The shardborn and the falling light

The world was not ready for The Shattering Night.

When Solaris fell, her light—once pure and whole—fractured into shards that burned through the heavens like falling stars. They screamed as they fell, searing the skies with fiery trails and shaking the earth where they landed. The light carried beauty and devastation in equal measure, a divine brilliance that could bless or corrupt all it touched.

For the mortals below, who had no knowledge of Solaris or the Void Walkers, that night was remembered as a moment of both terror and awe. Some called it “The Shattering Night”, others “The Falling Light”—but the truth, even in its fragments, remained unclear. When dawn broke, the world was not as it had been.

The villages, still young and nomadic, were small clusters of wandering families and hunters. They huddled together in tents of animal hide or under the shelter of rough stone ledges, moving as the seasons demanded. For centuries, their lives had been simple—shaped by the cycles of survival, the rising of the sun, and the coming of night. But The Shattering Night changed everything.

In the days that followed, the world was uneasy.

The sky bore the scars of falling light, faint streaks that lingered as though the heavens themselves had been torn. The air tasted of ash and something metallic. The animals grew restless—some fleeing their grazing grounds, others turning unnatural and hostile, their eyes black as voided glass. Rivers ran darker where the shards had fallen.

And where the shards touched the earth, something new was born.

Tales of the Shardborn spread like wildfire among the nomadic tribes. They were spoken of in reverent whispers or fearful curses, depending on who told the story. Some claimed the Shardborn were touched by the divine—chosen by the light to guide humanity. Others said they were cursed, twisted by power they could not understand.

The truth lay somewhere in between.

The shards had landed across the land, embedding themselves in the very soil or burying deep beneath lakes and mountains. Some shards found their way into people—humans who, by chance or fate, were drawn to the strange stones. When a shard merged with a mortal, the person was changed forever, marked by its radiance. They became Shardborn, beings who carried fragments of Solaris’s essence within them.

It was inevitable that the tribes, so scattered and fragile, would respond to the Shardborn in different ways. The Shattering Night was not just a celestial event; it was a catalyst, dividing the mortals into belief and fear.

The first group, The Children of Solaris, emerged from a vision.

An elder named Iliara—a woman of gray hair and sharp eyes—claimed to have seen Solaris in her dreams. She said the light spoke to her, guiding her to protect the shards and the Shardborn who carried them. “The light is broken, but it still lives,” she told her people. “And those who carry the shards carry hope for the future.”

Under Iliara’s leadership, the Children of Solaris became protectors of the Shardborn. They wandered from village to village, seeking out those touched by the shards and offering them shelter. They preached that the Shardborn were sacred—chosen to restore balance to the world.

But not all agreed.

From fear and desperation rose The Dawn Reavers.

They were hunters and warriors, led by a council of pragmatists known as the Sun Cleansers. To them, the shards were a curse—a poison that had seeped into the world. They had seen what corruption could do: wolves with twisted limbs, rivers that boiled in the cold, and crops that grew black and brittle. To the Dawn Reavers, the Shardborn were abominations.

“Where the shards fall, ruin follows,” their leader, Rathic, declared. “We must cleanse the land of this darkness before it consumes us all.”

With bone-carved weapons and iron determination, the Dawn Reavers began their hunt.

Among the scattered villages, rumors of Shardborn began to spread. A boy who could call fire to his hands. A woman whose wounds healed without leaving a scar. A hunter who moved faster than the eye could follow. To the Children of Solaris, these were miracles. To the Dawn Reavers, they were evidence of corruption.

For the Shardborn themselves, the reality was far less grand.

Those touched by the shards carried a heavy burden. Their powers, strange and uncontrollable, often came with pain or consequences. Some Shardborn burned their own flesh when they tried to summon fire. Others suffered visions—flashes of a light too pure to bear—leaving them sleepless and haunted.

Aelia, one of the first Shardborn, was a young woman from a small nomadic clan. She had been foraging in the woods when she stumbled upon a shard lodged in the roots of an ancient tree. The moment she touched it, a flood of light pierced her skin, and her body trembled with its power.

When she returned to her tribe, Aelia was no longer the same. Her hair, once dark, had turned white as snow, and her eyes glowed faintly in the dark. She could mend broken tools and soothe injuries with a touch, but her powers drained her, leaving her weak and feverish for days.

Her tribe was divided. Some saw her as a sign of favor from the heavens; others murmured that she was cursed.

“You are not one of us anymore,” her eldest brother spat one night.

Aelia fled before dawn, her heart heavy with confusion and fear.

The conflicts between the Children of Solaris and the Dawn Reavers began subtly—a stolen shard here, a lone Shardborn captured or hidden there. But it did not take long for these clashes to escalate.

The Children of Solaris moved from village to village, gathering Shardborn into their fold and preaching the divine nature of the shards. They left tokens of the light behind: small carvings of falling stars, left at campfires or mounted on poles. To those who accepted their message, they brought hope.

The Dawn Reavers were not far behind. Their raids were swift and brutal, targeting villages suspected of harboring Shardborn. They destroyed shards where they found them, believing it the only way to cleanse the world of corruption. Their symbol—a sun eclipsed by shadow—became a mark of fear.

In a quiet stretch of rolling plains, Tobin, a small tribal chief, watched the growing chaos with unease. His people were simple—hunters and gatherers who lived by the rhythm of the land. Tobin had seen neither Shardborn nor shards, but he had heard the stories. He knew the world was changing, and that change brought danger.

One evening, a stranger arrived at Tobin’s camp. She wore a cloak embroidered with stars and carried a small shard wrapped in cloth. “I am of the Children of Solaris,” she said softly. “I bring news and a warning. The Dawn Reavers are not far behind.”

Tobin frowned as he looked at the shard. It glowed faintly in her hands, as though alive.

“What do they want with us?” he asked.

“They want to purge this world of light,” the woman replied. “But this light—this power—will guide us to something greater.”

Tobin felt a knot tighten in his chest. “And what if they are right? What if the light is a curse?”

The woman met his gaze, her expression resolute. “It is not the light we should fear, Chief Tobin. It is what we choose to do with it.”

As night fell over the plains, Tobin sat beside the fire, staring at the faint scars in the sky where the shards had fallen. The world was young, but it was no longer simple. The tribes were stirring, drawn into conflicts that they did not yet understand. The shards had given power to the mortal world—power that carried both wonder and destruction.

In the distance, a howl echoed across the night, far too deep for any wolf Tobin knew. His people huddled closer to the fire, muttering prayers to spirits they had long worshipped.

The world was changing, and change, Tobin realized, always came with blood.

End of Chapter Two