The sun rises on a new world- a world not like that you may know. Shattered by a catastrophic impact not long after the extinction of the dinosaurs, Earth is not as it should be. This impact, a star falling to earth, changed not only the shape of the world, but also her content; this star bore strange light and strange crystals, warping and altering the planet where humanity slowly arose.
A thousand generations. Ten thousand generations? Longer, perhaps. Uncounted years had spun onwards since the fall of the star that was the herald of a different world, years unmarked by any man or beast, for when that celestial body plummeted to embrace the bosom of Mother Earth man had not even conceived of his first thought or his lungs filled with his first breath.
And yet, the echoes of that cosmic event still swept the world, their symphony molding the forefathers of mankind. Today he was not even aware of ought which might have been different, a path he might have taken, but it was one different nonetheless. Knowing or ignorant, mankind now looks out at the horizon marked by a thousand luminescent stars and stands to take his own place in the world- greater even than the fell and mystical creatures that roam the lands of Earth, his mind a burning thing so much more potent than even the fiercest of beasts and creeping things.
Anthropologists might call this a dreaming time, a time before men sang the first songs or wrote the first stories- when lives were so simple they left no mark on the tapestry of the ages, stamped no impact into the fabric of the planet to come. But to the men and women who lived such ages, who ate and breathed and hoped for what might be, these ages are only too real. A time of discovery, and innovation, and joy, and death.
The time of Civilization's Dawn.