To whoever finds this:
My name is Earthan of Nathaeria. I used to be a normal boy, many years ago. Now... I'm a nothing but a shadow of the past. My soul, my body, my mind... everything was changed.
My sanity is fading... slowly, but steadily. I can barely hold myself together, and stop myself from letting me jump into the darkness, seeking the inevitable. So I write this as a warning, an attempt to remind the future generations of what we did, and what we deserved.
The world... its alive, it has a soul, caring and forgiving, but everything has its limits. Gaea has means to defend herself, to regenerate, and continue living, but they are not flawless.
We, humans, abused the world. We killed the other species until they disappeared. We drained Gaea of her energy, and made it into chaos. And when we started to think there wasn't anything left we prepared our ships to leave to a different place... to a different world. But I was left behind, just as most of the ones that knew too much, or the ones that knew too few. I will always blame myself for taking part on that, but I was blinded... everyone was.
In the end, the world's defenses activated. Like a plague, the corruption started to spread all around the world. It was unstoppable. Anything touched by it would, in the best case, change. In most cases, however, the results were fatal. Even the light that went into the corruption couldn't come out easily, so it was all surrounded by that aura of darkness. The signal that your time was drawing near.
...and we started it all.
We were a secret investigation organization. We were given all kinds of projects, usually the kind that would be ethically wrong. At some point, we started working on a project codenamed "eternal flame". It was supposed to be the way to solve all our energy problems. We were building a device based on some papers we were given. We didn't know how it worked, and we didn't want to. We only knew what it was supposed to do: emit a lot of energy. Infinite, safe and clean, it was the everyone's dream. It would have given us an energy paradise... if it had worked. We couldn't be more mistaken.
The device did indeed work. Apparently clean, all the energy we needed just came out of it, as if it was magic. Given the success of the project, a few more devices were built. Bigger and more robust, meant for commercial exploitation. The project was made public, avoiding any kind of information as to how the devices worked. Everyone was happy, but ignorant of a simple fact: Our device was draining the life of our own world, to give us that energy. We were hurting Gaea, draining her of her own life, like a disease. And like that, Gaea had to defend herself.
As such, we lost our right to live in Gaea's surface, and with us, every other living being.