The First Tearing

Before the Concordat, before the Empire, before the Beacon-Chain — there was the first Blight-Tear.\n\nIn the waning years of the Age of Dusk, when the Blight covered half the continent and the Old Gods still ruled from their shadow-thrones, the sky above the Duskweald split open. The Blight, which had been a creeping ground-mist until then, punched through reality itself — a vertical wound in the air, thirty feet tall, bleeding absolute darkness. Through that wound, the Deep touched the mortal world directly for the first time.\n\nThe First Tearing was the moment Phaethon knew he could not merely push back the Blight — he had to seal its source. It drove his ascension from champion to sun-god: he absorbed the light of a dying star to gain the power needed to cast the Old Gods into the Deep and forge the Black Throne as their prison. The original Tear was sealed by the first Everflame, lit at the site that became the Emberlight.\n\nBut Tears are not singular events — they are symptoms. Every century, more open. Each is a thread connecting the mortal world to the Deep, and each thread can be pulled wider. The Duskweald portal-route to the Cimmerian Deep is the First Tearing's scar, never fully healed — a passage the Embergrove Compact now uses for its forbidden rites.