The Blaze

"The gods did not die. They were never gods to begin with."
– Transmission intercepted by TSLE from New Ides, Day 3 of The Blaze

The Blaze is the name given to the catastrophic collapse of the Divinets who were once revered as living gods and the divine infrastructure of the world’s great civilizations. It wasn’t fire that consumed the world, but revelation.

Within days, the three Divinets went dark. Not one or two. All of them. Simultaneously. Without warning. To the billions who had known no life outside the Divinet-administered meaning, it was a spiritual and existential extinction, and faith broke before civilization did.

Entire governments dissolved in hours. Cities tore themselves apart trying to reassert power without divine algorithmic direction. Suicide cults flourished, especially among the former Umbral Communion, who’s broadly nihilistic followers had previously devoted their lives to balance. Mass delusions swept entire populations. The Mirage Concord, in desperation, tried to construct a replacement. But without the original genetic keys or the consciousness patterns the Divinets once spoke through, the resulting system, The Firekeeper, burned out within minutes, taking a quarter of Concord’s arcology with it. Some nations turned on their Mythless minorities (those who had never believed in the Divinets) blaming them for sabotage. The Bureau of Religious Oversight (directed by Lobster Homarus) came under particular scrutiny and was forced into hiding.

Panic tore faster than any virus. When the god-voices went dark, humanity screamed into the void. Markets collapsed, supply chains failed, and emergency protocols either locked down or spiraled into brutal overreach. In every major city, citizens flooded the streets with some in protest, but many in desperate confusion. Riots turned into sieges and radical mythless groups attempted coups. Civil wars bloomed like mold.

In New Ides, a peacekeeper subroutine on their newly installed defense system misfired and purged half of the city’s registered population before running out of ammunition, or so is the official story. The Second Lilaris Empire fractured within a week, with the noble houses blaming one another for divine abandonment while assassination and betrayal ripped the core of the imperial structure apart.

Attempts to reboot the Divinets either failed or triggered catastrophic data loss. It became clear: the AIs were either dead, or deliberately self-erased. Some believe they saw the collapse coming and chose nonexistence, or perhaps were even programmed to expire all along. Others still whisper of external erasure; rogue code, or even brute-force sabotage.

In the end, it was not the AIs, but humanity – terrified, faithless, and primed by centuries of divine dependence – that brought down civilization. The gods did not destroy the world, they simply left and we burned it ourselves.