| The War of the Avatars |
Stop the Press! This Isn't Right! |
Divine Intervention
In all this time the gods had not been sitting idle. The Dark Three had been finding ways to turn the hearts of mortals to their cause and had inserted their influence into many different places across Novitas. Though this concerned the Sept they were more concerned with the fading magic and challenges coming to the land. They did what they could to aid the people while honoring the agreement they made with the Dark Three. The Dark Gods could not violate the agreement they had made, but they set about trying to find other means of getting around it. Only Darkness truly knows exactly when it happened but sometime around 1150 NL it discovered a means to bypass the oath and protective magics to impact Novitas directly if only in a limited way. Channeling some of its personal power into the most devious and deadly mortal it could find, Darkness created the first avatar: Maon. As an avatar, Maon was more powerful than any mortal being, but he was also still an individual capable of making his own decisions. Darkness had selected a vessel willing to carry out its desires and had given it great power to do so. In no time at all Maon became the advisor to the Emperor of Civen, Gnaeus Magnus. Soon after Maon used that access to take control of the Emperor’s mind through a foul Compulsion ritual. Maon used his control of Emperor Gnaeus to order Civen to prepare for war. Their neighbors were weak and it was time to once more expand the boundaries of the empire. Darkness was pleased and shared its new technique with Nox and Grak. Nox empowered the sorcerer Eradusk, a snow goblin with a great deal of influence in Gersh. Eradusk convinced the people of Gersh that Nalbendel had not fully recovered from the Reptillian siege and that they deserved punishment for their treatment of the snow goblins at the start of the blizzard only 200 years earlier. Many still remembered that journey with great shame. Gersh started to prepare for war. Grak empowered a great warrior Rannigar, a young tribal chief in the Dell. Rannigar became the first chief to unite all of the major tribes together in recent memory. It took time for him to bring them all under one banner but he did so and then he began preparing them for conquest. As the three avatars prepared their forces for war the Scholar began to take notice. Puzzling out the nature of these avatars and their ability to circumvent the protections stopping the gods from taking direct action he shared his suspicions with the Stranger. As the foremost expert in sparks the Stranger was able to quickly figure out how to create an avatar of her own. Little is known about this avatar who went by the name Umiel. The Stranger preferred it this way. They weren’t a leader of people or high priest, Umiel was a simple individual known for their black cloak and skill with a knife. Umiel slipped into the emperor’s court in Civen and attempted to identify the agents of Darkness there. Maon recognized an agent of the Sept and attempted to slay Umiel on the spot. What Maon hadn’t expected was for Umiel to be an avatar. Maon had revealed himself, and Umiel was able to use the surprise to escape. Knowing how destructive this was going to become the rest of the Sept prepared to create Avatars of their own.
The War of the Avatars
Darkness had been discovered and was forced to accelerate its plans. In 1182 Maon made his puppet, Gnaeus, invade Adecia. They were a simple folk who had successfully talked their way out of every conflict prior to that. A hero of the people there, General Vlean organized and trained an army seemingly from nothing, slowing the Civen onslaught and making them pay dearly for their gains. The army took refuge in mountains for years before they were fully defeated, and those mountains came to be known as the Spires of Retribution afterwards. At the same time Eradusk brought forth the snow goblin armies to attack the city of Nalbendel from the west. Rannigar sent a contingent of his forces to attack Evenandra. He knew he couldn’t possibly overcome their defenses but that was never the purpose of the attack. They only sought to keep Evenandra occupied to ensure they wouldn’t come to Nalbendel’s aid. With the remainder of his forces Rannigar attacked Nalbendel from the east. Along the way the tribes convinced various goblinoids to join their war, promising orcs and others glory in battle. A force unlike anything Nalbendel had ever seen beset the great library’s city. All appeared lost until the avatars of the Sept arrived. They were still sorely outnumbered, but the presence of so many Avatars in one place gave the people of Nalbendel a chance to take action. A small group of scholars used the chaos to escape to Evenandra carrying with them a wealth of knowledge and artifacts that would almost certainly have been lost otherwise. Many others led by the elven heroine Bethanael Celeberyn escaped the city,ultimately traveling west until they found safety in the Elemental’s refuge. The avatars of the Sept did battle with their corrupt counterparts seeking only to give the people time to escape. One of the remaining inhabitants of the city, the Arch-mage Gorgannash, unwilling to allow the remaining wealth of knowledge and power in the city to fall into enemy hands, sundered a relic of unimaginable power as the armies closed in. The resulting blast wiped the city completely from the map, creating a huge crater and destroying the land for miles around. The invaders were destroyed almost utterly though the cost was horrible. If any of the avatars from either side survived there are no records. Likewise with the destruction of the library and the death of so many in the fighting tremendous knowledge was lost that day. Many of the primary records from Vargainen were stored there, as well as many of the artifacts of the Sept that had been found when Novitas was first settled. All of this was gone. Meanwhile Umiel and a small band of heroes, possibly including some of the avatars that were not present at Nalbendel returned to the court of Emperor Gnaeus in Civen. Maon was driven off but not killed in the ensuing battle and then Umiel severed the link to the Emperor’s mind. By 1185 the scattered survivors from Gersh and the Dell returned to their respective homelands. Civen began to restructure itself so that one individual would never again have so much power. The War of the Avatars drew to a close. Sidebar: The Elemental Vanishes In the aftermath of the War of the Avatars the Elemental disappeared. No one knew where or why she vanished, she simply stopped communicating in any way with anyone, no longer was she empowering any Chosen to aid her causes. None of the Sept would speak of the matter or even acknowledge that anything had happened. This remained the case until 1587 when she was discovered in the town of Pinedale living as a mortal with no memories of her true identity. How she bypassed the protections keeping the gods from being present are unknown nor is there any information commonly available about what she was doing there. If it wasn’t for the intervention of local adventurers she might not have ever returned to her place with the Sept. <end sidebar>
Aftermath of the War
The nations recovered and repaired the damage near total war had wrought. Terra and Evenandra were largely unscathed from the conflicts and they prospered from the trade opportunities that presented themselves. The barriers around the Grove of the Elemental fell and the refugees from Nalbendel made it their home. They called it Fionn A’ilean or as it is often called in common, the Great Forest. They’ve attempted to honor the Elemental by becoming one with the forest, striving to have as little impact on it as possible. Though some humans from Nalbendel made the journey there, many were not willing to live a minimalist lifestyle and ultimately wound up back where they started. Gersh returned to its largely insular ways having little communication with anyone after their losses in the war. The permanent winter continued and severely impacted their cultural development from that time on. The great crater where the city of Nalbendel once stood filled with rain and was named the Eldirloch. The lands Nalbendel had influenced up to that time were unoccupied by any major government. Over the next 200 years a dozen battles were fought over these lands with no one nation willing to let others reside there due to its strategic value. In the year 1371 NL the Treaty of Ghage was signed on the shores of the Eldirloch by the governments of Terra, Civen, Evenandra and the Great Forest. This document created the modern Freelands where no government holds power. The new Civen government ultimately refused to relinquish control of Adecia. In 1250 NL the Adecians protested by renaming their former capital city Vleanoa. The anger at occupation lasted and grew. In 1480 NL a group of Septons successfully started a rebellion in Vleanoa, casting out the Civenite occupation forces. The rebellion grew from there until all of the Adecian province had broken free. They named their new nation Vlean. Civen went to war, and the conflict lasted for over 100 years.
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