The Fall of Greyvast

On the first night of the Age of Fractured Light � the night the Celestial Fracture's largest moon fragment completed its slow, grinding descent � the kingdom of Greyvast died. The fragment was not a meteor; it did not streak across the sky trailing fire. It drifted, silent and enormous, a chunk of pale stone the size of a city district, rotating lazily as gravity pulled it down through the clouds. Every soul in the capital saw it coming. There was nowhere to run. When it struck, the impact was not loud � it was a subsonic thrum that shattered windows across the entire kingdom and rang in the bones of survivors for the rest of their lives. The upper city vaporized instantly. Stone turned to dust, dust to glass, glass to light. The ground beneath the capital � already unstable, built atop ancient catacombs � collapsed into a bowl-shaped chasm that swallowed the lower districts whole. Then the water came. The impact had cracked the seabed of a nearby frozen fjord, and seawater poured into the crater, mixing with the pulverized stone and magical residue to create a thick, eternal mist. Within hours, the capital was gone � replaced by a seething, fog-choked basin that stretched for miles. King Aldric survived � barely. Mortally wounded, pinned beneath a collapsed arch in what remained of the royal keep, he watched his kingdom drown. In his final hour, he called upon Mourne, the Hollow King � not the god's name in prayer, but in a binding invocation written on the inner walls of the keep's vault, a pact sealed in the blood of Greyvast's first king a thousand years before. The terms were simple: power to contain the fragment, in exchange for the souls of every Greyvast monarch yet to be born. Aldric was the last king. He paid the debt of all who would have followed him. The fragment stopped spreading. The mist held. But Greyvast was finished as a kingdom. The survivors who crawled from the outskirts � knights, merchants, farmers, priests � found themselves rulerless, their capital gone, their identity erased. From their desperation, the Oathbound Remnants were born. Across the mist-choked border, Valdenmoor watched in silence. The Ashen Crown's spies returned with reports of a kingdom erased in a single night � and Valdenmoor's lords, already locked in their own slow death spiral, made a quiet, terrified decision: they would never let the same happen to them. The Tide-Weavers arrived within a month. The mist was dangerous � it ate memories, warped time � but the lower levels of the sunken capital held fragments of the moon, and fragments meant power. They set up their operation on the crater's edge, lowered ropes and cages into the fog, and began to pull the past out of the drowned city, piece by piece.