As festivities raged throughout the realm and adventurers found joy upon Lord Sorrelion's storied party barge, the Eschaton's newly forged cosmos neared a portentous moment.

It was Heiress Rashemi and her conclave of daring siderealists that sensed the first shifts throughout the stars, their keen senses and keener intellects turned to the task of divining the motions of each distant world beyond Aetolia. Eager to share her circle's findings, Rashemi penned a missive to Sapience, foretelling a coming conjunction - a moment of alignment between multiple planets. The Averroes-blessed sorceress failed to contain her excitement, resorting to sensationalist writing that stoked the curiosity of several city-state's citizens. Speculating on how the conjunction could manifest, some pragmatic and shrewd cities formed elaborate plans and urged their citizens to look upon the stars with renewed vigilance. Every week blazed with discussion among hopefuls and doomsayers alike until the moment the conjunction was completed in truth.

Then, as Omeiian's first evening shrouded the land, two of the Prime Material's seven worlds began to shift in the skies.

Fully evident to the naked eye, the Nascent Cradle and the Untamed World, second and third of the Eschaton's handcrafted planets, began to emit a fascinating amount of light. Held together by a new arcane gravity, the two realms became constant sights in the sky in the following days, filling Aetolia's midnight hours with beautiful aurorae the colour of gold and precious emeralds. The following week, as night swallowed the land, the third planet became prominent: the Dark Mirror, home to ruthless doppelgangers that had expressed untold animosity for their originators in our world. Upon its emergence, the distant celestial object tainted the light emanating from all three with a new, bruise-like hue. It fell into the same course, prompting many adventurers to await the perfect moment of alignment that the Heiress had promised in her writing. Unease gripped many leaders of Sapience's nations as they considered anew the idea of coming danger, leading some to prepare for the worst with endless planning.

As evening approached in the middle of Omeiian, the planets neared Aetolia's celestial meridian - a dividing line from north to south used by astronomers, astrologians, and siderealists to chart the position of stars and heavenly bodies, often viewed as the centre of the sky.

At first, the Nascent Cradle and the Untamed World aligned at the world's apex, filling the skies with awe-inspiring colours and a sense of foreboding power. Energy began to trickle down from the duo in the form of ghostly light, offering Aetolia a fleeting taste of what was to come: tremendous power, raw and primal, enough to flood a world and empower acts of genesis and destruction alike. Promising to intensify upon the arrival of the Dark Mirror, the celestial force wove ripples into the sky and set the heavens ablaze with the fury of a thousand stars. Despite this glorious display, the aforementioned realm journeyed at its spiteful, plodding march, threatening the alignment in its entirety due to another planet's faster pace.

It was then that the Eschaton, the Starforger, True Creator of all the worlds of the Prime Material, manifested in full view of those mortals that walked the length and breadth of Its perfectly arranged Creation. Unwilling to let Its plans be spoiled and eager to see Its worlds suffused with a surge of potential that would surely hasten Its Creation's flight from an unknown Other, the almighty deity reached out. It steadied the errant world for long enough to complete the conjunction in truth, holding it in place so that a perfect planetary array could come to pass. Uncaring for the force It exerted, ill-adjusted to the notion of restraint that It had so often left in the responsibility of Endless Aechros, the Architect of All Existence rendered the alignment too perfect an arrangement, multiplying a thousandfold the force brought on by the astral assembly.

In response to a potential threat to Its charge, the Abyssal awoke and began distributing the energy that started to pour into the First Realm, also known as Aetolia. Once more drawing upon the mana of every living being, the Albedi God of the Arcane wove a complex skein of deific energy that captured the onrushing tide and distributed it into seven equal parts meant to empower each world equally. Pleased with Its contributions to Its Creator's toil, the ancient arcane entity dissolved from mortal perception and left the rest to its lunar overseer, proving yet again that It was ever bound to the subtleties of Divine machination. Upon Its flight across the planes, Abyssal Odravh streaked through the perception of those mortal minds sensitive to planar energies, leaving the acolytes of elemental gods, practitioners of elemental or planar channels, and even the fervent priests of Avzosh and Rahiela stunned in the wake of the Helm's ineffable strength. Not far behind Its arcane subordinate, the Eschaton scattered to selenic light, gone from view with the satisfaction of a design furthered.

