So, the Archmages stopped the wobble of the world, ending seasons (more or less). The elves continued to spirit away princesses, spooky hags cast them into endless sleeps, and dragons indiscriminately ate whomever they were brought or could catch easily. (Dragons are notoriously lazy unless roused from their obssessions by knights or adventurers, halflings or seekers-o-things, after all.) Drastic changes came over the land, both politically and environmentally.
The unforeseen consequence, not planned for in the study-rooms of Wizards contemplating the fate of the peoples, was the land itself changing, and the harshest environments closing in on the relatively temperate region north-midworld in Orbis.
The south was exposed to the sun now all year, drying out, the soil blowing away as little fresh moisture blew in, with dunes forming and overtaking cities and towns. The desert called the Shevóram, after the tribes who lived there, buried the entire region up to and including most of the Zoràl Sea, now also known as the Salty Sea. The tribes took in everyone they could, absorbing the populace to the south, teaching the myriad peoples how to survive in the dry, sandy regions. The Shevóram consist, even now, of seven loosely organized "tribes" all speaking Shevrám, a conglomeration of the original tribal language as well as many once independent languages from the regions lost to the sands.
Bordering the creeping sands of the deserts, Nilato with her mazy canals, and a propensity for seeking out solutions (and one-upping each other), secured a deal with an envoy of the strangers who had settled near the Tropæan Ocean. Commonly called the Mok, from the lands they claimed to hail from, they had resemblance to the dangerous elves. These Mok-elves, though, were taller, more alien, and of a more eldritch bent than their apparent relations. They claimed to have knowledge of processes by which machines could be built, towers planted into the ground, to change the environment at the whims of the operators.
So a tower was built to the south of Nilato, extracting some strange energy for the Mok as their price. But the wonder also caused a cool, moist atmosphere to permeate the area near the City of Mazes. But when the desert surged in a huge sandstorm seemingly out of nowhere, the tower was heavily damaged, and exploded in a fury of raw generative magic. The shockwaves sent a transmutive effect deep into the desert, scattering tiny sand-grains of unmeltable ice to mingle with the desert, making the sands for many hundereds of miles strangely cold even as the air was hot, and the sun burning. Of the site of the Mokbalatar power-rig, only a haze of cracks and rainbow mirage remained, coming to be called the Iridescian Wakes. A place the Nilatese have made great profit from extracting the raw magics, the Wakes have given huge profit margins to the ruling Merchant clans, and power to the Dharsati family of wizards.
The explosion was seen hundreds of miles away.
To the north, in a state of perpetual twilight, the cold overtook the land, moisture trapped high above sending snow snow snow, heavy and continuous for many years. Glaciers formed and crept across the wildlands from the constant compacting snow turning to ice. With the glaciers came the terrible denizens of the cold. The Isigi-gan, ice giants, with blocks of iron hard ice to throw into the fragile walls of cities brittle from the freeze. And the worst flurries, storms that were walls of snow and wild air, carried with them the howling song of great white dragons, sounding like the harmonizing of the very winds layered atop one another, until the fatal breath locked the unlucky listener in permanent frost.
To the Northwest, Azageer mustered the men and materials, tightened strictures of governance under the Imperator, and (with alliances with the strange dwarven Stonemen under Lys Yrvan) held the line, keeping the frozen monsters from storming into the Spans. Most of the Northeast fell to terrible glaciers and was wiped out. But one man, already old, feared and hated for his ruthlessness in accumulating mystical power took to himself the whole region of Pridwia in return for keeping the threats living there at bay. This was Nicodemio L'Athos, now most often referred to as The Old Man, or that Evil Bastard.
Still, in regions even The Old Man, nor his three powerful apprentices deign to patrol, out on the Pridwian glacier, people tell tales of a land thriving in perpetual spring. It's specific location seems murky, and most who speak about it mumble into their cups a bit of truth: it's not heard of anyone actually returning from there. But there is a consensus among the hardiest rangers, and the few barbarians who still stride the ice out there, that a hardy party could be lead out there. For a price. And no guarantees of safe return.
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| Beautiful, until it's implacably flattening your town. Also, monsters surfing that stuff. |
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With ice from the north and sand from the south, the area of habitable, farmable land was getting swiftly swallowed up. But, there were those who had taken the studies of the Archmages to heart, and a few had plans on how to survive the coming apocalypse.
Next: the Rise of the Orchidium and the Era of Wizard Oversight.
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