The war had started at the behest of the elves when they were still one people. The First Children spoke of the great devourer, the herald of the end that would consume all things and leave this world a shriveled, cold husk of rock. They predicted that Mana, the god-gift that flowed through all things, the giver of life and the hope of the future, would be ended by this grave new threat.

The diviners and the truth seers of the elves called for war against a small country far to the west, across the Untouched Sea, ruled by a mage-king they divined would bring about the end-times. The High King of the elves, acknowledging the words of the prophecy, sent his envoys to the realms of man and throughout the civilized lands.

Although humans were short-lived in comparison to the elder race, they were as numerous as the trees in the forest and were almost as ferocious as the barbaric orcs of the Long Hills. The League and the Old Empire ceased their endemic wars, united with the promise of gifts of powerful elven artifacts and mithril bullion.

The Under-Kingdoms were slower to answer the call, but dwarven greed eventually won over ancient enmity and they flocked to the banner under elven kind. The dragons of the mountains and the sky, understanding the threat the mage-king possessed grudgingly promised aid, though in their pride they would suffer none to command them.

The Fae of the deep woods and the places of the In-Between honored ancient pacts and promises, presenting their best warriors and life mages. They also gave unto the First Children great stores of witchwood lumber, grown from the giant sentient trees that had roots in both worlds so that the elven craftsmen might make living ships to travel the deeps. The forces under the command of the Elven High King were named the Eastern Alliance, as an entire continent prepared for war.

The Queen’s first egg was to be presented in ten turns of the seasons as a new bride. Such was the desperation of the alliance with the fate of the world on their shoulders. The Dragons in their great pride would never forget what the ‘lesser races’ had forced upon them, and their resentment would only grow with the passage of time.

After many years the great horde started their journey across the vast Untouched Seas, unmolested by the scaled leviathans of the deep. The dragons had negotiated their safe passage, securing it in the ancient way of their kind. The serpents of the sky and sea were to be bound together once more.

The great Arks, living ships of near-indestructible magical witchwood, made excellent time across the water, their massive bulk now pushed and pulled by the gigantic leviathans that made the deep places of the sea their home. Great cheers were raised when the ships made landfall on the western continent.

Spies from the alliance and divine scrying showed that the mage-king was actually no king at all. In fact, he was seen to be more of a Steward and Servant of the people and was in fact chosen by the majority of them which was a concept that was so alien and foreign to the members of the alliance. The system of government was seen as preposterous for who would ever in their right mind allow the common man to dictate the rules of power above their station?

They were met on the beaches by envoys of the unknown mage-king under the banner of peace. Their decapitated heads were sent back wrapped in spider-silk and sweet-scented with Aeyory blossoms, a traditional declaration of total war in the east.

But the spies and scouts of the unknown kingdom had not been idle, and they discovered horrifying facts that only hardened the resolve of the people to resist. Many of those who were brought across the ocean were in fact slaves. Men and women who had pulled at the great oars, who had cleaned and scrubbed the decks, tended the fires and cooked the meals that fed the armies and a thousand more labours were chattel with the hateful mark of slavery inscribed upon their bodies.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

The Eastern Alliance vastly underestimated the depths to which a free people would resist an oppressor, and troops of the kingdom now known to be called the Republic of Arastia fought with great zeal and fervour. They knew what fate awaited every single man, woman, and child should they become a conquered people.

With the cost in blood ever-rising as the war raged on, the leader of the Alliance, the Elven High King even offered amnesty to the Republic on the condition that they surrender their leader in chains. This was met with derision by the senate and their envoy was sent back with a message that there would be no surrender to the savage barbarians from across the seas.

So incensed by the refusal of what he thought was a reasonable offer of amnesty the High King of the Elves begged once more with the Dragon Queen for aid, offering a dragon’s egg weight in precious silvery mithril. Greed sinking its claws into her reptilian heart, she commanded that flights of dragons launch into the sky and rain death and destruction on the Republic. The world would feel once more the terror of living under the shadow of the great serpents.

Though a small nation, it was a nation of free thinkers where great strides had been made in the fields of magic. Even so, their mages who were growing fewer could not protect them all from the constant barrage from the skies. Desperate, the Republic sanctioned the use of a newly researched form of magic that combined dark and life energies in an aberration of the natural order. Necromancy, the art of raising the dead and bringing them back in some corrupted form of unlife.

A lucky ballista bolt shot from atop one of the border forts was able to fell one of the lesser dragons from the sky, piercing it through the heart. The bespelled adamantine tip punching through inches of rock hard scale and thick muscle. The mages of Arastia ecstatic having acquired a vessel of indomitable power poured all of their magical might into the dragon’s now still corpse.

Slowly, like a grave flower blossoming the dark energies flowed into the great lizard’s cadaver sloughing now rotting flesh from thick pristine white dragon bone. A new nightmare was born, arising with the stench of a freshly turned grave and all the majesty of the winged tyrants of the sky. The first Bone-Dragon Vizzeks came into existence with a roar and the howl of a thousand lost tortured souls.

With the birth of the Bone-Dragon, the Dragons were horrified and unwilling to play any further part in the campaign. With the loss of one of their number, they felt the first pangs of fear of newfound mortality. The great lizards left the short-lived races to their fate and flew back across the ocean to their high mountain homes. With their departure, the war began to grow back into a grinding stalemate.

With casualties mounting on both sides, the Republic began to lose its appetite for war. Even with necromancy filling the holes in the army ranks, the constant attrition of war was beginning to wear away at the people, with some even demanding that they heed the elve’s earlier offers of amnesty. The Steward of the Republic, feeling the pressure of his people’s cries, searched for a way to end the war and force the invaders back.

Research into the necromantic arts, sped up by the twins need and necessity, had opened dark channels into another plane of existence. Here the sibilant denizens of the void promised a quick end to the war with something that was translated by the magical researchers as the ‘Seed of Oblivion.’ Grasping at a chance of total victory the leader of the Republic accepted the dark bargain and brought the Seed fully into the world.

Elven mages felt the horror of the void for the first time as it touched their minds, with many of their number going mad and unleashing the sum total of their magical energies. Those who kept their sanity failed to shield the rest of their brothers and sisters, their own defences overwhelmed with the pouring out of wild entropic magic that ate away everything it touched.

The short-lived races too were ravaged by the horrors of the great beyond, their delicate psyches overwhelmed by the total fear of the end of all things. Those who had the gift of magic were consumed in a conflagration of magical energies which started a chain reaction throughout the rest of the world. Only those who had fully given themselves to the path of necromancy had any defence against the great psychic cry that consumed any of those who had a spark of magical aptitude.

Seas rose, and continents cracked under the energies that ravaged the world. The sky itself burned in places that scoured the very ground beneath of all life. Great volcanos spewed mountains of dark ash into the air covering the world in primordial darkness. In the deep places of the ocean, there was to be no refuge, the water boiled, killing all but the hardiest of creatures and the people of the Mer suffered greatly.

Thus was the first cataclysm started, and the game board set anew for the unending game of the thirsting gods.

- By an unknown Quassian Scholar.