The Burning Wheel

Disaster / Destruction

Now as a man is like this or like that, According as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be; A man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad; He becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds;   And here they say that a person consists of desires, And as is his desire, so is his will; And as is his will, so is his deed; And whatever deed he does, that he will reap.   — Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 7th Century BCE

In the fabled time of the gods, there was a great object, the Astras known as 'The Wheel of Eternal Souls'. It was an engine of resurrection, spun from the Breath of Sānaloe. The god inside the Wheel was called Tehyiah; and their domain was life and death. The Wheel was also a city: A city of shrines. Shines devoted to all the gods of the universe. It floated high above the world and was the palace where all gods who died could find themselves reborn anew: Resurrected at their personal shrine.   This power was perhaps the most potent force that defeated the demons in the Heavenspear's War. But there were other forces that they hated also: The sun, who's constant light They envied it. The exact details of their coup are partly lost. To this day, some gods still theorise that it was a conspiracy. In the censure that followed many millenniums later, and a cabal of supposed traitor gods and blasphemers were eventually trialled and destroyed, but some say they were just scape-goats. Either way, the half-dead Ishvara got what they wanted: Their first definitive victory in this unending war.   The vessel was meant to be indestructible, but when an unstoppable force met an unmovable object, the resultant explosion brought everything to ruin. The Wheel fell. It burned and plummeted to the ground. It’s collision with the earth marked the end of the age of gods; as fire and shrapnel once again scarred the face of the earth.   Previously, when souls 'died', it was the function of The Wheel to collect the vacant essence and return it to it's progenitor to be re-drawn. But the gate of heaven was closed, and Tehyiah was dead. Indeed most life had died too. The world was in limbo.   And so the cataract brought with it an age of darkness.