The old songs say the Age of the Divines ended with a child’s scream.

Yaroth was the twelfth child of Bhava, born to an Elven woman named Katira in the tranquil glades of Eskandor. He was six years old when human children cornered him with a snake. The oldest accounts differ in small details, as old accounts often do, but they agree on what followed. Fear took hold of the child, divine power answered it, and the children and serpent before him were remade into something Einarth had never seen.

The first Naga were born.

That is the true beginning of the Age of Magic. Not the first spell, nor the first prayer, but the moment mortals were left to live beside power without the divine hands that had first carried it.

Einarth had known divine gifts before that day. Bhava’s children had brought healing, wisdom, growth, protection, inspiration, law, and other wonders to the mortal races. Omerus had even taught mortals to reach toward magic for themselves. Temples, families, rulers, and wanderers had all lived beneath powers greater than their own.

Yaroth’s terror revealed something different.

Power could change mortal life without permission.

It could alter bodies, bloodlines, and futures in a single moment. It could create something no king had ordered, no priest had prayed for, and no scholar knew how to undo.

The Naga became the first unmistakable sign that the relationship between divine power and mortal life had grown too dangerous to ignore. Their existence carried grief and fear from its first breath. Some saw them as victims of a divine accident. Others saw only shadow in their making.

What happened next is preserved differently from one tradition to another, but the broad shape remains the same. Bhava withdrew his children from the mortal world. The oldest surviving records describe the separation as protection. Divine power had walked too closely beside mortal life, and the consequences had become impossible to contain.

Yet removing the divine children did not return Einarth to what it had been.

Magic had already entered the land, the bloodlines, the stones, the waters, the songs, and the memories of the people. Mortals had seen what power could do. Some wanted to heal with it. Some wanted knowledge. Some wanted protection.

Others wanted mastery.

A few wanted to become something more than mortal.

Einarth would pay for all of it.

Reader question: If you had lived in that first generation after the Divines withdrew, what would you have feared most?

Next week, we will look at what remained behind after the gods were gone, and why the world did not become quiet when they left.