The Following Times

Then came the ides of man.

Civilization's apogee, Iylum's sublimation of divine tyranny into providence, was the ripening that invited torrefaction. Only where men lived in stone hovels did men survive. Desert foragers, highland nomads, lowland cenobites. Around them the mountains burned, the seas boiled, and the roots of the world melted into slag. Finally, exhausted, the sun itself dwindled.

Iylum had stripped every aegis that could repel his spear; so then there was no amianthus that could shield the flame of Hyuri.

But the long dusk of perigee is not fatal. This was not the first apocalypse, and not the last. Progress, enlightenment, apotheosis: these things are deciduous.