The skies rained down fire and stone in a way that had never been seen by our people before. We lived near an active volcano, but this was different. Something was happening that hadn’t been seen in our lifetime, nor the lifetimes of our forefathers. A story like this would have reached across time and would have been passed from parent to child through generations. No… This represents something much bigger than the volcano.
The rain of fire lasted three days. During these days, the sounds of battle could be heard across the town, though no one could find the source. It sounded as if giants were battling just outside view. Many people died that day, and the village was destroyed. Those of us who were smarter, or maybe luckier, fled at the first sight of fire in the skies. We fled to the caves, or we fled to the seas. Who knows which of us fared better? We may never know.
We heard the screams, clanging of weapons, and sounds of fire even from deep within the caves we took shelter in. We stayed a whole week. We didn’t trust that the event was over, even after the sounds stopped. We survived on cave lizards, bats, and even strange insects we found within the caves. You may wonder how we kept warm, but as the world outside burned around us, we never wanted for heat. Not even deep within the caves were things unchanged by the outside world.
When we finally trusted that things had come to a stop, we ventured back out into the world. It had been completely devastated. Forests were nothing but plains filled with ash, and rivers dried up. We looked to the mountains we had lived under, and even they had very little snow and ice atop them as we came to expect when we looked at them. They seemed much smaller as well. We were lucky to not have the caves collapse upon us while we hid inside them.
We decided we needed to move to the mountain tops to survive. The only source of water we could find was there. We knew not how to live at this time, as every technique we knew functioned in the old world. We slowly developed tools for carving out an existence atop the mountain through agriculture and hunting what was left.
We soon found that, through the devastation of our world, things were beginning to spring to life. There were plants we had never encountered. Animals, too. Life was abundant in the aftermath of the rain of fire. It seemed that the ash was a perfect breeding ground for new life to flourish. The snow soon came back to the peaks of the mountains, though not nearly as much as before due to the height of these peaks having been diminished. We were now the people of the mountains, and we would tell storied for generations to come of the beginning of our culture.