The Elder Ages

No Gar was there to see it. This is the deep past as the shamans tell it, where myth and memory have long since run together — take it as legend, not chronicle.

• The Shattering — in an age beyond counting, a cataclysm broke the moon apart, and it has hung shattered ever since.
• The Descent — down the Floating Islands came the Lizardfolk, cold-blooded and unimpressed, to make the world below their own.
• The Elder War — they found the Throg'Gar already here: then no brutes, but builders of great megaliths. The two kindreds warred across the mythic ages, and the Lizardfolk prevailed, casting down the megaliths and raising temples and colossal pyramids in their place.
• The Fall — nothing they built endured. Both kindreds decayed, masons and temple-builders alike sinking back toward the beast, leaving the world strewn with drowned shrines and broken columns. Humankind came late, into wreckage older than itself.

THE COMING OF THE GAR

The tribes came late into the world, and tell their own beginning in a single breath. Every Oom'Gar child learns it before it can hunt, and the shamans repeat it over the fire without changing a word:

"First was the Oom, and they lived peacefully with the beasts in the valley. Then the shy Tul swam in the waters of Garuun and ate the fish, because fish has no feelings. This is how death came to be. Then the Kun domesticated beasts and built stone strongholds. This is how iron came to be. Then the Wuf went to the mountains and forged weapons and became trouble. This is how bloodspill among Gar came to be."

It is a genealogy and an indictment at once: each tribe in the order it appeared, and beside it the thing it let into the world. The Oom'Gar tell it without apology — they are first in it, and they brought nothing. The Kun'Gar answer that a people who brought nothing also built nothing. The Wuf'Gar are said to like the telling best of all.