Board :	Chronicles of the Winds
Author :	Zenath
Subject :	The Ashfall Village
Date :	1/13
Long ago, before our kingdoms were established, there stood a village at the edge of what we now know as Tangun. The druids found there taught only a single lesson: "To awaken beneath ruin is to die first and breathe second." The villagers would ask the druids what it meant, but the druids would only smirk and place a single finger to their lips. It was not long until the villagers would understand the lesson. It was a chilly morning when the earth split open with a scream. Fire spewed into the heavens while stone rained down from the heavens. The sky itself was ripped asunder by ruin. Many of the villagers ran as fast as they could. Some stood and screamed in horror. And some remembered the teaching as they watched the druids lay flat on the ground, bodies still, with their faces buried in the soil. The villagers followed suit. They died, or seemed to die, as the ruin fell upon them. The storm passed, the stones grew cold, and the ash settled upon the ground like tainted snow. Then, one by one, the druids and those who followed their lesson took their second breath. Their mouths tasted smoke and blood. But they had also tasted survival. They slowly rose from their self-imposed graves only to walk among the corpses of those who were frantic and tried to flee. From that moment on, the villagers were changed. Their eyes would  remain rimmed in black and their and their breath forever shallow. They survived and lived, yes... but the first death clung to them as though the ruin found home in their bones. The druids gathered the village into a circle, saying: "Ruin will always come. To meet it, you must offer your first breath willingly. Only in that surrender does the second breath  come. To awake beneath the ruin is not to escape it... it is to be remade by it." And so the lands grew quiet once again, but the villagers were never quite the same. They carried ruin in their lungs and taught their children that survival was not triumph, but a deal made with death with a smirk and finger to lips.