The Fifth
Riftspawn War, known as the Gravewright’s Gambit, lies within living memory for long-lived peoples and ancient beings. Unlike earlier wars defined by frontier scars or heartland upheavals, this conflict focused primarily on northern
Westerlunde and eastern
Auralea.
Its central horror was the reappearance of something the world had prayed never to see again: a second recorded
Riftspawn Architect, styling itself the Gravewright. Where the Taintwright reshaped the living, the Gravewright specialized in death.
Its campaigns were characterized by:
- Mass slaughters on battlefields followed by the rise of Rift-twisted dead, animated and reinforced by flows of Rift energy and Rift Stones.
- Systematic targeting of cemeteries, ossuaries, and ancient barrows as anchor sites and “kilns” for new abominations.
- The terrifying possibility that any defeated army might rise again in warped, composite forms.
Politically and militarily, the Gravewright’s Gambit forced realms to confront a new nightmare: wars in which the very act of fighting could swell the enemy’s ranks. Strategies shifted toward targeted strikes, corpse-denial tactics, and desperate efforts to prevent key sites from falling intact.
Official histories record that in 320 DA, after seven years of grinding, multi-front warfare, the combined might of the
Rift Wardens, national armies, Magi, and faith-militant orders destroyed the Gravewright near the
Blackwood Wilds of
Westerlunde, shattering its bodies and anchor sites and casting its essence back into the Rift.
Un-officially, rumors persist that the Gravewright was not wholly destroyed but captured, held somewhere in a sealed prison by those who feared what could be learned—or unleashed—by studying it. Whether true or not, the Gravewright’s Gambit left enduring marks: depopulated regions, haunted barrows, deeply entrenched distrust of large-scale necromancy, and a sharpened sense that the Rift’s repertoire of horrors was far from exhausted.
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