What Aelyn did not know, what she could not have known then, was the price of repairing the world.
I do not speak of her personal loss. Not her lover, her family, her friends, not even her own dreams. No, I speak of the panic that gripped the world when the three suns were merged. I can still remember the absolute darkness that engulfed that day.
Panic gripped Leviathan’s End. We were a microcosm for what happened elsewhere in the world. We burned all the fires inside the skull of the old god, but outside, we could see nothing, not even the shape of our own home. Around us the ocean was still, and we quickly realized that, unless the tides returned, we would be able to leave only by our own strength. It grew cold on the second day and on the third we heard cracking. The ocean around us began to freeze.
After two weeks the sun returned. It came with famine and disease.
We continued to suffer when the Leviathan’s blood was drawn from the ocean. Great black waterspouts ran from horizon to horizon. They passed over us, cracking the skull of the old god, flooding us within and threatening to break apart our home. After they finished, corpses of the sealife began to rise – sharks and whales and everything larger and smaller. The stench of rotting flesh was inescapable. We lit fires to burn the dead for nearly a year.
It went on and on, but nothing rivalled the birth of Se’Saera’s Children. Nothing had such long fingers of dread as those pregnancies.
—Onaedo, Histories, Year 1029