Riven

The world has moved on.   First was Doom, the Eternal Fate, the Architect of Destiny. Doom rose the Divine at the end and moved them to dominion over the unformed world. The Divine danced and sang in the light of the old sun and slumbered through the darkness of the last days, weary from their work shaping the formless void to their desires. They were as of yet unskilled, and their labor yielded creatures of half-remembered nightmares and grim sorcery, but they cared not, for they were masters of all that still was. It was they who raised the mountains' teeth and spilled the stars across the sky. Who filled the oceans with water and wrote the deep magics to hold the earth and sky together. It was they who awoke the Great Old Ones.   But the world has moved on.   The earth was forged of blood and magic by the Great Old Ones. The mountains were broken and oceans tamed by their cunning and skill. The wastelands were wrested from the wilds to be sown with crops and the forests beaten back for the stone of their cities. Men long beset by the behemoths and leviathans of the primeval earth no longer feared that which moved beyond the firelight. Soon, they no longer feared those which had molded them, and the Great Old Ones dragged down the Divine and slew them. The magics were stolen and sciences deciphered. The Great Old Ones grew powerful and skillful through the years of their extraordinarily long lives, soon battering down the doors of the very laws of nature. Illness was first struck down, then war as their power left not food nor drink nor pleasure for want, then death itself seemed to flee before them as the length of their days ever increased. But their Doom was not finished.   And the world moved on.   The Great Old Ones are now dead, slaughtered by their own arrogance. Ever death eluded them, even in the midst of their might. Their inquisitions turned to obsession, their research to infatuation, until their great halls echoed empty and their hearths lay barren. Great wonders of machine and magic lay wasting away, as old men hid away in their laboratories and factories grasping at the one thing they could not touch in all the world. Forsaking their heirs, great kings and queens turned their thoughts only toward their own lengthened days. And as the long eons stretched their minds thin, their yearning became a consuming jealousy. Their jealousy slowly transformed to anger, then to hate, and then the first of the Last Wars began.   The world moved on.   The Great Old Ones forged the world anew through the Last Wars. It was forged of iron and sorcery. Forged in the armament depots and steel mills. Forged with siegecraft and artificers' cunning. Shaped with weapons beyond the knowledge of any who still endure after the world moved on.   The world moved on, but Doom had done its work.   The Doom of the world was to linger. To linger in the ash of the great kingdoms that once were. To go on among the ruin of all that was once beautiful. There are none, now, who remember the world as it was before, and few who possess the understanding of what was lost.   For the world has moved on.