Wars, Historical and Potential

Obviously the remnants of the Celestial Wyrm’s Rebellion are an account of the Dragons uprising. It took a tremendous amount of time for them to actually, successfully, rebel. It took a reasonably short period, however, to utterly reduce the Gods to their bare bones and their flesh burned away with magical fires. That said: ‘short’ for a Dragon, means ‘five thousand years’ to anyone else. Praises are sung by Dragon and Dragonkin of the heroes of great battles across the entire planet. This was not an isolated, simple event. Though there were already other species beginning to populate the world, under the Gods noses, some of them probably got trampled flat in the process of this terrible war. Geologists among the Necromancers claim that the Sulfur Shadow erupted at least four times in the five thousand years of battle, doubtless some of those eruptions caused by the forces – magical and physical – being thrown around on the surface. Also because of this level of magical interference on the surface and overall for so many years, it is guessed that the Griffins grew more intelligent and powerful as a direct result. Because there are still remnants of the Gods bodies, craters instead of islands, and still-burning wastes tracked directly to Dragon intervention, absolutely no one doubts that this is a sort of battle that can never be repeated. The Dragons want to keep their world orderly and safe. They are remarkably tolerant in these days – but their tolerance can still be exceeded, and eventually is, in at least one case.

Nearly twenty thousand years both after that and before the current Era, it seemed that the same Portals which later Fey would come through, led from the Darklings domain. These creatures made Daemons and their superiors look like kittens by comparison. It is very possible that the same species over time became Demons and Daemons, or perhaps those breeds were let to thrive after the dominant Darkling population left them alone. The Darklings, large for Humanoids and definitely evil ones, left very little record of their passage through the Moss Portal. It’s possible that their entire population migrated through it, for there were hundreds of thousands of them. Armies of them, only barely organized and with only their dark magic and claws as weapons, but swarming like ants. They made their way both east and west – covering the mountain range with their tainted magic. At the time, there were many different Humanoid species scattered around the peaks and ranges, no evidence of those cultures exist now – they were all wiped out or used as cattle by these demons. Apparently the only mistake the Darklings made, was in the assumption that the Necromancers, already having a well-established culture on the eastern edge of the Darkling map, were ‘friendly’ to their ideas of conquest. Not so: after seeing what the Darklings did to the few True Vampires that they’d captured, the Necromancers knew better than to trust this devious race, and alerted the Dragons as well as anyone else in the area to their presence. The Dragons took out the bulk of Darkling encampments – they left no ‘cities’ as such, they appeared to constantly be moving around. But individuals and groups survived for another 200 years as they had to be hunted down on the ground and under it. Spells that were created by Necromancers to preserve and reanimate life had to be adapted in order to actually preserve the natural order of the woodlands and hillsides. Otherwise, the great dark taint of magic they’d left behind in their massive battles would have caused most of that land – nearly six thousand miles of mountains from west of the Mirror Forest to the edges of the Necromancers lands – to be uninhabitable. The Moss Portal took the brunt of many Dragon fire and magic hits. The result of that was not only did the Portal become less useful and much smaller, but it was ‘nudged’ a bit so that the exact direction of its entry and exit were changed. Given that no one quite knows exactly how these Portals and Gates were ‘tuned’ to their respective locations on both sides, it’s possible that the nudges altered the entry point enough to be useless to any further Darklings wanting to use it. It did, however, open it to the Fey and other creatures. That Portal, considerably later only a Gate, has always spelled trouble.

Among larger scale inter-species wars, the demise of the Mountain Republic is recorded. Though their culture was at least Bronze-age in technology, and would have continued to expand and grow more technologically advanced. But in the middle of their very short stay on Dragondeep, the Forestkin Fey arrived. As Humans often would, the Republic folk had it in their head to keep the land they had settled, and these half-animal creatures invading their turf would be of use as laborers and servants once ‘tamed’. Perhaps their desire to utilize a servant race triggered the fighting. For nearly 900 years, almost every semi-intelligent or sentient Fey which came through any Portal or Gate, not just Moss Portal, headed directly toward the Republic. It isn’t known whether survivors of early skirmishes went back through their Portal and warned of this or demanded help, it certainly seems likely. By the time their reign ended (some fleeing through another Portal, but most being killed brutally or dying of starvation and disease) the Republic had barely scraped into ‘Spartan’ mode, with the bulk of their efforts having to go to defenses and weapon production. Since the Fey effectively consumed their entire culture, the only records left are those made by outsiders – nothing at all is left now but a few well-preserved standards and shields, and one or two warrior leaders bodies tucked away on Ashen Rest. Necromancers might have intervened in this long fight had they known about it earlier. After all, there is more than enough room to go around without bothering anyone. The Dragons would have brutally put a stop to any slavery exchanges eventually, so in the long run it’s actually a mercy that the Forestkin defeated these people before they got out of hand.

