As Time Goes By: 935 - 941

Crafted by an evil druid named Cella Vivaldi in the deepest reaches of the Koulan Forests, the deadly disease known as Violet Blight spread to all reaches of the continent in the past half-decade. Sparing neither rulers or commoners, a death toll in the millions makes it deadlier than the Sunken God's Reign of Terror or the Redpox Plague of the 830's.

Circumstances in recent years created the perfect storm for the Blight to quickly spread, the unification of the Northern Territories making travel throughout the region easier than ever before while the Koulan Forest's proximity to Sardivelia's major port cities spread the Blight by sea and by air to the rest of the continent. Clerics worked tirelessly to stop the Blight from suffocating its victims, few but the strongest healing rituals capable of permanently warding off the disease. The Temple of Erivo crafted a potion in 939 capable of permanently curing Blight victims, but the rare ingredients needed to craft the potion have kept it out of reach for most Ekalians.

By the start of the 940's outbreaks became less frequent as the Blight struggled to find new victims, but its reign of terror permanently reshaped Pescaliat's status quo. Trade and travel between kingdoms has slowed to a crawl, all but the most foolhardy adventurers willing to brave infection in foreign lands. The Koulan Forests, long a source of the timber and resources used to forge modern innovations like airships, has become a wasteland as Cella's corruption spreads into neighboring towns and villages. The Stewards, longtime defenders of the lower classes in the region's cities, have expanded their organization to patrol outlying villages and combat the monsters crawling out of the Cella's Koulan.

People have started to doubt the promises of the modern era, turning to groups like Control Weather and Drakkenism that preach a return to a more primitive era of society. Others fled to far-off corners of Ekal like Rana and the Floating Islands, outrunning the Blight and willing to risk the dangers of these exotic locations. Many world leaders and peacekeepers fell victim to the Blight, and the new generation of rulers are more suspicious of each other and eager to settle old scores. Pescaliat's future looks uncertain.

One bright spot from this period proved to be the successful defeat of Atropus by a High Priest of the Ageless One named Heiwa. Warned decades ago by a prophecy first obtained by the Shroud, the High Priest and an army of clerics prepared a ritual to unleash a wave of divine magic that pushed the interplanar monstrosity back into the void. After years of Ekal being harrassed by fiends and eldritch horrors from other planes of existence, the successful ritual came as a relief to a beleagured world.

The ritual required massive amounts of energy, so much so that Heiwa had to pull energy from the fabric of the Veil to complete it. This led to a trade-off where the Veil was pulled back from the moon of Zunal, making it more exposed to interplanar threats in the future. This proved to be an acceptable risk for the Ageless One and their acolytes given that Zunal is largely uninhabited, and the move allowed for any remaining Gith on Ekal to return to their home plane. A partnership between the Ageless One and the Shroud will oversee Zunal for any signs of interplanar threats, but some veteran adventurers like Windred Ozlow are already capitalizing on the new arrangement by crafting spelljammers capable for sailing from Zunal into the furthest reaches of space.

High Priest Heiwa passed away from exhaustion at his home in Sanjuro City not long after completing the ritual. Compared to other Ageless One priests like Alma Quinn and Criella Anderson, Heiwa was more open-minded and willing to work with unusual allies (e.g. the evil gith necromancer Zan'kiri) to achieve larger goals for the benefit of Ekal. His successor, a man named Azama, will no doubt continue Heiwa's tradition of choosing the lesser of two evils to combat the forces of chaos from other planes of existence.

In a ground-breaking paper published by Mulane College in the Treeleaf Union, halfling researchers argue that gnomes and halflings come from the same ancestry and that there are not enough differences to justify classifying them as two different races.

The paper pulls from a mix of anthropological and biological studies, arguing that the gnome/halfling distinction is a cultural creation by elven administrators from the Elflands Empire and Kiri Clan during the construction of their respective empires. The paper mentions how gnomish and halfling communities are frequently found close to each other and share many similar features, the only major difference being lifespans. The paper speculates that the centuries-long lifespan of gnomes may be attributable to magic experiments performed by the archmages of Old Myltev, but further research is required from that era.

The paper has become an international sensation, with gnomes either outright rejecting the paper's findings as racist or reconsidering their relationship to their communities. The paper also has major political ramifications, giving the halfling Treeleaf Union an opportunity to push territorial claims on the gnomish-majority city of Galway in Sardivelia. It's up to gnomes everywhere how these findings change their worldview and identity.