Veyra: The Mouse Of Blackfen

1C 01 — And the Gods Fought

Veyra is old.

Older than its kingdoms. Older than its borders. Perhaps older than the names people have given the lands beneath their feet.

Its history is less fortunate.

Wars burn libraries. Kings erase their enemies. Religions rewrite what came before them. Stories become legends. Legends become myths. And sometimes, nightmares survive only as children's tales told beside a fire.

But there is one truth almost every civilization in Veyra agrees upon.

Every thousand years, give or take, something happens.

A Calamity.

No two have ever been the same.

Some brought war. Others brought creatures that should never have existed. Kingdoms disappeared. Civilizations collapsed. Entire peoples vanished so completely that only ruins remained to prove they had ever existed at all.

Veyra recognizes twenty-eight Calamities.

Of the earliest twenty, very little can be called history.

There are fragments: songs passed down for generations, carvings buried beneath dead cities, religious texts written centuries after the events they claim to describe. Stories that contradict other stories. Heroes who are gods in one kingdom and monsters in another.

Perhaps some of them are true.

Perhaps none of them are.

But from the First Calamity, one statement survived.

No explanation accompanied it. No account of what happened before. No record of what followed.

Only this:

*And the gods fought.*

Thousands upon thousands of years passed.

Civilizations rose upon the ruins of civilizations that had risen upon ruins of their own. The Calamities continued.

And eventually came the Twenty-Eighth.

A Demon King appeared.

He declared war upon all living things.

Armies gathered. Heroes rose. Guilds marched. Kingdoms that had spent generations hating one another suddenly discovered reasons to stand together.

For nearly two years, Veyra fought.

Then the Demon King fell.

The Twenty-Eighth Calamity ended.

And strangely...

That was all.

There was destruction, certainly. People died. Cities suffered. But compared with the horrors attributed to the Calamities before it, the Twenty-Eighth left surprisingly little lasting damage.

Civilization survived.

Kingdoms rebuilt. Trade resumed. Borders reopened. The heroes returned home.

Years became decades. Decades became centuries. And eventually, the Twenty-Eighth Calamity became another chapter in history.

It is now 28C 320.

Three hundred and twenty years have passed since the beginning of the Twenty-Eighth Calamity.

Veyra is enjoying an age of relative peace.

Monsters still roam beyond safe roads and settlements. Guilds hunt them. Adventurers explore ruins and forgotten places. Merchants cross continents in pursuit of fortunes.

Kings scheme against kings. Guilds compete for influence. Nations argue over borders drawn by people long dead.

With no world-ending threat left to unite them, the powerful have returned to doing what the powerful have always done.

Competing for more.

And why shouldn't they?

The Calamities come roughly once every thousand years. Everyone knows that.

The Twenty-Eighth has already come. The Demon King is dead. The world survived.

By every reasonable calculation, Veyra has nearly seven centuries before it needs to fear another.

There will be wars before then. There will be monsters. There will be famine, greed, murder, ambition, and all the smaller horrors people have become quite talented at creating for themselves.

But another Calamity?

Not in their lifetime. Not in their children's. Nor their children's children.

The people of Veyra can sleep peacefully knowing one simple truth.

They have time.

After all...

*The last one already ended.*