The Domain of Illumination fought perhaps the slowest, and most insidious of civil wars. Though they spent a good five thousand years working up to it, and having an amazingly talented spell-magic based culture in the meantime, the Domain folk refused to believe that the suicides performed on a daily basis were anything less than civilized combat. No fist fights, no bloody pit matches, certainly not one large-scale invasion occurred. Their fights were cerebral contests, intellectual challenges, and absolutely deadly matches of business acumen. Goal-oriented to an extreme, almost fanatical in that regard, the Domain seemed overtly peaceful and certainly looked and felt like any normal magical/industrial-revolution society should. Clean roads, technically inclined inventors and well-governed interactions. Small but numerous families populated the landscape, even a royal line dominated by handsome princes and talented queens. And – they all wanted to out-do one another so badly, that they enforced laws about winners taking all. Literally, all credit, all money, goods, even sometimes family members. Such a cut-throat society was almost always at the edge of utter anarchy, except that if chaos erupted who would make the dessert? Not only was this culture on the brink of disaster for two thousand years, it was where the exiled Alorel, immortal and mad, was from (where even they thought he was crazy – more than likely, because he wanted to kill his enemies himself). Once their society had effectively stunted itself so badly that its numbers it could not rebound, it simply vanished. Not overnight: it is known that the population continued to both fight among one another, as well as condense until it lived in one compact and ill-run city, filled with paranoid spell casters flinging magic at one another. Wise folk among them fled through portals made by their own magic or devices, some numbers of them integrated into other Humanoid societies, and some picked through the rubble of their prior empire with a sort of shame that led to their current Lumin incarnation. Eventually groups came back through those invented portals. What they learned, apparently, was that spell magic was nothing compared to their inner will power, and there were much better ways to keep a society rolling and innovating than forcing the loser to kill himself. When the losers still continue to put out amazing works of art or advanced science, it makes much more sense to keep them alive. From that sordid history, though, the Lumin Kings emerged and their twelve families have made sure to keep peace rather than destroy one another, and yet still remain remarkably competitive and inventive. Theirs is one of the very few stories with a reasonably happy ending, among cultures which have effectively destroyed themselves.

Though ongoing (and technically ‘in the future’ since the events on the time line below do not account for it yet) the same thing that happened to the Mountain Republic seems to be happening among the Summoners and Fey now. Though they are different Fey – now Daemons and summoned Demons primarily, rather than the Forestkin of old – the impulse to exact revenge on the Summoners in general has grown over the centuries since they arrived. The original fight with the Republic was done mostly on the part of Forestkin, cleverly and deviously fighting using stolen weapons and magic, fighting over territory and pride. But now… The stakes are much higher. With Demons and their ilk actively locating travelers and killing them for their wares, weapons, flesh, and magic goods, hoarding them until they have an overwhelming edge. Reckless Summoners, those unfettered by good sense at least, have begun bringing forth considerably more dangerous creatures – and even attempting to crack forbidden codes found in the Maze of Ruins. By the time the Summoners at large begin to pay attention to the warnings they were getting (from all sides, from all other cultures, really) the seemingly-random Fey attacks on others have claimed hundreds of lives, almost including Vaelan and his traveling companions. Once that attack occurred, and once he’d recovered from the extraordinarily cruel damage done to him, the purple-haired Lumin King arranged meetings with Dragon and Starcourt, Witch and Necromancer alike. Putting an end to the simmering hostilities would take another 30 years, and leaves not just the Fey territories open for grabs, but also the Summoners’ lands – most of them would either perish or wisely flee the area. It also solidified Vaelan’s reign as an overarching political leader, though he never desired more than to continue helping his kin. These events are some of the rare occasions when Starcourt Elves involve themselves with the goings-on of the rest of the world.