“The first to go was our ignorance. For even our greatest and wisest could not have foreseen that ours was a story told a hundred thousand times or more. None could have seen that terrible red corpse city, and its inhuman masters, whose exhalation was death. The next to go were our laws. The tablets of our old prophets were ground to dust and the law of the Bright Queen was raised in their place. It was a molten law, an absolute law, and touching it brought swift and painful death.

In the end, creation itself was stripped from us. Wolves in the shape of men and things more awful belched forth from the fiery wound in the sky. They had iron boots and smooth fingers made for rubbing gold, and their bellies were always empty, and full of cruel and inhuman laughter. They ate up all the Ardenwood, and stripped it bare, and then they slurped all the rivers up, and the hills were scorched with acrid smoke. The valley dells where the beasts of the wood gathered were ripped asunder, and the beasts were ripped into a million parts and sold piecemeal to make women’s trinkets.

As for our kings, they were gelded and flayed. They were treated no better than the beasts in the end.”

– Excerpt from Age of Fire, attributed to the sage-poet Avsa Galman. Said to be an early account of the conquering of his world by the god-queen Mother Om.