The Cataclysm
Event
The Cataclysm is the great wound of the world, the day the Builders' shining age ended and the long fallen present began. In a span no tale agrees upon - an hour, a day, a year of horrors - the works of the Builders broke, their cities fell, and the land itself was torn: it was in the Cataclysm that the Gulf was rent open, a vast wound of water that swallowed whole kingdoms in its flooding. The Forever Storm that has raged over the heart of the Gulf ever since began in that same hour and has never once stilled. Every child of the Reach knows the word, and every child knows the shape of the world it left behind - broken, diminished, haunted by the grandeur of what came before. Why it happened, and whether it might happen again, are questions the wise ask in low voices.