The Lorekeeper's Tome

The deepest scholars hold that the Cataclysm was not merely a disaster but a breaking - that the Builders had raised some vast working to hold back a darkness pressing upon the world, the thing the faithful call the Drawing, and that in the Cataclysm this working, the Hold, was broken and has been failing slowly ever since. By this telling, the three thousand years of decline since the Builders fell are not the world simply growing old but the world steadily losing a battle the Builders once won - the Drawing creeping back as the Hold weakens, the storm over the Gulf its rawest wound. It is a grim thought, and the Cathedral does not teach it; the Cathedral preaches that the faithful must merely RESIST and all will be well. But the scholars who have read deepest in the Builder-ruins whisper that resistance alone has never been the answer, and that the Hold itself must somehow be made whole again - though how, and by whom, none of them can say.