The primordial city burned.

  Waves of fire swept across bloodstained streets. Pillars of ash poured into the sky. It was a city of grace once—a sweeping sea of marbled stone, its towers clawing at the heavens, its reach stretching across the crest of the earth. Now it was lost, a bygone wonder ravaged by carnage and flame.

  Invading legions swept through the wending roadways, shrieks of steel and wails of woe spilling out along their path. Smashing every barricade, razing every wall, they pierced clear through the city, stabbing at its very heart: the cosmic deity, seedbed of all things, source of life upon the earth.

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  The Archmother.

  It was an old and gnarled mass, a towering tree of twisted arms scaled in wood, coiled and interlaced. Its hands and fingers splayed out as it climbed, forming writhing branches that cast long shadows over the inner city. Rendered warped and pale by the ages, it nevertheless endured, dominant over all.

  And then: a flash of light, a crack of thunder. Swiftly, savagely, the Archmother was cleft in two, its titanic trunk split asunder. A fountain of emerald fury ruptured from the wound—a thousand bolts of lightning entangling with the air itself. Blackened clouds grew like a cancer; a terrible, swirling storm engulfed the sky. As the Tree roared in pain, an ethereal blast, a dreadful shockwave of otherworldly might, erupted from its roots. It swept across the city, devouring all in its path, leaving in its wake the sickened screams of the transmuted damned.

  And from the ashes came the scourge.