The Rending
“Whoever said ‘only the dead know the end of war’ has clearly never met a lich.”
– Dain Steelfist, 0 R
Introduction
In the year 499 AR, some folk are only a few generations removed from the Radiant Age; there are even some elder elves who lived through it in their childhood, their fleeting immature memories of that greatest of civilizations tainted by the traumas of its fall. It is almost unimaginable how much was lost in such short order. It should not have happened, yet “should” is no obstacle to evil.
The heroes of Ꞇőläp si Hwēn had long tamed the monsters of The World’s Heart and marshalled its free folk through millennia of peace. Over such lengths of time, however, complacency can see even the stoutest shields drop; the ‘Army of Color’ had evolved from primarily a martial organization into more of a civil one, focused on social and intellectual quandaries of the Eꞇērēǝm rather than the domestic issues of Kǝʂän.
For whatever reason, Ꞇőläp si Hwēn did not anticipate the events of The Rending and failed where they had always succeeded before, in defending The World’s Heart from evil. No one saw it coming, save Supäri Vámapoor.
Prelude to Apocalypse
Supäri Vámapoor was a human bedouin warrior of the Djannäda, a ruling tribe of the Belhondäri Confederation; he was also an aasimar, touched by the grace of his Origin God, Adämēǝ. By this divinity he made a harrowing three-thousand mile journey across The Desert of the Damned to tell of the black fate befallen the Belhondäri Confederation and give The Spectral Coast the only warning it ever received of the impending apocalypse.
Supäri Vámapoor’s gift was of a few days; time enough for the dwarven kingdoms to man the walls of their barrier mountain keeps, and for ports to fill with emergency supplies and evacuation ships. It was these few days that bought the survival of mortal life on Kǝʂän; the survivors have honored the memory of Supäri Vámapoor, making his likeness into popular art throughout the new nations in the north.
The warning was of an unholy army risen from the sands of The Desert of the Damned. The dead of a thousand generations now swept across The World’s Heart in a vile herd of unyielding evil; mindless yet not aimless. The undead massed to the south at first, wildly yet without exception. Within a fortnight, the Belhondäri Confederation–a civilization one thousand years older than the great city of Málikesh–was utterly destroyed, its people ground into the sand by the bones of their ancestors. Supäri Vámapoor had fled the ashes of his homeland with a handful of others, none of whom survived the unlikely crossing of the desert to The Spectral Coast. The wildly intentional undead horde had not stopped to gloat over its victory in the south and was hot in his heels. Supäri Vámapoor had traveled for weeks through the most barren terrain on the planet, fighting off advanced parties of undead as he raced north. It is said his words of warning were his last and he collapsed in inhuman exhaustion soon after; other records claim he lived long enough to die on the beaches defending the last ships to depart. Scholars tend to agree with the former.
The Fall of Kor Kadrakin
There is an accepted inevitability concerning the end result of the Rending, but the speed and totality of it still confounds historians and survivors. One common debate concerns how the greatest fortress on the planet capitulated in but a single day? Bernkoldir might have been the largest dwarven city on Kǝʂän, but Kor Kadrakin was the unrivaled peak of dwarven defensive engineering. Its famous facades of expert dwarven masonry stretched the over two mile gap between the Warden and Drakespine Mountains and offered the only land passage to the Spectral Coast for 500 miles in any direction. The undead surely would have eventually swept around the edges of the mountains, as the Leşik tribes once did to reach the Spectral Coast, but it would have taken weeks while the grand fortifications of Kor Kadrakin sealed them out. Instead, the greatest dwarven fortress in the world --having stood for over eleven-thousand years-- fell in a mere two days.
It is one of the greatest mysteries of The Rending. Reports from King Dragonbleeder at Kor Kadrakin delivered to Ꞇőläp si Hwēn headquarters in Málikesh marked the undead reaching the pass and the walls holding fast. Then without notice, the gates were open and the unnumbered dead passed through to swarm The Spectral Coast. The famed dwarf-fort Kor Kadrakin became The Dead Pass.
Survivors
Supäri Vámapoor’s gift to The Spectral Coast was of a few days warning; time enough for the dwarven kingdoms to man the walls of their barrier mountain keeps, and for ports to fill with emergency supplies and evacuation ships. These few days bought the survival of mortal life on Kǝʂän; the survivors have honored the memory of Supäri Vámapoor, making his likeness into popular art. In 499 AR his admirers often refer to him as Ʂēäpsőm (prophet), though his skeptics call him Ꞇülflēmsi (death omen). What time they had to flee was afforded not only by Supäri Vámapoor, but also the stalwart dwarven kingdoms and heroes of Ꞇőläp si Hwēn who fought the undead all along a thousand-mile front.
No dwarven king would order the evacuation of their mountain, and so the mountain legions bore arms and tried to throw the undead menace back into the desert; and so they did, again and again and again. Each time the undead swarmed back in greater force until one by one their defenses collapsed and the storied dwarven mountain kingdoms were lost. Dwarves were once common on Kǝʂän. The Rending reduced their numbers to the extreme; those who live bear the burden of a great legacy and the greater guilt of not participating in it.
Ꞇőläp si Hwēn dissolved. The Army of Color supposedly fought to the last to aid the evacuation of others, although rumors abound of isolated survivors. Such claims were often attributed to post-Rending warlords affording themselves manufactured legitimacy. For centuries, the legendary hero organization had grown increasingly theoretical. It had become mired in bureaucracy and slack in domestic affairs, but remained an imposing institution with powerful actors; their blindness to the threat and ineffectual defense of The Spectral Coast remains one of the poignant mysteries of The Rending.
The death toll was staggering; only 3% of the Spectral Coast’s population survived The Rending to make it to the northern shores of the Crescent Sea. A population of millions reduced to less than 150,000. The initial count of surviving dwarves was in the hundreds. Among those dead were the brightest minds and bravest hearts The World’s Heart had ever seen. This year of unfathomable loss and dispersion became known as "The Rending." Those few who survived found the world forever changed for them; a new era had dawned on the mortals of Kǝʂän who would mark time by this terrible rebirth as the year 0 R (Year of The Rending).
Whomsoever could find a way of evacuating, did so to the smaller continents off the coast of the World's Heart, known today as The Crescent Islands and Nador’at. This forced diaspora–in which the demographics had forever changed, as well as the dynamics between them–proved fatal to old ideas of progress; the next five centuries saw the once unified people of The Spectral Coast divided, and divided again, until there was little recognizable of the civilization that ushered in the Radiant Age. They would rebuild their lives in the year 1 AR (After-Rending). The dead pushed to the coast and remained there, idling in the slowly crumbling cities, towns, roads, and farms. Nobody knew how the undead were raised or why they had systematically destroyed all civilization on The World’s Heart; fear and desperation gripped the people of Kǝʂän.