24.1 The Beginning of the First Age.

The grandfather clock of Genesis, the god of time, bonged thrice, sending the hallowed chimes throughout the Land. Everything shook, harder and harder, as though being ground to a perfect halt. For a moment outside of a moment, time stood still. It was an infinite second of reflection, to pause on the events and achievements of the past, to praise and commemorate the moments shared in history.

And then time turned on its axis, flipping backwards, faster and faster. The cities and villages retracted their freshly built spires and their cobbled streets. The shorelines receded as they recalled their previous form. Battles and skirmishes, great heroic shows played in reverse, their outcomes undone, their causes erased. Back, further back, to a point where none could have recalled those simple few moments to start it all. And then, they were passed too, throwing the land further back in time.

The grandfather clock, its hands spinning, begin to slow. The streets of Springtown are small and unpaved. The sky is tinged with the fiery glow of torch and mortar. The facades of Thakria stand pale and gloomy, looking south to their kith and kin, Goblin Town. Parrius is brim full of its first ruffians and rebellious youth, bawdy jokes and songs of seamanship. Thandrades, nigh so young, yet ever so imperial, sits within the white-washed walls of Mercinae. The forests tremble with the last turning of time. The leaves stop waving. There is another moment of pause until...

A single, frozen fire warming a wanderer's feet kicks out its heat again. Sounds reach the ear, of battle yonder. The reining of horses and clattering of steel reach into the air. Never so lonely did the wildlands look, surrounding that Ranger, for the temples of all but Genesis never existed. Yet in the great walls of the cities, a history unwritten is beginning, preparing to engulf the whole Land. The essence of divinities that runs through the lives of men is there, urging it forward, to a new direction. Genesis decrees the separation of past and future:

"Now, we rewrite the First Age of Avalon!"