Cegg never had an easy life, being a half-orc, especially one more inclined towards reading than fighting. Still, he worked as hard as he could in the small village he grew up in, making his living doing various jobs around town that needed doing.
Until calamity struck. Again and again and again. A drought, followed by a massive flood, then a plague. The small village was devastated and the folks way of life was devastated. Too small to garner any international attention or aid, the citizens were left to fend for themselves.
All Cegg could wonder was: why!? Why would his home be punished so? What had they done to deserve this?
Seeking the answer to this question, Cegg left home, as did many now-refugees from the destroyed town. Arriving at a larger city, Cegg immersed himself in academic studies of natural disasters and catastrophes. But these mundane answers proved insufficient to his nagging question. That is, until he discovered Groteus.
Groteus, the God of the End Times, the Harbinger of Last Days, Father of the Apocalypse.
There was no reason for the calamity that struck. That was it. It just. Did.
Another man would have been broken by that maddening revelation, but to Cegg, it simply made everything click into place. Of course there was no reason for it! It was just one of a thousand other catastrophes happening across the planes! All to foretell the eventual end of life itself.
And through his study of the natural world, of floods and droughts and plagues and the movements of the stars, he could begin to plot and predict when that time would arrive. Other Grotean scholars and madmen had endeavored to do the same, but had all been proven wrong, as the world failed to end at the time they had decreed.
Cegg took up a teaching position as a natural philosopher, educating folks on the phenomena he studied.
But then he saw new patterns begin to emerge. Signs pointing to a new apocalyptic epicenter. Through a portal to a so-called... New World.