Hykravones, the Shattering, is the catastrophe that ended the Gaeaic Eon. It lasted a single year, 10,210 to 10,209 BSD — roughly 13,500 years ago — and in that year one returning titan undid most of what twelve million years of life had built. The Modern Era opens at its close.
The Gray Prince returns
Hykravones is a titan, called the Gray Prince. He left Alaria long before the rest of his kind did. While his kin still walked the world, he withdrew into the space between dimensions and did not come back, and so he was already gone when the Ezz flood drove the remaining titans to madness and death. Whatever he went looking for out there, he was absent for the whole of the change.
When he returned, millions of years later, nothing he remembered was left. The titans were dead. Gaea had filled the world with her own life and her own order, and her children kept it. The Gray Prince looked at a world that had erased his, and the rage that took him did not stop. He began taking Alaria apart.
The War Against the Gray Prince
Gaea's children led the defense, and several of the older peoples stood with them, the Vystrilik of that age among them. The daemons of Celestia helped where they could, but their help came late and came scattered. Each daemon weighed the cost of spending itself against the risk of losing its followers and its reach, and most of them hedged. By the time they understood there would be no followers left to lose, the war was already past saving.
The last stand is remembered as the Last Line. Gaea's three children fell there. Nagatayora, the First Dragon, was the first of the three to die, his body broken open above the field. Shara Bolasi, the First Lion, held his stretch of the front alone after the rank beside him broke, and was killed where he stood. Ulvma, the Wolf-mother, fought inside the mortal ranks rather than apart from them, and was the last of the three to fall. What their deaths made of the ground and the people on it belongs to the histories of the Sharabha, the Ulvsjael, and the Naga.
The Last Line, in its final hour. The rank beside Shara Bolasi has broken and run, and the lion-father has not moved from his stretch of the front. Overhead the sky is still burning where Nagatayora came apart. Somewhere in the press behind, the wolf-mother is still fighting among the mortal ranks, the last of the three left standing. None of them will see the morning.
What survived, and what rose
The Gray Prince won. Nearly every civilization was destroyed, and the world was thrown thousands of years back. Nearly every daemon died with its worshippers, its reach cut off at the root.
A daemon is only as alive as it is remembered. Worship is how it stays remembered: each prayer carries a little life across the boundary between planes, and that tribute both holds the daemon's name in the world and pays for everything it does. Stop the prayer and the name falls quiet; leave it quiet long enough and the daemon is forgotten, and a forgotten daemon does not come back. This is why the daemons died with their people and not apart from them. The Shattering did not have to hunt them. It only had to kill the mouths that spoke their names.
A few were carried out of it by their own faithful, and the carrying was an ugly thing. A daemon cannot simply walk back into the world; the way out of Celestia opens only for a spirit that left a body waiting, and these had left none. So their priests took a body that already had someone in it. The rite unwinds the living owner's spirit from the soul and shadow it was born between and snuffs it out, the true death that leaves nothing behind to remember, and into the emptied body, still warm and still wearing another self's soul and shadow, it draws the daemon down out of Celestia to take the vacant place. Sometimes the one unmade gave themselves up for their god and went willingly. More often they did not. Either way a person was ended so that a daemon could wear their life.
What comes back is no longer a daemon. Seated in stolen flesh it has given up the things that made it one: no reserve of worship, no miracles, no reach across the boundary. It is a mortal now, in a borrowed body, with a borrowed soul and shadow, and it ages and bleeds and dies on the same terms as the one it displaced. That is the whole of what the rite buys, one borrowed lifetime, paid for with a stranger's entire existence and with everything the daemon had been worshipped for.
Some who came back this way did more than live the borrowed years out. They had children, and the children had children, and the line held. A few of the peoples walking Alaria now were begun by a god who became a person in a body that was not its own and then simply lived. Which peoples is not for this telling, and what marks such a line from any other, if anything does, belongs to their own histories and not to the history of the war.
Not every survivor paid in someone else's life. A rarer few never took flesh at all. Rather than be reborn into a stolen body they rooted what they were into something the elves would keep alive for its own sake: Aelwennar into the Long-Song, the memory the elves recite to stay themselves, and Eluvarin Aelweir into the First Grove and the laying of the dead beneath it. These displaced no one and became no one's heirs. They stayed daemons, dormant in a form, and patrons of the Druids. Theirs was the quieter road through the Shattering, and almost none who looked for it found it.
A second inheritance came up out of the battlefield itself. From the blood and soil of Gaea's fallen children rose three peoples: the Sharabha from the lion, the Ulvsjael from the wolf, the Naga from the dragon. Each keeps its own account of how it began, and each of those accounts begins at the Last Line.
The dormancy
When there was little left worth breaking, the Gray Prince stopped. He did not die, and nothing drove him off. He went down into the earth and slept. The histories hold that he is still there, somewhere under Alaria, and that he will wake again to finish the work he left undone. The Elves of the Gray Order have spent the age since searching for the place he lies, certain the world is owed his return.