The Blood Betrayal

In the annals of Yi Ti the Long Night begins with a crime. The Amethyst Empress of the Great Empire of the Dawn was cast down and murdered by her younger brother, remembered ever after as the Bloodstone Emperor, in the act the priests name the Blood Betrayal. He practiced dark arts and necromancy, took a tiger-woman for his bride, feasted on human flesh, and cast down the true gods of the empire to worship a black stone fallen from the sky. In his sin, the tales say, the Maiden-Made-of-Light turned her back upon the world and the Lion of Night came forth in wrath, and the Long Night fell upon all the earth. The shadowbinders of Asshai tell their own dark versions of the tale, and the maesters credit none of them, but as legend it stands: the oldest story in which the darkness comes from the east.