Part 1 - The Forewarning

The earthquakes have been plaguing you for a while now.

The first one was just a little shiver; the ground jittering so gently you might not have noticed if it weren’t for the flower vase on your counter shaking like it had taken a soft breeze. Though, there were no windows open, and the cacophony of notifications on your social media feed told you that others had felt it too. Even if it was small, it was all everyone talked about. Quakes were far and few between on Skire.

Two days later there was another one, and people started to get a little worried. Between talk show hosts sharing hopeful theories about the development of a new layer of Uto, all that was on the news was the quakes. You were listening to one of these casts when the room started to shake… violently. Running outside, the ground under your feet seized and swayed as if you were on a boat in rough ocean. You’d never felt anything like this before.

Your neighbor’s distant panicked cries sank to the background of your mind as you stared out over the layers of hills and houses. Even the swaying of the ground becomes secondary, because out of the corner of your eye you saw it.

A strange, dark amalgam was crawling into the yard.

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The Nautipods are telling you that Ofae’s magic is out of control. While more reports come in about the earthquakes and the oozing beasts, they say they don’t know anything else. It’s just a feeling they have -being the moon’s children- that Ofae is in distress.

The news says that since the earthquakes started, Ichor Beasts started to appear all over the place. The shrouded creatures came in many shapes; aggressively stalking and even chasing anyone who came near. That thing you saw was one of them. Though they’ve been sighted in the deep wilds before, it was extremely strange to see them wandering in towns, or even densely populated areas.

The worst part of all this is that nobody knows why.

You start to take home extra water and food. You pick up first-aid kits from stores, which is something you’ve never felt like you had to do before. You just have some urgent feeling that you must prepare yourself for, inevitably, whatever happens next. It could be nothing, but you’d rather be ready instead of sorry.

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You go about your day as best you can, but you cannot shake the feeling that something is coming. The strange reports of magical fissures around meteor lake do not help either. Chaos slowly swells, the continent unable to ignore the warning signs appearing all around. It almost feels like the world is pending some kind of upheaval. Those more magically inclined have begun their investigations, but many remain unsure of what's to come.

It feels that nobody is immune to the anxiety, Nautipods especially impacted by the weight of what's coming. Their connection to the world's magic is different, drawn often to strange wells of magic unfamiliar to Skire. These fissures crack and shatter the earth, upending homes, displacing many. They pierce deep into the planet, past the crust, beyond... You cannot see far enough down. The magic feels familiar in a way, pulsing like veins from the cracks. Energy erupts with a static that feels almost heavy.

What's on the horizon?

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PART 2 - THE EMERGENCE

An intense rumble, like a gutteral scream, pierces the air.

You were right to be cautious.

It’s been months since the first quake set off a nearly daily chain of tremors over the entire continent, but despite the fear early on, people have started to become used to it. Aside from the slight feeling of dread, you no longer jump or panic when you feel the ground move. For a moment you think that maybe this is just the new normal for Skire.

You’re asleep when it happens. A jolt wakes you from your slumber, and at first you’re only annoyed. Instead of the quake petering to an end, the shaking only gets more and more intense. You sit up in bed and patiently wait for it to stop. It doesn’t.

As you get out of bed, the glass in your windows shatters covering the floor in glimmering shards. The sound of it triggers your survival mode; and you run out of the room and into the world. Even out here, you can still hear the shattering noise. It’s not just your windows, the land itself seems to be screeching in agony. A chorus of shrieking, crashing, and something reverberating from deep under your feet. It makes you want to cover your ears, but it echoes through your body in a way that can’t be shut out.

A sudden powerful shockwave sends you to your knees; the earth bucking upwards underneath you, as if you’re being shot upwards into space. In the distance, all around you, the earth is breaking. It cracks into pieces with smoke and dust billowing from the fissures. Terrified, your eyes trace the cracks and chasms to one bulging point in the distance. You hope that whoever is nearest those fractures will not be swallowed up alive.

You’re sitting there, mind racing as you try to figure out what will happen next. Then, you see it. Out of the bulging earth, something starts to breach. It’s a strange thing, trying to describe a being of a size you couldn’t begin to fathom exists, but it’s there… jutting upwards like you’re witnessing a mountain being formed in real-time. A Titan, slick with oily Ichor that seeps from it’s body and waterfalls down to the land below, so far below. It crushes whole settlements with its hands as it heaves itself upwards until the crags of its long, shimmering neck touch the sky.

As you crane your own neck back, it opens its jaw and the siren roar pierces deep into your skull.

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You wonder if this is the end of the world. You will realize soon that in a way, it is.

A titan has emerged, dripping in a dark and oily substance that floods the land. It consumes everything in its path, drawing in magic and refusing to release it. The fissures burst from around it, massive cracks that span downwards for what seems like forever. From the substance new beasts are birthed, overtaken by it, driven by insatiable hunger for magic. Many do their best to fend them off, but are too consumed.

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PART 3 - THE FRACTURING

Gravity suddenly flips beneath your feet.

