The Great Withering is the name given to the long collapse that ended the Age of Abundance and left Tarisia the dying world known today. It is remembered through broken stories, ruined cities, poisoned waters, and the scars of Sorcery, but no surviving tradition explains with certainty where decline ended and catastrophe began.
Collapse of the Old Kingdoms
By the final generations of the Age of Abundance, the great waters of Tarisia were already failing.
Rivers narrowed. Reservoirs emptied faster than they could be replenished. Fertile lands withered along their edges, while kingdoms that had once fought over trade and territory increasingly turned their armies toward springs, lakes, and watersheds.
Sorcery remained one of the greatest powers available to them.
That was the problem.
The same art used to preserve crops, defend cities, heal the wounded, and accomplish impossible works consumed the very resource upon which those wonders depended. Every shortage created another reason for Sorcery. Every conflict over water demanded still greater workings to secure what remained.
As scarcity deepened, old rivalries became struggles for survival. Kingdom fought kingdom. Cities rebelled against those who controlled their water. Alliances formed around rivers and collapsed when those rivers failed. Armies crossed lands already beginning to die because somewhere beyond the horizon another people still possessed a lake.
Sorcery made such wars terrible.
A reservoir could sustain a city or fuel the working that destroyed its enemy. An oasis could be worth more than a fortress. Rivers became borders, prizes, and sacrifices.
The ruins of the Old Kingdoms still bear witness to what followed. Ancient battlefields surround long-dead reservoirs. Desiccated soldiers remain buried beneath salt and sand. Stone channels cut through ruined fortifications, while entire districts bear wounds no ordinary siege could have made.
The stories become increasingly difficult to follow from this period. Names vanish. Dynasties merge together. Victories claimed by one people are remembered as massacres by another. Some kingdoms survive in oral tradition only in stories of their destruction.
Yet one name occurs again and again: Casshern.
The Betrayal
Nearly every surviving tradition eventually arrives at the same accusation: the Old Kingdoms turned against Taris.
Why they did so depends greatly upon the teller. Some claim the rulers of the Old Kingdoms sought immortality and believed the Mother Goddess alone possessed the secret of escaping death. Others say they wished to command creation itself, to make life without depending upon the world that was failing around them. Certain temples teach that mortal rulers simply grew arrogant enough to believe themselves equal to their creator.
In some, Taris refused to save the dying kingdoms. In others, she threatened to destroy them. A few traditions claim the Old Kingdoms believed binding the Mother Goddess was the only way to prevent the world from dying at all.
Whatever they intended, the stories place their final ritual at Casshern, one of the greatest centers of Taris’s worship, where they sought to bind a god, and, according to nearly every telling, they succeeded.
The Tomb of Taris
What happened at Casshern cannot be reconstructed with any certainty.
Some stories describe armies surrounding the holy city while sorcerers performed a ritual large enough to shake the land. Others speak of betrayal within Taris’s own temples. Many name Erra as architect, accomplice, or tempter, though few agree upon what role he actually played.
The oldest traditions say Taris was defeated, bound, and imprisoned beneath Casshern in what became known as the Tomb of Taris.
Whether the Tomb is truly a structure, a place beneath the earth, or simply the name later generations gave to whatever happened there is impossible to know. Casshern itself did not survive in any recognizable form.
Neither, perhaps, did the world.
The Last Waters
The oldest poems and songs tell that the seas withdrew immediately after the Betrayal.
Some claim they vanished more and more with every subsequent act of sorcery. Others say the imprisonment of the Life Bringer broke the natural order and the waters simply began to die. Priests still teach that Taris cursed those who betrayed her, while other traditions offer considerably less divine explanations.
Ancient coastlines have largely faded from the land. Harbors overlook empty basins where no living memory recalls water. Vast salt flats and strange formations mark some of the beds of vanished seas, while elsewhere there is little to distinguish what was once dry land from what once lay beneath the waves. The Defiled Lakes remain among the few recognizable remnants of Tarisia’s great inland waters, shrunken and poisoned beyond recognition.
Perhaps centuries of Sorcery had already done most of the damage and the betrayal at Casshern consumed what remained of the oceans.
Or, far more likely, later generations compressed generations of drought, war, and collapse into a single punishment because catastrophe is easier to remember when it has a beginning.
Whatever the truth, the Age of Abundance ended with a choking gasp for water.
The Survivors
The Old Kingdoms collapsed just as quickly. Cities were abandoned when wells failed. Roads disappeared beneath drifting sands. Kingdoms broke apart into migrations, warbands, refugees, and isolated settlements clustered around whatever sources of water remained.
The peoples of the Old Kingdoms survived, but the civilizations they had built largely did not. Humans, Peri, Saurians, Asuras, and Fenn who had once belonged to distant kingdoms and cultures were scattered across a changing world. Some carried their traditions with them. Others adopted those of the people among whom they found refuge. Languages fractured, customs changed, and histories became stories passed from one generation to the next.
In time, new settlements arose around the few reliable sources of water that remained. Some would grow into the great City-states of the modern world, while countless others vanished like the kingdoms before them.
The Old Kingdoms were dead, but their descendants endured and what followed became known as the Age of Survival.