The Age of Chaos—The Age of Destruction—The Age of the Scorpion

This age, it is agreed by virtually all sages, will be the worst age the world will ever see. Most sages agree that no creature on Urthe will survive this age unchanged, and that many of the Powers, Greater and Lesser, will fall in this age. Where the Archer’s age brought war, and the Sea-Goat’s age brought reckoning, the Scorpion’s age is agreed by every surviving tradition to bring something else entirely: not a battle to be won or lost, but an ending that makes the very idea of winning meaningless.

The Debt Comes Due

Whatever solar Power was bent to mortal service in the Age of the Sea-Goat, sages of every remaining school now agree on one point: it does not stay bound forever. The old speculation, that some overlord’s Type II mastery of the sun was never truly a mastery at all, but only a very long and very patient loan, finds its terrible confirmation here. Whether the solar Power breaks its chains outright, or whether its captors, sensing the cost finally arriving, unleash it themselves rather than be caught holding an unpayable debt, the result is described the same way in every fragment of prophecy that survives: a light that does not warm, arriving from a direction the sky was never meant to open.

Another Leviathan Wakes

The Seed of Baramin planted quietly by some unnamed Power in the earliest ages, the one sages have tracked only by its slow, patient growth across seven Ages of silence, is now widely believed to reach its full and terrible maturity in this age. What form the leviathan finally takes, whether beast, plague, tide, or something with no name sages are willing to commit to paper, remains disputed even among those who agree it is coming at all. What is not disputed is the timing: an age already named for the sting, the poison, and the thing that waits beneath, is precisely the age such a creature would choose to finally surface.

The Godsfall

It is in this age, more than any other, that the old Godswar of the Seventh Age is expected to seem a small and orderly affair by comparison. The Cardinal Powers themselves, Vita, Fortuna, Mortem, Aequitas, and Magica, alongside the lesser Powers who have governed the peoples of Urthe since the Second Age, Savitas, Eleutheria, Spero, Veritas, and the rest, are foretold to contend against one another and against whatever the leviathan and the loosed sun bring with them, in a conflict sages have taken to calling simply the Godsfall, for lack of any word equal to what they expect it to actually be. Some hold that Mortem itself, the Power of Death whose touch on the strings first sent the Catastrophe’s stone falling toward Urthe in the Third Age, will be the one Power still standing when it ends, presiding at last over an age that finally belongs entirely to it.

The Elements Turned to Ruin

Alchemists who study the matter darkly point to the Exotic elements as the likely instruments of this age’s destruction, substances whose only prior use was theoretical or ceremonial, suddenly finding a purpose no one intended for them. Basiliskium’s litho-kinetic touch, once a curiosity for petrifying stone, could as easily still whole cities in an instant. Chaosium, whose glow already frays the mind of any sage who studies it too closely, is feared as the seed of some new madness spread wide rather than kept sealed. Corazonium’s volatility, contained until now only by vessels built to fail safely rather than hold it forever, is expected by more than one school to fail on a scale no single vessel was ever meant to survive. And Dilithium, whose net energy gain no alchemist has ever fully explained, is the one element sages fear most of all, precisely because no one has ever needed to learn its limit.

What, If Anything, Survives

No sage claims certainty about what remains once the Scorpion’s age has run its course. Some hold that this is precisely why the Tenth Age’s sages fell silent, having seen far enough ahead to know there would be nothing left to write for. Others take a thin comfort in the very existence of a Twelfth Age still spoken of at all, reasoning that a wheel which has turned faithfully through eleven ages already is unlikely to simply stop, however dark the eleventh proves. The mad prophets who once screamed of Ophiuchus and the Serpent Bringer are, by most accounts, silent now too, though whether that silence means the omen was answered, or only that no one remains mad enough to keep watching for it, is a question the Age of the Scorpion is expected to finally, and permanently, settle.