Mono no aware
The sadness of things
Mono no aware
The temptation to see
The world as it ought to be
Mono no aware
The sadness of things
Blinded with tears
I can still see
- Momus, "The Sadness Of Things"

It rained after the storm, but it was no rain that had ever been felt before. The rain cut through the sky and left it rent and bleeding strange colours few had seen before and none ever did again. Strange creatures and people came out the air and land masses crashed together than had never been in the same world. Suns lit skies and died in moments as worlds and realities collided and shattered into fragments. Entire civilizations fell within moments as the storm rushed past and over them, and there was a screaming in it that none had ever heard and no one could ever forget. Entire universes blinked out of existence, unravelling into chaos for the storm was so very bright and the shadows never deep enough.

In the end it was over, though few who remained knew what had happened, nor how. Something had passed over al the worlds that were and nothing could ever be the same. Something had died, that much the learned could agree on, and some called it God. The wise had different tales, of the City that was all cities, of the land that all others were pale reflections of, a reality that had intruded itself into the worlds for one brief terrible moment and was gone.

Some called it Heaven.
Others called it Amber.

But it was gone, the golden city that had had been home to gods, and more than gods. many dreamt of it, of golden spires, verdant forests and lofty peaks and, perhaps, of a horned creature that wept somewhere - alone, and lost.

After the storm survivors huddled in ruined cities, or walked broken roads to lands that had escaped and made their homes, carrying with them tales of dread and a black road that led to the very beginning of things and birthed monsters. But it, too, had been broken by the storm that swept reality and terrified nations posted guards and planets were destroyed by vast weapons to break the parts that remained, and they waited.

"There was a war in heaven," the religions claimed, but if there was a victor no one knew. Heaven was empty, and silent, save for the echo of the storm, and sometimes the storm itself crashing into universes years after for the first time and scattering those who had doubted and those who had sought sanctuary like flotsam. There has been no calm ever after, no understanding of the force that shredded walls between universes like tissue paper, just stories, and legends.

And time passed, as time does, and stories became wilder, and the few grains of true were cast to the winds and lost.

All save for the name Amber,
and it was no more.

Index		Exegesis		Microcosm
Macrocosm		Game Stuff		Trump