Magestone: The War of Ruin

In our day The War of Ruin has faded from memory into myth and legend. Only the Inner Circle of the High Elves of Alphoria and the lich lords of Chynda truly know what happened in those dark days, but they do not share their secrets. Some grains of truth lie buried in the dead and cursed places of the world, while others have been uncovered by adventurers and other foolish souls willing to trade their health, their lives and sometimes their sanity for a bit of forgotten knowledge.

What is known for certain is that the war was fought between the Halandirite Magocracy and the Zhun Dragon Empire. For a while these two great powers ruled their own hemispheres unchallenged, until for some reason both decided it was time to rid the world of the other. It wasn't a war fought for the spoils, but the complete eradication of the enemy at any cost. And what a cost it was!

Both the Halandirites and the Zhun summoned every manner of terrible thing they could to throw against each other. Nightmares walked and crawled on the face of the world. Burning-eyed giants with metal skin battled winged fiery serpents spewing death. Small suns were born and died blazing in the night, taking cities and even nations with them. This was the God War the barbarian tribes sing songs of, but it wasn't fought by or for the gods, but for petty human beings. Such horrors had never been seen before and, we must pray, will never be seen again.

In the end the Magocracy fell, but in a final act of spite took the Dragon Empire with it. The entire continent of Chynda burned in a terrible arcane inferno and its cities were laid to ruin. Something similar took place in what is now Goitia, though no-one quite understands how or why. Had the Zhun brought the war to the Halandirites' doorstep, and they rather destroyed all that was theirs than let it fall to their enemies? All that is known is those lands became plagued by monsters and other unnatural horrors for millenia to come, shunned by anyone with an ounce of sense.

The end of the war brought with it a great darkness and unrelenting cold, the Long Night. The light of the sun was diminished for many years and an age of ice and snow began, that drove every survivor southwards to escape the endless winter. Everyone, except those Halandirites that fled to the island of Alphoron, and the forgotten Zhun lords that slept in their palace crypts and waited in their new undying forms for the dawning of a new age.


-- Excerpt from "Histories of the Vordacians" by Parapharos