The following comes from the desk of the Scion of History, at the University of Caldonia. It appears to be an early draft of an essay for the historical journal Microscope, edited by Alex, JC, and Ed.

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It is easy, when considering the Cataclysm we are still recovering from, to pass blame upon the sun-folk. After all, the native occupants of the sun are long-dead, no longer able to defend themselves; besides which, it is commonly believed that they erected the bone shield around their orb countless eons ago, cutting our planet off from the light of the sun entirely*. This, however, is a short-sighted and unfair view; the true cause of the Cataclysm can be placed at the talons of my own distant ancestors, the Raven Kings.

The Raven Kings came to power following their discovery of the Rite of Creation, which allowed them to summon the great city-beasts. While the destructive power of these titanic creatures is still fresh in our minds, we mustn't forget that they were and are a blessing; the bones of a city-beast are the finest building material known, essential to preventing cave-ins underground, and even Caldonia itself remains bounded by a protective ribcage.

While many of the Kings were benevolent in expressing their power, the King of Food and the King of Water were bringing their wares to distant caverns well into the decline of the Kings, even when the assassinations were in full swing--they had among their number those with less-savory desires.It was the King of Blood and the King of Grief** who captured and enslaved five of the sun-folk, allowing the rest to be destroyed during an ill-conceived and ineffective Rite of Ultimate Power. These sun-folk became the heat source of the Legendary Forge.

This is the event which led us inexorably to the Cataclysm; though the Ravens kept it a secret, forging legendary weapons required one or more dead spirits to be bound eternally to the material plane, against the spirit's will. While these weapons were immensely powerful, the only items able to injure a city-beast, this was a clear violation of the living's compact with the dead, without whom society could not function. Worse, as the city-beasts had become unpredictable and violent following the decline of the Raven Kings, the necromancers of the Whispering Council were increasingly reliant on the dead to mitigate the decay of extant cities***.

It is no wonder, at this time of high tension, that the Parliament of the Dead should declare war. Though a new compact would be created eventually, during this time the Legendary Forge was destroyed and the sun-folk at its core freed. Here records grow spotty; alliances between the sun-folk and the dead are made and broken, a new compact is made which greatly empowers the dead and grants them fuller control over the legendary weapons, and the politically-powerful dead instigate a full war against the burgeoning underground city of the freed sun-folk. All the while, an organization known only as the "squirrel cabal" appears in the fringes... though some doubt the existence of this group altogether, my research indicates that they were a very real presence, operating in shadows since the time of the Raven Kings, with unclear or downright anarchic motives--evidence suggests they had a hand in the fall of the Kings, the beginning of the war with the dead, and the final assault on Sun City.

However, though the squirrels were a force of chaos, I still contend that it is the Raven Kings who ultimately caused the cataclysm: without their ill-advised abduction of the sun-folk, the war with the dead would never have occurred, nor, in its shadow, would the sun war. The sun war, after which we were not content in the genocide of the sun-folk--we had to destroy the sun itself. It seemed reasonable, after all: what had that bone-shrouded orb ever brought us but war and misery? Could we have taken the risk that more sun-folk would be discovered?

Perhaps we should have predicted its gravitational effects. The earthquakes were destructive, collapsing numerous tunnels and severing all ties between the surface and the world underground. Perhaps we should have recognized at the time that even the dead did not fear the sun itself, recognizing the importance of its lightless presence. But ah, I am the Scion of History, not the Scion of Hindsight. The sun died, and so too did life as we knew it. For a time, anyway.

We need no recap of the time after the cataclysm, the return of the Raven Scions or the brave exploration of the Serpent Council, which finally linked the ground and surface together. Let us leave such analyses to future historians.

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*If at all true, this happened so long ago that no historical record could exist. However, most reputable scientists are of the belief that so-called "sunlight" is a myth, best considered with other rumors like gods, elves, and stone.

**Historical records are unclear why the Raven Citadel authorized one of their number to take either of these monikers, let alone why nobody intervened when the King of Blood metamorphosed into an animate conglomeration of gore.

***See the Scion of City-Beasts' seminal work "The Decay of Marcór" for a full account of on city's desperate bid to stave off collapse by attempting to re-animate its beast.

(Ed, I admin-edited the square brackets to parentheses in your subject, because meetup uses them for HTML and hides anything inside them)