Out of Character:
We'll see how this'ne turns out, won't we?

In the distant past there sat a man in a cell speaking words of such a weight that they would scar themselves onto the flesh of history.

In the deepest past, before time had meaning, something old, cold, and blue raged through the void at the dawn of creation.

More recently, there sat a Dark Wizard in the ruins of a country, relating a story straight from the razor's edge that separates children from adults. Later, the story came up again in a set of grim, deadly tunnels soon demolished in cataclysmic fashion.

Before that, a cantor died in the dark and only one man was there to witness it and bury him.

At some point, time lost meaning again -- and something pulled it back together through sheer force of will.

The web was tangled, the threads often overlapping and spinning around each other. Ever was the bird, the elder crow, and in the mountains of central Raiaera there stood a dwarf waiting as patiently as his tectonic father would allow.

A woman stood now, on the steps of a slowly populating academy in the City of Wizardry, Beinost. She looked up, forgetting for a moment the sound of her daughter's laughter, of one of her apprentices casting her first spell. She looked up and felt a sense that something had changed, and she couldn't put her finger on what it was or why but it chilled her.

Before that, so very long before, a man in a Hat stood atop a mountain in a storm, his long leather coat billowing in winds that should have ripped him out of his boots. He took up a liviol guitar, its strings crafted from the finest spider silk the world had ever known. Before him, a fleet of airships churned, their arcane engines leaving behind grim rainbow exhaust as a thousand took aim. The man in black grinned.

Before even him though, close to when that first Dark Wizard uttered his immortal words, before a catastrophe, before so much of that -- before.

The world split in the night. It looked like ripples on a water, complete with a spray of bubbles and everything; these faded quickly, drawn back up by some unnameable anti-gravity. What fell through with them did not. It was blue. It was blue like the idea of the color, and it was a man in much the same way. At some point in the fall, the scars and imperfections of reality ebbed back into place. Everything that should have been there soon was, as if the cosmos saw a great error within itself and decided to correct it quickly. As he fell, he -- this man -- fell, he reached out with senses new and old and far between; he became himself again, marked as ever by power and the awful responsibility to use it and use it well.

Because while much of what's been given exposition here might happen, or might not, only one thing was certain:

"There won't be any apocalypse."