The Matter of the Ashes (lo de las cenizas, “the ashes”) is what the valley of Barrado Balacán, fifteen years later, calls the day the city of Ritornello ceased to exist, in Ardis Vala. The valley does not say “the destruction” or “the bomb”.
| Type | Event (catastrophe) |
| World | Ardis Vala |
| Spanish entry | Lo de las Cenizas |
Event
The Egg — a cosmological weapon from a Rudishva weapons module, operated in coordination with the intelligence of the Beacon — was carried by the bomb-dragonfly to Ritornello, the city of sixty domes at the head of the imperial road, and subtracted it. Those who study the ruin stress that the city was not demolished but disconnected. What remained:
- ash covering everything like dirty snow;
- the imperial road running straight to an arch that leads nowhere;
- four thousand vanished — neither dead nor gone.
Consequences
The whole valley broke. The rift opened that day swallowed Balmora castle, today the Sunless Citadel; the imperial roads were severed; and Valdemora went from farming village to survivors’ bastion.
Responsibility
Responsibility is layered:
- Kerbog Khan operated the weapon.
- The Seekers of Ardis Vala had handed the Egg to another faction as a pledge of alliance, to secure backing in their war against the Knights of the Scar of the Sun.
- The faction that received it made a drastic decision whose justification is still debated.
- RAJ-750 is the intelligence that configured the Egg; it later became the seed of the Main Weapon Tree.
Ash as a signature
Ash recurs across this cycle: the ash over Ritornello; the ash falling mixed with snow in the land of hielo ardiente (“burning ice”), the mixed Gehenna onto which a door of Sogol now opens; and the god Ashtar, whose name is spoken softly — “the one who left us something, from the ashes”. The archive does not claim these are the same ash.
Depiction
The archive’s image shows the event from a farmhouse: a family on the threshold, stopped mid-task, looking toward the valley, where a city-shaped absence and the low crater rim lie under a pale sky, and the fields recover in patches.
Appearances
- The gesta (campaign-cycle) of Ardis Vala — the return after the Hiatus: the valley fifteen years later, told by those who stayed.