Campaigns

At the turn of the eighth century since the War, the covenant that had bound the nations was sundered by the slow patience of old grievances. Saerrus strained against the Federation of Man, and the strain bore the character of ancient bitterness long harbored and never forsaken. Dwarves from the mountains, those steadfast and unyielding kindred of stone, had taken to skirmishing with human settlements along the timeworn borders. The elves of Vand'ardhon stood upon the threshold of a grievous decree, debating whether to bar all non-elven peoples save the hin from their hallowed lands. And the Sabonaar, ever restless, had launched expeditions to the far-off reaches of the Azala while war kindled between Cecasta and Sabonna in their own harbors. The world was drifting back toward the isolation and suspicion that had defined it ere the great shared catastrophe had forced cooperation upon the races, and none among the stewards of nations possessed the will or the foresight to arrest the dissolution.

And then the orcs came from somewhere that should not have existed. And the reckoning that followed would forge the world anew.

In the Steppes of Broken Stone, a machine wrought by the fugitive wizard Zanthar in 310 BW had lain buried beneath rubble for a thousand years, immutable and unheeded beneath the ruin of its creator's tower. When orcs infesting a small keep built from that rubble disturbed the device, it sent a vibration across the firmament between realities, a susurrus heard by two parties and two alone. The first was a host of orcs from an alternate world called Ta'Puh, a reality in which the orcs had prevailed in the War to End All Wars and had subsequently wrested dominion over eleven other planes of existence across four centuries of methodical interdimensional conquest. The second was Aleron Windstrider, a priest of Thalaman who bore a divine gift he had never fully comprehended, the ordained ability to wield any spell of interdimensional passage, bestowed upon him by an entity who had not yet proclaimed its purpose.

Heroes answered. They tracked raiders to the keep and beheld the machine and the body of an alien orc scout, slain by the keep's own inhabitants who could not recognize one of their own kindred from another world. They fought through a Zebulban cult that had taken root amid the nearby ruins like something fungoid growing in shadow. They sought counsel from dwarven sages at Arkhan's Hold, where they arbitrated a clan dispute with sufficient wisdom to earn the trust of those resolute people and their expertise on the nature of planar boundaries. In Instar they commissioned the tuning forks that would grant them passage to peer across the membrane between worlds. And what they beheld in Ta'Puh was fell beyond reckoning. An empire of orcs more advanced than any civilization upon Mazariim, armed with magical devices of such prodigious sophistication that the most accomplished mages of our world had never conceived of their possibility.

The Orceri launched a preliminary assault. Cities burned. The nations that had been sundering themselves through petty ambition were forced to stand as one or perish separately, and in that dire hour the old alliance of the War found its echo in a new and desperate unity. Heroes fought their way to the ruins of Gaal'Tarak, a dwarven stronghold that had suffered an inexplicable catastrophe some fifty years prior, where the Orceri were constructing a permanent portal into our world. There, in that embattled citadel beneath mountains that had stood since before the races had names, Aleron Windstrider fulfilled the purpose Thalaman had ordained for him. He gave his life and his gift to seal the portal, barring the Orceri's passage into Mazariim for one hundred and one years.

And the wave of power that the sealing wrought did not merely travel outward through the planes. It traveled backward through time, and the dwarven citadel of Gaal'Tarak, which had borne the scars of its unexplained ruin for half a century, received its explanation at last. The heroes had not merely chosen the ruins as their battlefield. They had created them. The catastrophe that had always been had always been their doing, a closed loop of consequence whose implications for the nature of causality I find both elegant and deeply unsettling. Time, it would seem, is not the river the philosophers describe. It is a thing with patience of its own, and it bides.

The Orceri Incursion forged unity from fracture. Racial rifts mended beneath shared blood and shared grief. But tens of thousands of advanced orcs remained upon Mazariim with their devices of incalculable power, and the sealing of the portal sent ripples through the planes that none felt at the time and none would comprehend for years. Something vast and immemorial shifted in its slumber. The first thread had been pulled, and the pattern that would consume three decades had begun its unceasing weave.

The shadow dragon Noctuminalis had lain in repose for centuries when the planar disturbances reached his tenebrous lair. He woke with his mind undiminished and his patience inviolate, and he did not reveal himself. He would not, not for decades, not until his designs had been wrought to completion. Instead he reached through dreams into the minds of mortal servants and wrested command of the Umbral Hand, a Zebulban cult that had operated in the penumbral spaces of civilized society for generations. Through this cult he forged magical weapons tied to the four classical elements and bestowed them upon the leaders of elemental cults that had lain dormant since before the War, and those cults roared back to life, filled with fervor for their old gods, and the Inner Kingdoms shuddered.

