The beginning of time is such an interesting concept to author. No one was there, save the omniscient narrator. The world forms and reveals itself to readers through descriptions or histories, but no one, save the author, truly knows what the beginning was like.
Aestraea is different.
Aestraea does not reveal itself in a traditional way, and there was a single person there at the very beginning of Aestraean Time. Asrin Moore crashed into a world that had no name. No history. No people. Just land, revealed for the first time as the Veil was pushed back by the force of his arrival. That land was Druth Cael. It was the first thing Aestraea showed anyone. And for fifteen hundred years, that was all that existed.
What happened in those fifteen hundred years was the quiet beating heart underneath everything that follows in Book 1. Druth Cael grew. Ithrynvael rose as its capital, a city that became the centre of arts and trade and architecture, the kind of place people travel enormous distances to reach just to be part of it. A civilisation built itself, slowly and with great care, from a single point of beginning.
Then the second cataclysm hit, and everything changed again.
Druth Cael was not destroyed; it was merely broken. The Fíochmhuime were sent to tend it, to find the Remnant, to begin the long work of healing a land that had already lived through more than most places ever will. Donovan din Lars is from Ithrynvael. When he walks out of his ancestral home in Chapter 3, he carries all of that history with him, the memory of a city that was the beating heart of the only world anyone had ever known.
Druth Cael holds all of it quietly, underneath everything that happens in A World Reborn, much like people hold the cataclysms in their own lives, the trauma, the expectations, all of it, just under the surface.
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