In the wake of the True Creator's disappearance, Its ordained conjunction began in truth. With the cosmic power divided into seven pieces, Aetolia's leylines drank deep of its share and split it into three streams: one bound for ancient Albedos, another for exotic Vorostra, and the final for Sapience. The energy fragmented into seven more streams in our familiar territory, and each then lanced through the continent's worldveins like serpents desperate to make a new den. Arcane might soon saturated a network long forgotten and unprepared for it, sending a cobalt inferno tumbling throughout the ley that illuminated the earth from shore to shore.

One by one, ancient sites associated with the dreaded War of Power began to stir from centuries of slumber.

A triumphant roar echoed from the Mhojave as a statue awakened amidst the dunes. In short order, a leonine silhouette took wing upon the desert's hot winds and vanished from sight, its enigmatic form hidden by flashes of wild magic. Soon after, a beacon ablaze with verdant fire awakened upon desecrated Ulangi, sending ripples of rejuvenating power from shore to shore like a distress signal. Stirred to primal sentience, an ancient ritual totem at a dirt crossroad exuded fell green light, awaiting a new purpose and communion with spiritual forces. Deep in the Western Ithmia, the sacred Tree of Renewal's lightning-hewn bark began to mend, its vitality refreshed by the conjunction's astral bounty. The storied titan soon settled its repaired roots into its surroundings and began to sprout fruit, its once-barren boughs seemingly rejuvenated by Eschatonic providence.

Meanwhile, tragedy struck in the Dun Valley as Oloo, beloved environmentalist and the Grook behind the campaign to keep the ancient waterfall of the valley clean of blood sacrifice, tumbled to his death amidst the earthly tremours brought on by the leyline disturbances. In a cruel twist, the Grook's head splattered open upon a rock at the waterfall's crest, undoing his life's work as his sanguine vitae seeped into the falls - tainting it anew with innocent, kind-hearted blood. Newly christened, the beloved site ran as red as Vilimisean wine, twisted again into an instrument for vile sorcery to echo elder ages and dark wars of spellcraft. As the world mourned, ancient potsherds and enchanted rubble strewn across the Siroccian Mountains began to shudder as the old ways awakened in other places, and the unfamiliar guidance of cosmic force drew these together through a dire arcane gravity. Though the leylines had shifted in small ways since the landmark's birth, the Fist of Dameron soon reformed within the dig site beneath its original location, filling a dead-end cavern with the ominous dark pillars once described as the baleful fist of a Prince of Chaos. Having re-established its Far Realm frequencies after centuries of obliteration, the enchanted monument exerted its foul influence and defiled the ground around it, blackening the earth for all to see. Even as this subterranean emergence unfolded, a cosmic symphony arose from the caverns beneath sleepy Tasur'ke. It filled the surrounding area with clear, crystalline chimes that sang of cataclysmic power renewed once more by empyreal brilliance from beyond the stars, setting each crystalline facet to a frightful tremble.

The seventh and penultimate site to attempt awakening was the fabled garden in lost and scoured Aalen, a place scholars purport was Tsol'aan holy ground. Though an ethereal echo of that garden bloomed amidst the celestial convergence, it almost immediately withered and died, eliciting alarm from the Heartwood even as the energy dispersed back into the leylines. It thundered from the western shore to the eastern ocean in a tumultuous upheaval of primal power, rattling Mournhold's cobblestones with its force as it desperately burrowed into the silt and sand off the devastated town's coast. There, it seeped into an unknown object near the wreckage of once-Shastaan, its identity veiled by the eldritch horrors that lurk there in that dark ocean.

Driven by fear or passion, the curiosity merchant on Lord Sammonward's barge hurriedly packed his things into a caravan drawn by misty equine simulacrums and promptly took up its reins. With a loud crack of leather and bridle, the mysterious man and his odd burden-beasts thundered away into the horizon, destined for parts unknown...

Penned by my hand on Gosday, the 19th of Omeian, in the year 10 AC.