SKARN

People ask what Skarn is. He is neither a beast nor a man. He is a force, the way a comet gliding through the night sky is a force. Something released him a long time ago, out past the edge of this universe. Some say his release was inevitable, and ever since, Skarn has ruled the skies. Nothing in our sacred sky has ever been heavy enough to bring him down or shift his direction. That is what makes Skarn an unstoppable force.

Skarn is the first of his kind. A creator. A destroyer. His creation is the reason for all that exists, and all that does not. He does not hunt. He wants, and what he wants comes to him. He has never wanted two things at once, and he has never gone around anything. Mountains do not divert him; the mountains lean aside. The great winds have thrown themselves against him since before the sky had a name, and not one of them has turned him a single step. The stars he passed came loose and trailed after him. He walked at our sun until it could not refuse, and the scar of light it left behind is the sunwake.

In the old engravings, a hoop circles Skarn's body. It is not a halo, and it is not his path, for his path has never bent. It is his mind itself, the constant turning of his need to conquer reality. It wraps around the road he walked like a rope around a post, the way a dead world will keep circling the thing that killed it. Where his face belongs there is only an annulus, an empty ring, and through it there is nothing but the dark he came out of, because Skarn has never looked at what he has. He has only ever pursued what he desires.

As countless years of Skarn's rule began to pass by, he began to fall. His falling reshaped reality itself, and ancient baskets began to form across the universe. Elders of the Casters' League began to find these powerful baskets, but there was a problem. They held untapped power, intricate puzzles, and impassable walls. Some were hidden inside tangled stars; some were hidden inside black holes. No force could handle Skarn's sacred baskets, and the baskets began to eat away at planets, stars, and even whole galaxies. The Casters had no force that could conquer them, and could find none. Then one night a young Caster from a hidden world, named Ismar, came across a fallen meteor behind his home. He went to investigate and found something that would save the universe: a dark, circular fragment holding a power his eyes had never seen. He brought it to an Elder, who knew at once that this fragment had power enough to conquer Skarn's baskets.

After this discovery, more and more of these fragments began to appear. Ancient scientists came to believe that the fragments were pieces of Skarn's crown: the last pieces of a universal puzzle, a power strong enough to reach the chains of Skarn's baskets. Whatever the Caster is looking at, the fragment fixes on, the way the god fixed on a foreign star. The fragments are believed to carry a piece of Skarn's will, and they will not stop until they reach their end. They were so powerful they could eat a sun.

As time went on, the Casters discovered three rules about Skarn's fragments.

One: keep your fragment apart from the others. Two: never let the fragment stand in one place.

And three: never throw it toward the sun.