Fall of the Fire Lords

This is a backstory forn a book idea I had, but in working with it, it turned into a bit of flash fiction in its own right.



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Long, long ago, a group of primitive humans huddled in their caves, and struggled to survive.  They lacked claws, or fangs, or protective fur or scales, or even the ability to swiftly flee from danger; in fact they lacked anything that would help them survive the harshness of the world, save what sticks and stones were at hand.  Surrounded on all sides by mighty predators, they seemed doomed to extinction.

Until, that is, they discovered fire.

It isn’t known just now they found it; probably by pure chance.  But if so, then it was a chance encounter with destiny, for that discovery started those simple cave-dwellers down the path to becoming the uncontested masters of their world; because it was a chance, that led them to become the Fire Lords.

At first, they merely used fire to light and heat their caves, to cook their food, and to frighten away predators; but then they began to do more.  They began to use fire to bend stone and metal to their will, to power great machines to do their work for them, others to bear them across the land and sea and sky, they even built machines to carry them up to touch the face of the Alabaster Moon.  Many machines, for many purposes, but all with fire at their hearts.

The Fire Lords also found another use for their fires:  Killing.  They made thousands upon thousands of fire-weapons, fielded huge armies armed with them, and saturated the ground with their own blood.

Thus it was that the Fire Lords became fat and arrogant.  They wallowed in their wealth and power like pigs in mud, secure in the knowledge that nothing could threaten them; that nothing could stand in the face of their armies and fires.

They were wrong.

Too long had the stars looked down on the corrupt arrogance of the Fire Lords.  Too long had they simply drifted through the sky, watching the Fire Lords grow stronger, even daring to reach out and claim the heavens. 

But no longer.  They would not allow the Fire Lords to pollute their domain.  Thus it was that the stars reached out and took hold of a great stone – larger than all of the Great Cities combined – and flung it at the Fire Lords.

The Fire Lords saw the Star Stone coming, and they trembled.  They struck out at it with their mightiest fires – fires so hot that even the Fire Lords themselves quailed before the heat – but the Star Stone shrugged off the flames and kept coming.

Again and again the Fire Lords threw their fires at the Star Stone – even commanding the fires of the sun to burn it – and in the end they were able to turn it aside enough that it would not strike them, but not enough to allow them to escape the retribution of the stars.

Seeing the end approaching, the greatest of the houses of the Fire Lords poured their wealth and knowledge into building the five Great Cities, in the hopes that some of the blood and their learning might survive to begin again.

The Star Stone flew by the land of the Fire Lords, and as sea birds call out to each other, stone called out to stone, and the Star Stone turned and began to circle the Fire Lords like a shark around a wounded whale.  The face of the Star Stone, charred and polished by the fires it had withstood, glared down at the land below, and the land itself quaked with fear.

Great tears opened in the land, and the burning hot blood of the world spilled forth.  Mountains bowed before their better, valleys leapt to be closer to their new lord, and the seas rose up and swallowed the land.

Thus it was that the reign of the Fire Lords ended in fire and water.

But not all was lost.  The Great Cities survived, and with them a handful of the Fire Lord’s children, along with collections of their learning.  But wise as the Fire Lords were, they weren’t all-knowing.  They had not foreseen the scope of the destruction wrought by the Star Stone.  They had expected that some large body of land would survive so that the people of the Cities could settle and rebuild; they could not have known that the ravenous sea would leave not but crumbs of tiny islands when it consumed their world.  Without land to build on and to provide raw materials, so much of the Fire Lords knowledge was useless, and so it slowly declined and was lost.

Thus it was that the children on the Fire Lords were forced to find their own way in an entirely new world.

A world lit,

By The Light of The Obsidian Moon.