The Corrupted Veil

For most of early imperial history, the Rift was a distant abstraction: a metaphysical hazard for philosophers and fringe cultists, not a military concern. Breachpoints were mostly quiescent, dangerous under certain stars or after midnight, but they did not vomit armies. There were no Riftspawn. There were no Rift Stones.   The calamity later known as the Corrupted Veil changed that forever. A cabal of Blood Mages within the ascendant Isendir Empire attempted a deliberate, large-scale opening into the Rift. Whether they meant to harness its power, parley with something beyond, or simply prove the empire’s supremacy is still debated in arcane circles. What is not debated are the results.   Most of the cabal never returned. Those who staggered back were warped in body and soul, bearing the first recorded cases of Shadow Plague. Their corruption spread like a spiritual contagion, twisting victims into the first true Riftspawn. In the uncharted depths of the Rift itself, something vast stirred or was defiled: an intelligence later recorded as the Taintwright, the first known Riftspawn Architect, bound to a terrible Ancient Dragon, Mor’Xandrel.   In the decades that followed, strange phenomena multiplied across imperial and subterranean territories:

• Isolated outbreaks of Shadow Plague in cities and garrisons.
• Breachpoints that stayed open longer, thrummed with malign purpose, and began to show crude organization.
• The first deposits of unstable Rift Stone, left like shrapnel in the wake of anomalies.

The Corrupted Veil did not yet resemble a formal war, but it rewrote the rules of reality on Rokadeus. It undermined faith in imperial invulnerability, shattered complacency in the underworld halls, and gave every scholar of the arcane a new, terrifying reference point. Later chroniclers would look back and mark this era as the moment a distant, abstract wound in the world became an active, invasive enemy.   In retrospect, the Corrupted Veil was not a self-contained disaster. It was the opening movement in a grim new pattern of history: the age of Riftspawn Wars.