The Fall
The Fall was not a single day’s cataclysm, but a thirty-year descent into ruin, the grinding span of an invasion of Gaiatia nearly seven centuries ago, and the desperate, self-consuming retaliation of the folk who fought against it. It began with the arrival of the Devil warlord Vile, and his endless legions from The Hells; Unleashed by the will of Xaethra, goddess of greed and desire, upon our realm of The Folklands and the planet of Gaiatia within we call home. Vile’s brutal campaign shattered borders overnight, his armies flooding every corner of the world through portals that bled battle onto a hundred fronts at once. The Devils or their lands had never even been known of before they came for us that faithful day; An enemy as foreign and mysterious as their invasion was sudden, and brutal. But Gaiatia did not surrender, it clawed and bled in answer desparate to turn back the demon-tide. Nations turned every forge, academy, and foundry into engines of war, crafting weapons so devastating they reduced their own cities to rubble in the name of denying their Hellish invaders a single victory if they could help it.
Entire academies of magick burned, their libraries of irreplaceable knowledge destroyed by their former keepers so Vile’s forces could not claim them. Every ship scuttled, every granary torched, every bridge collapsed in a grim calculus of survival. The war was fought with every desperate instrument of annihilation the world could muster, and still, Vile advanced forward more and more each passing day. By the final years, the world was already a corpse. Its bones would only be broken further when Vile on the cusp of victory, in his hubris, betrayed Xaethra in an attempt to seize her power, unleashing a chain of events that would damn her invasion and send a dragon-golem vessel she had occupied to witness her victory, plummeting from the heavens in a ball of fire. The impact split the land, drowned coasts beneath towering waves, and choked the skies in ash. What the war had not burned away, the impact finished. When the smoke cleared, there were no victors, only survivors picking through the ruins of a world they had destroyed alongside their former enemies. The Fall was more than the beginning of the end for The Lost Ages; It was the death of practically everything our forebears had built, war waged for nothing, remembered only as the bitter prologue to a century of blood that followed. The Great Schism.
The Conflict
Prelude
While as our fragmented records of history can say for certain were by no means a time without its share of conflict or strife, comparatively to now the world of old was a sprawling utopia. The Lost Ages, as they would come to be known, were towards their end a ceaseless renaissance of technological and magickal developments, an unprecendeted era of progress, advancement, and relative peace for all folk of the land, that is, until he arrived. His name was Vile, as we know him an accomplished general and battlemage of the race of Devils, who during the Lost Ages united millions of demons under his banner, in a realm known as The Hells, a place of chaos and fire which went unbeknownst to Gaiatia for thousands of years, and Gaiatia in-turn to it. After this victory, Vile reveled in his absoute power over The Hells and it's people, yet secretly yearned for another war. Vile was renown as remarkably diligent in both studies and athleticism, a Tiefling who sought only to better himself, and was afraid he had simply nothing else to truly test him; Until the Goddess of greed, lust, and jealousy would come to him in a dream, with an offer he simply could not refuse. Strange to him at first (as Gods were strangers to all folk at the time, secretly dwelling their lands since the dawn of time before this very moment would introduce us to them) Vile would overcome his initial confusion to hear her plea. She, who referred to herself as Xythra, needed his agency on the world, proclaiming Gods were too powerful to directly interact with the physical world without potentially destroying it and subsequently themselves; To entice him, the Goddess alluding to Vile who's greatest love was war, of supposed knowledge of another realm beyond his own to conquer atop a way to reach it, that she would grant him if he met her demands to wage war on-it in, but in her name, not his. As this meeting progressed, they would seem to possess everything the other desired... She an Avatar to enact her will on the world without inadvertantly shattering it, Vile with an infinite lust for battle glad to spread war on her behalf with more than the means to do so. And-so Vile agreed, delightedly in-turn the Goddess showed him the way to Gaiatia and soon the whole of our realm Gods and all would have to fight for their survival.
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