Sixty year ago, the world was turning dark, and, in the Lady's realm, madness spread like a plague and reigned like a king. The people were insane, insatiable, like rabid beasts. Soldiers deserted the Army, leaders forsook their people, and swindlers and thieves patrolled every alley with more regularity than any police or night watch. The world tree's roots were gnawed by an acidic chaos that crept up through cracks between the floorboards of the world. Everyone was drunk. Everyone was high. People, strangers, made a wild, desperate something that cannot be called love openly in city streets. A fragment of the multiverse was dying, as a thousand do every day, and no one but its denizens noticed or cared. Denizens they were, for it was a land of travelers, vagrants, wanderers, immigrants, and refugees, lost souls and ruined people from a million surrounding dimensions. Each searched for success, trying to cut from the fabric of the place a new and mighty self, a personage able to write off past failures as the work of a pitiable inferior and free from the curse of any prior misfortune. Now, they found their lots cast with a dying country.
Some felt cheated and spent their rage pummeling anyone smaller and weaker who happened to come along. Others became resigned to their fate, declared themselves perpetual losers, and finally lost even themselves in the abundance of alcohol that stayed cheap even as the price of food went through the roof because of obscure economic difficulties that only a few of the wizards of the great bankers could understand. The wizards, mathematician-mages, were slaughtered along with their financier bosses before they could do anything to rectify the colossal mess they had made. Some people cried, others quietly hung themselves or left for parts unknown. Many turned to hedonism, violence, and vice as branches of the old ash tree cracked and fell away, forever, into nothingness. The void's un-stomach growled as it laughed at their coming destruction.
Then the trustees, older than the Lady herself, convened and decided that there was no alternative to a cataclysm of biblical proportions which would wipe everything out. Their sorcery would rip the ash out of the ground and throw it into the emptiness of space. Then they would begin anew. These mortal deities had not visited the realm they handed off to a minor goddess in aeons. The roots of the ash tree proved stronger than anyone had anticipated. The trustees decided they would keep the same topography and find an almost entirely new population less depraved than the half-settled nomads, strangers, foreigners, and freaks who were told tho pack their bags and leave. No one particularly wanted to die, so as far as anyone knew, the eviction notice had one hundred percent compliance. Most of the people went quietly off to other places with nothing more than a few good stories to tell, stories their new acquaintances would likely never believe. A few, however, loved their homes. They left to save their lives, but they swore an oath of return.