Earthquakes clove roads and toppled ramparts. Tidal waves assailed coastal cities. Wildfires consumed forests that had endured since the age of the Bryndawi kings. Storms marshalled where no storms had cause to gather. The people called it the Elemental Crisis, and new heroes rose to answer it, for the old heroes had sailed beyond the reach of tidings and the world could not wait for their return.

These heroes tracked the disasters to their sources and cleared cult strongholds called the Haunted Keeps, fortified bastions that had been reoccupied and corrupted by elemental sorcery. They followed teleportation circles to Tyar-Zaruk, the underground citadel where the cults had gathered in their strength, and fought through its perilous depths to reach the elemental gateways that threatened to become permanent breaches between planes. They sealed the portals. They broke the cults. They prevailed where the nations alone could not.

And they never learned who was behind it. Noctuminalis watched their victory from the umbral distances of his patience and considered it a successful reconnaissance. He had tested the strength and unity of the nations and found both wanting. He had identified the heroes most likely to oppose him in the fullness of time. He had wrested every scrap of knowledge he required, and he had revealed nothing, not his name, not his nature, not the scope of an ambition that measured its progress in centuries the way mortals measure theirs in seasons. The earthquakes his cults had caused unearthed artifacts that had been buried for millennia, among them a Taovanian relic called the Devil Cube. The shadow dragon noted this and bided.

The elemental cults shrank back into their accursed worship and their sibilant prayers. The portals were shut. The crisis passed into the chronicles. And for the next decade, the tensions between rival nations began their inexorable rise once more, as though the unity forged by shared peril was already fraying at its seams. Saerrus showed its wayward streak again. Pragos exerted pressure through secretive machinations in the Praetorian Senate. Small wars kindled among the Merchant Nations, none sufficient to redraw borders but all sufficient to remind the world that peace is not a condition but a labor, and the laborers were growing weary.

The Devil Cube had been buried and forsaken for centuries ere the Elemental Crisis shook it loose from the earth.

The artifact bore the history of two brothers. Salacan, the elder, gifted and renowned among the mages of the Lands of Chaos. Davos, the younger, consumed by wrath and beguiled by a Taovanian cultist who played upon his weakness with the patience that is Taovan's hallmark, for Taovan is nothing if not willing to tarry. Davos slew his brother in a ritual sacrifice ordained to grant him power beyond mortal reckoning. What he received instead was imprisonment within the Cube itself, a pocket of shadow wrought by Taovan as both prison and lure, and there he languished while centuries passed above him like seasons passing above a tomb.

When the earthquakes of 819 AW wrested the Cube from the earth, its malign influence began to spread. A portion of the Lands of Chaos merged with the Shadow Plane, creating a crepuscular nightmare where daylight was perpetually dim, where devils walked in stead of the undead, and where reality writhed and twisted like cloth wrung by invisible hands. Those who entered the afflicted region became sullen and hopeless, their will waning with every hour spent beneath that stygian pall. And Davos ruled this nightmare from his fortress, a sovereign of shadow and chain, eternally beseeching escape while punishing all who fell into his dominion for the injustice of his own damnation.

Heroes ventured into the accursed lands following rumors of a miraculous healing artifact, for the Cube had disguised itself as a Spike of Asti, promising benediction and light. What they found was shadow and chain-devils and a madman whose bitterness had calcified across centuries into something both pathetic and fell. They recovered three artifacts through perilous labor. A holy symbol of Tiovin. The tome containing Davos's own chronicle and his weaknesses, writ in his own hand before the madness consumed him. A blade of pure radiance, wrought to cut through the tenebrous fabric of the Shadow Plane itself.

With these they assailed Davos's fortress, fought through halls haunted by devils and corrupted illusion, and destroyed the master of the Cube. The artifact shattered. The Shadow Plane receded. And the land remembers. Fifty square miles of the peninsula's interior remain scarred and grievous, the vegetation grey and stunted, the animals gone, the air bearing an oppressive sadness that the Ashen Wardens who patrol its borders say has not waned in a decade. The corruption creeps outward at ten to fifteen feet per year, unceasing and without apparent limit. Whether it will ever relent, none knoweth.

The ley-line in the mountains of Beneshire was the first mortal-wrought ley-line since ancient Akovar. It was small and fragile, and it was the most consequential act of sorcery performed in eight hundred years.

