Before the Fifth Black Calamity began, every commentator on the continent had weighed in at length—and to no real purpose—on the significance of the war. The most common line they used was that this Black Calamity would usher in an era of chaos.
Well, that sounded reasonable at first. But during the previous Black Calamities, the commentators' ancestors had said much the same thing: that a Black Calamity would shake the order of the continent, and that restoring order would involve a difficult period. Wasn't that just another way of saying an era of chaos?
So no matter which world you were in, those so-called big-name public intellectuals couldn't come up with anything new beyond playing at mystics and repeating themselves.
As for the few people who truly saw past appearances to the heart of things, they said similar things too—people like Murphy and Lord Paine. But when they spoke of an "era of chaos," they meant a much broader and deeper concept.
In short, fools and geniuses alike believed the Fifth Black Calamity would bring changes destined to go down in history. But no one dared make the outrageous claim that a god would descend into the mortal world during this war. Even the madmen who had already lost their minds wouldn't say such a thing.
After all, in a world where gods truly existed, any discussion of them was veiled and taboo.
And yet, the thing the world believed could never happen had just happened in full view of everyone.
In front of every soldier on the entire Maginot Line, amid the wide-eyed curses of the surviving players and the dazed stares of vampires and Golds, an enormous pale wolf tore through the astral plane and descended from the heavens like a meteor. Its first contact with the