The flood of Ichor cascading off of the Titan infected the land before your very eyes. From it seeped hundreds of beasts, those caught in the flood succumbed to the Ichor quickly. It left behind a throng of creatures none fully solid nor liquid that harassed and attacked any inhabitants they encountered.

It wasn’t long before they reached you. Over the next day your fellow Skireans began to band together. There was nowhere to run because they were everywhere, spawning from the ground and the rivers of muck that crept through the land from the fissures. There wasn’t much else you could do but fight. They seemed to resist magic somehow. Not even devastating magical attacks kept them down for long, so you resorted to attacking them with whatever physical weapon you could get your hands on. Eventually they would be kept at bay, but you were still unsure if they would stay down for good. Even when you felt you’d conquered them all, a new wave of them would soon appear. 

The looming Titan makes you all afraid. Days pass and it continues to climb up out of the earth, dominating the horizon. Attempts at attacking it seemed to be futile. It was just too large; too dangerous to get close, for fear of being swept up in the Ichor yourself.

Through it all, you try not to lose your hope. The idea of this being the new world you live in terrifies and exhausts you. You’re not ready to accept that world, though you’ve lived in it for close to a week. Is this truly how life is now? Have the guardians abandoned you? Your peers cry and huddle in stress every night. Unfortunately, you don’t think there is anything you could say to make it better.

One night as a new wave of Ichor Beasts breaks through your defenses, you and your group abandon your camp and retreat to higher ground. The sharp wail of the Ichor Titan threatens to break your will. What are you to do? What can any of you do?

Another shockwave hits. For a brief moment your heart stops, thinking that maybe another one of those towering beasts is about to appear. Just like that time weeks before, it feels as if the world is falling apart. This time though, you see it happen with your own eyes. A deafening sound like cracking glacial ice echoes from the ground and across the sky, like rolling thunder. Just as you witnessed the Titan ascend into this world, you watch the earth split open to swallow it whole again.

You hold onto each other as gravity shifts. The world feels heavier; sucking you towards the soil under your feet but you can’t look away as the Titan plummets down to whatever hell is underneath. The massive chasm continues to grow in the distance. Further, and further, as if Skire had become a floating island drifting away to safety.

You realize you aren’t dreaming, and this might as well be true. A CCCat near you says as much. You can barely believe what you are hearing.

Eeridi has shattered into pieces. 

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PART 4 - THE AFTERMATH

All that's left is to pick up the pieces.

When you think back about everything that happened, you’re not sure how much time has passed. Everything feels like a blur, yet crystal clear in your mind at the same time.

Yes, Eeridi had shattered. You recall the emotions you felt when that information dawned on you. The world you once knew no longer existed, at least not in the same way you remembered.

Eventually you mustered the courage along with the others to approach the edge of the world as you know it. It made your stomach turn to look down and see a vast expanse of nothing but air, clouds, and Ichor below. Down there, under the mist and mire, you could still see the looming Titan moving like a leviathan across the surface of some inner alien world. You feel dizzy just looking at it.

When you look up you can see other fragments of Eeridi suspended far in the distance. They remind you of the floating islands near Meteor Lake, or Stonewing, though you know these fragments of the planet are much larger than they appear. Whole continents suspended in air… it’s still hard for you to wrap your head around even now.

In the weeks that followed the Shattering, people tried hard to adapt as quickly as possible. You think that if Skire had been less keen on advancement before all this, the change would have been harder for you all. Somehow everyone has found a way to band together and push towards solutions.

The Ichor Beasts still spawn here sometimes. With time you learn that you can predict where they appear if you follow the trail of the Titan below. Guilds have been popping up all over the place with this exact knowledge in mind. They’re training people on how to fight the Ichor Beasts. These guilds go by many names, but they are all sworn to fight back and keep us safe.

The air feels heavier around the edges of Skire, and authorities warn you all, especially those with abilities to fly, not to try and traverse the openings at all. The gravity is too great; able to suck down any craft that attempts to bridge the gaps at land level. The only way to travel from one island to another is from space. Over time you see an explosion of new types of space-faring shuttles and crafts built to ferry people from one island to the next.

It seems daily that you hear new stories of adventuring parties and researchers attempting to go down to the surface below; the “Core Planet” as they’ve been calling it. It seems to you like it’s a death wish to want to go down there, but they keep insisting that the information they gather is priceless. Half of them don’t come back.

Despite the enormous change to your physical world, you find that things are starting to move on like normal. Yes the air is a bit thinner, and the Ichor Beasts can be a tad annoying to deal with, but life goes on. Skireans are resilient beings. You all work hard to repair what has been broken.

Of course, researchers are still trying to figure out why all of this happened. You yourself wonder what the greater meaning of all this is, if there even is one. Everyone everywhere has their own theories. All you can really do is go on with your life, adapt, and hope that nothing worse happens to your precious planet.

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🎃WEEKLY MINI Prompt - Costume Celebration🎃

Draw or write about an Official Skire Character (Yours, someone else's) dressing up for the Long Night! NPCs are not available for this prompt.

• Does your character create their own costume?
• Do they believe in the superstition around wisps and costumes?
• Does your character play tricks and celebrate, or prefer the more practical use of costumes?
• Cosplays are okay to draw for this prompt!