A. The gods decided whether to destroy humans and the world.
I just learned this today, every 52 years when a specific group of stars is in the middle of the sky (called the pleiades) they douse their ceremonial fires that have been going for the last 52 years, and have a ceremony (including sacrifice) to light new ones, praying to their gods that they will decide to spare them. They do this because they have stories about a long time ago when the gods nearly wiped out the human race, which many people believe is a version of the Biblical flood.