Four factions desired it, and each desire bore a different character. The Umbral Hand, still operating beneath Noctuminalis's hidden stewardship, sought to seize or destroy the line ere it could be wielded against them. The Dark Whispers, a cult beholden to entities from the Abyss, hungered to corrupt it into a permanent portal through which demon lords might stride into the mortal world. The Nergalu Dragons, an ancient council who considered ley-lines a draconic birthright wrested from their keeping by the hubris of lesser races, demanded its surrender. And the Watchers, enigmatic observers led by the entity Acular, tested those who interacted with the line to determine whether mortal hands were worthy of such dominion.

Heroes from two previous campaigns mustered their strength and joined forces with the Astral Circle. What followed was a conflict that spanned planes of existence and tested the uttermost limits of mortal resolve. They traveled the Astral Plane using the ley-line as their anchor, walking the silver expanse where direction holds no sovereignty and time moves at the whim of thought. They ventured into the Abyss itself to prevent the Dark Whispers from deploying a Sphere of Annihilation, fighting through daemonic territory where the very air seethed with malice. They infiltrated the City of Fortune, an extradimensional gambling citadel where debts are paid in years of servitude, and there they rescued captured Astral Circle wizards through cunning and nerve and games whose stakes were measured in lifetimes.

They endured the Watchers' trials of combat and morality and judgment, tests wrought by beings who observed the flow of time the way a scholar observes the flow of ink across a page, with detachment and an unnerving certainty about what would be written next. And they faced the dragon council's ultimatum and found a resolution that satisfied draconic honor without surrendering mortal sovereignty over the line, a feat of diplomacy that I suspect required more courage than any of the battles that preceded it, for it is one thing to face a wyrm with a blade and quite another to face one with an argument and hold your ground while its breath heats the air around your words.

The ley-line endured. The Astral Circle retained its stewardship. And across the world, other ley-lines were beginning to stir and quicken, fed by the same planar energies that had been building since Aleron Windstrider's sacrifice. The threads were multiplying. The pattern was becoming visible to those with eyes tempered by decades of observation and the willingness to believe what they beheld.

The ley-lines continued their unceasing spread. In the Gnomish Lands, their energies reached a place that should have been left to its long and quiet burial.

A century ere these events, the gnomish necromancer Salvatore Togglesprocket had wrought a complex of laboratories and charnel workshops beneath what are now called the Gauntlight Ruins. His experiments grew ever darker, ever more aberrant, until they consumed him, or so the chronicles reported. When the ley-line's tendrils intersected his buried laboratories, they did what ley-lines do with the immutable indifference of rivers finding the sea. They fed power into whatever they touched. Salvatore's ghost coalesced from the necrotic residue of his own failed ambitions, and with it, his experiments stirred in their jars and cages and began to move once more.

Simultaneously, the gnomish capital of Chumbawamba tore itself in half. Clan Azure, heralding the traditional gnomish values of arcane inquiry and clockwork innovation, clashed with the Children of Pyre, a faction that sought to harness elemental fire for industrial revolution and would brook no opposition to their vision of a world remade by flame. Sabotage became violence. Assassination attempts became frequent. The gnomish city that had stood for centuries as a bastion of inquiry and invention was embattled from within, and the fracture lines ran deeper than any political disagreement, down into fundamental questions about what gnomish civilization was for and what it owed to the future.

Heroes found themselves fighting upon two fronts with equal urgency and no respite between them. In the Abomination Vaults they descended through progressively more perilous levels, facing reanimated horrors and experimental grotesques and reality-warping magical zones where the geometry of the corridors shifted in ways that made the skull ache, while Salvatore's ghost appeared periodically to test or torment them with the sardonic wit of a madman who had outlived his own death and found the afterlife irksome. In Chumbawamba's streets they investigated sabotage, guarded the lives of besieged political figures, gathered evidence of outside manipulation, and labored to expose the agitators driving both factions toward a conflagration that would serve neither.

The two threads proved to be one thread, as threads in this age so often do. The vault's resurgence was destabilizing the ley-line. The ley-line's instability was being exploited by elements within both political factions. The heroes laid Salvatore's ghost to its final repose, cleansed the deepest vaults of their necrotic taint, and brought to light the machinations that had been driving Chumbawamba toward self-destruction. The gnomish capital endured. The dead were granted the rest they had been denied. And the lesson was inscribed in the annals for those who study such matters. Ley-lines do not discriminate between what they kindle. They bestow their power upon the beneficent and the fell alike, and the world must reckon with both.

And then the firmament burned.

Five points of supernal light struck the Varkonan desert like the fingers of a hand pressed into sand. Each impact carved a crater and released magical energy that the Ra-Priests felt in their bones from a hundred miles distant, a resonance so vast and so alien that the eldest among them fell to their knees and wept, for they recognized it as something their ancestors had once known and their bloodline had spent seven thousand years forgetting. Proto-entities, consciousnesses that had spent tens of thousands of years coalescing in the interstellar void, had arrived upon Mazariim. They bore names, or would soon. Zonth, who sought order. Khemset, who hungered. Menot, who changed. Nakar, who destroyed. Anumata, who held the balance between all things and the nothing that surrounds them.

