The God of Death was dead—yes, Duncan knew that, of course. Not only the God of Death, but the Goddess of Storms, the Eternal Burning Hearth, the God of Wisdom, every ancient god and evil god whose names had or had not been recorded in history, every one of the Ancient Kings—they were all dead.
On the day the Great Annihilation occurred, at the moment thousands upon thousands of worlds abruptly turned into these scorching, chaotic ashes, all gods had already died. What remained were merely their ever-decaying corpses, merely the "inertia" of the Old World.
Yet the instant the towering Gatekeeper uttered the words "the God of Death is dead," Duncan realized that he meant something else—not the "gods are dead" that Duncan knew of, but something that had just happened.
Duncan was not the only one. Agatha beside him quickly realized it as well, and the confusion on her face swiftly turned to shock. "What happened?"
The towering Gatekeeper silently turned around and once more stepped toward the distant wilderness. Several seconds later, his low, slow voice drifted back. "To buy time."
The world was cooling, and it was not merely the flames that were cooling—something intrinsic, something originating from the foundations of the mortal realm, was dissipating, as though one final warm breath were irretrievably leaving a dying person's throat.
Now, the undead had begun wandering the streets. Cold flames could no longer dispel the bitter chill of the mortal realm. The sea had long since fallen still, and memories of days gone by were fading from everyone's minds, or twisting into bizarre, shattered fragments without anyone noticing.
From distant Faelun to prosperous Pland, from Frost to Lightwind Harbor, from Moko to the broken, sprawling archipelagos of the Eastern Sea, "cooling" and "strangeness" were spreading through