The world counts its years from a single instant. Everything before it is reckoned in the long shadow of the gods; everything after is the struggle of their orphaned children. That instant is the Deity's Sacrifice — the end of the Conflagration, and the death of the divine age. It is the Year Zero of the DS calendar.
The Breaking of the Greathammer
When no power could end the war, the Ancient Deity ended it herself. In a final, catastrophic act at the Greathammer Mountains, she turned the full might of the divine against her own sister — and against herself. The mountains broke. A bottomless black abyss, the Eldertomb, was torn into the world, and into it the Ancient Devil was sealed away, imprisoned beneath the earth where she remains to this day. Around the wound spread the Ashen Plains, a vast dead country that has never fully healed.
The Year the World Began Again
The cost was beyond counting. The Deity gave her life in the act — her sacrifice. Two of the five Elders were now gone from the world: one sealed, one dead. The shock of it, and the storms of unleashed power that followed, killed mortals in their millions through fire, famine, plague, and ruin, and shattered the cross-continental order the gods had built.
From the Deity's death would later rise the faith of Radiant Light, which holds her sacrifice the holiest act in history; from the Devil's imprisonment would later rise the Infernal Creed, which holds it the gravest injustice. But that was for the centuries to come. In the immediate aftermath there was only ruin, and three surviving gods who could not undo what their kind had done — and who, one by one, would withdraw from the world entirely, in the long twilight the survivors call the Years of Ash.