king, or a sudden flash flood washing away a couple of houses.   Then these disasters become not only more frequent but rapidly increase in scope and reach, causing widespread crop failings, outbreaks of deadly diseases, and a rampant increase in banditry and piracy.   On their own, these events would have already greatly tested the people and nations of the world, yet in combination, they created a perfect storm that resulted in an apocalyptic calamity that tore the world apart.   Ancient kingdoms that persisted for centuries crumbled within months, supply routes that stretched all over the known world shattered overnight, and the voices of the gods that guided their people since time immemorial went quiet as their temples burnt.   Yet it was not in the physical realm that the breaking of the world was most heavily felt, for the shockwaves of the Collapse reached all the way into the world below and broke apart the mechanism of death, causing the appearance of the Ziugra; the Broken Dead.     Branded by the wounds of their demise the Ziugra are people whose death were incorrect and incomplete resulting in them waking up from the endless sleep of death and again walking among the crumbling world of the living.   Changed and altered in body and mind by their "un-demise" the Ziugra were also imbued with strange new powers that set them apart from the regular humans and enable them to perform deeds otherwise reserved for the heroes of myths and legends.   While some, therefore, see the Ziugra as the last gift from the silent gods to bring about the salvation of a broken world, others just see them as the heralds of the inevitable end.   Many Ziugra on the other hand don't assign such significance to themself as they struggle to survive in a world falling apart around them while getting to grip with their own existence and the strange new powers they received.