There is no event in the history of Thanria that has shaped the world more completely than the God Rain. It is the dividing line between everything that came before and everything that came after — the moment the gods stopped being distant, abstract objects of worship and became something mortals had witnessed, survived, and in many cases, never forgiven. Every calendar system on Thanria marks time in relation to it. Every major religion was forced to reckon with it. Every person alive today lives in its shadow, whether they know it or not.

It began with what most people assumed was a distant thunderstorm. What was actually happening was the gods themselves engaging in direct physical combat in Tannerian, the celestial realm above the mortal world. A faction of rebellious deities — Yogg, Ethiss, Malon, Feota, and Kirbik — had launched a coordinated assault, beginning with a brutal attack on Edhos, the god of healing. With Edhos near death and his protective energy no longer radiating throughout the pantheon, the rebellious gods pressed their advantage and struck at Jonium himself, the One Above All. In a swift and devastating assault, they achieved the seemingly impossible: Jonium was defeated and fell. For a period of time that felt, to those watching from the world below, like the end of everything, the most powerful being in all of creation was gone.

As the gods waged war in Tannerian, their expended energies — released like blood from wounds struck in divine combat — began raining down on the surface of Thanria. It touched everything. Animals, plants, land, water, minerals, and people were all affected, and nothing was changed the same way twice. Some died instantly in strange or horrific ways. Others were healed of lifelong ailments. Some were transformed entirely — altered in ways that ranged from extraordinary to devastating. The only constant was that nothing the God Rain touched remained unchanged. The chaos above was perfectly mirrored by the chaos below, and none of the gods, locked in combat, seemed to spare a single thought for the world suffering beneath them.

Within Tannerian itself, the battle raged at the highest levels. Inaias, the Holy Shield, squared off against Yogg himself — the flaming sword Dragon Breath clashing against an impenetrable divine shield in a battle that shook creation. Thalen fought alongside him. Kajsa, goddess of magic, sensed through the arcane weave exactly what was about to happen next and cried out a warning — too late. Ethiss, operating from the shadows as she always preferred, seized the fallen glaive Squall from where Feota had dropped it and hurled it at Inaias’s exposed back. Simmonette saw the throw. She had no time to warn him. To call out meant death from Yogg. To do nothing meant death from Ethiss. She stepped forward without hesitation. The glaive passed through her and she fell at her husband’s feet. The youngest of the gods was dead.

Her death, and the depowering of Ethiss, triggered what would later be called the first of the two great deluges — a massive release of divine energy that struck the mortal world like a wave. With the supreme deity restored, the tide turned completely. The rebellious gods were routed. The punishment handed down in the aftermath was swift and severe. Ethiss — whose cowardice and treachery had directly caused Simmonette’s death — was stripped of nearly all her power and banished from Tannerian forever, condemned to walk the mortal world as an outcast. The other rebellious gods were dealt with in ways that religious leaders have been considerably more vague about in the centuries since.

What the God Rain left behind was a world permanently and irreparably changed. The Rain-Touched — those altered by divine energy — walk among the population in every city and village. New creatures and plants exist that did not before. Old ones were transformed beyond recognition. The highbloom alone has come to infest hundreds of miles of land. And the relationship between the people of Thanria and their gods — once foundational to daily life — was broken in a way two centuries of time has done almost nothing to repair. The gods had fought each other in the sky above a world full of people who had done nothing wrong, and those people had suffered for it. Most of them have not forgotten. Most of them have not forgiven.