Khemset moved first, for hunger is the swiftest of all motives. He discovered knowledge of an ancient machine wrought by the primordial being Gyru, a device of such fell purpose that its mere existence constituted a blasphemy against the natural order of mana. If assembled, the Machine of Gyru could drain the life-force from other entities and bestow it upon its wielder, and with that stolen power Khemset would achieve apotheosis. The machine had been sundered into five components and scattered across the breadth of Mazariim, hidden in the Frozen Isles of Nond, the Mespoian Peninsula, the Merchant Nations, the Dwarven Nations, and a final location that proclaimed itself only when the other four were gathered.

A race began that spanned the globe and tested the boundaries of what mortal resolve could accomplish against beings for whom centuries were as afternoons. Heroes traversed every corner of the world, pursuing machine components through arctic wastes and desert strongholds and subterranean complexes hewn by hands older than any civilization that remembered them, competing not only with Khemset's agents but with the other four proto-entities, each pursuing its own ordained agenda with the implacable certainty of forces that had been coalescing since before the world had a name. Zonth tested their commitment to order. Menot offered aid that bore the furtive character of manipulation. Nakar sought to unmake the machine entirely, willing to destroy the heroes along with it if the destruction served his nature. Anumata labored to prevent any single being from claiming dominion over the rest.

The heroes gathered enough components to deny Khemset his prize, but the machine was never assembled by mortal or immortal hand. In a moment of desperate ingenuity that I suspect will be debated by arcanists for centuries henceforth, the heroes placed two of the machine's components into a bag of holding and thrust that bag into a portable hole. The resulting rupture tore a wound in the Astral Plane, and both pieces were lost into that silver illimitable expanse, irretrievable, scattered across a dimension without direction or shore or any principle of return. The Machine of Gyru can never be completed. Two of its five parts drift somewhere in the Astral, and the Astral does not surrender what it swallows.

The proto-entities remained at their present strength, neither gods nor mortals but something betwixt, and they began the slow and uncertain labor of integrating themselves into the world they had crashed into. New entities walked the earth, uncertain of their purpose, finding their place among the faithful and the fearful of a world that had gods enough already and viewed the arrival of more with the wariness of a household that hears knocking at its door past midnight.

But the ley-lines still spread their unceasing web. The ripples still traveled outward through dimensions that most mortals cannot name and would not wish to. And in his lair, patient as the stone that hid him, Noctuminalis watched it all and said nothing and continued to plan. Thirty years of carefully wrought chaos, and the shadow dragon had not yet played his hand. I see you, Noctuminalis. I have always seen you. And I wonder, sometimes, in the small hours when the Library is silent and the candles gutter low, whether you have always seen me.

The ley-lines do not merely carry energy. They carry vulnerability, and this truth was foretold by their very nature, for anything that connects also provides a path for corruption to travel.

Since the reawakening of 815 AW, the network has spread its influence into regions that had known nothing of Akovarian infrastructure for seven thousand years, and with that spread has come a new and grievous category of peril that no previous generation had cause to contemplate. In 840 AW, investigators serving House Renoalt in Beneshire uncovered evidence that someone was deliberately contaminating ley-line scars in the eastern highlands, introducing compounds that bound to the mana current and corrupted everything the flow touched. Livestock sickened in radial patterns around the afflicted sites. Crops failed in concentric rings. Ward-work that had held steadfast for decades became erratic and unreliable, as though the magic itself had been poisoned at its source.

The investigation led from a murdered lord at the Royal Gala in Wyebluff to the merchant city of Verantia in Xeque, through strata of financial deception and institutional rivalry, to a cult operating from a perfumery in the Artisan Quarter. Behind the cult stood a disgraced researcher whose expelled work had found purpose in divine malice, a methodology that could, if wrought at scale, poison an entire nexus and propagate corruption along every scar and tributary connected to it, spreading like venom through the veins of the world itself.

Two investigators, a sorcerer and a dwarf, bore the weight of that discovery across two kingdoms and into confrontation with forces that preferred the world's foundations rotted from within, slowly and silently, so that by the time anyone noticed the decay the structure would be too far gone to save. I have watched the ley-lines affect more and more of the world since 815. They have woken dragons and ghosts and proto-gods and things that slumber in island caves. I had not considered that someone would learn to make them bleed. The oversight troubles me. I am meant to see. I did not see this.