Eregnos Monument

The Eregnos Monument was built to commemorate the lives lost in the defense of Orochtha. As the lack of robust record-keeping at the time prevented the creation of a comprehensive list of the deceased, a collective memorial was created instead.

In the aftermath of the Wealth Wars, once the next steps for the people of Orochtha had been decided, came the time to reckon with the consequences of the war. Not only had six decades of fighting left tens of thousands of people displaced from their ancestral homes, it had decimated entire communities. Although little could be done in the short term about the demographic damage, it was decided that something had to be done to memorialize those who had lost their lives in fighting for the defense of the realm.   At the behest of the Earth Elemental Lord Tephron, the site of the Rowoon Kingdom's mining site was selected as the place to build the greatest of the war's memorials. The site had been considered in discussions, but the area's instability due to the extensive mining had eliminated it, early on, as a viable candidate. Things changed when the awakened elementals volunteered their services to stabilize the area and do more than simply fill in the old mining shafts, but rather restore the landscape to the greatest extent possible.   Stabilizing the region took the better part of a year, but with the help of the elementals, the monument was finished three years after that. It was dedicated and consecrated as a temple to the Athai during the autumnal equinox, and opened to the public shortly thereafter. In exchange for their assistance, the elementals asked only for a chamber where they could enshrine a peculiar stone that they unearthed from the site, though they were not forthcoming about the nature of the stone.   It wasn't until forty years later, when the Elemental Lord Tephron himself visited the site to pay his respects that the significance of the stone, and the reason why the elementals had insisted on the monument being built at the site, came to be known. Unbeknownst to even the High Moradeikon, the reason that the elementals had set upon the outsiders with uncharacteristic fury in the first place was because the Rowoon Kingdom had committed an unforgivable sin against their kind. In their greed, the Rowoon Kingdom had interfered with the birth of an infant Elemental Lord—the namesake of the monument—and in their ignorance, killed it.   The stone that the elementals had enshrined in the rear of the monument was all that remained of Eregnos, as unlike Lord Tephron, who resembled a slab of earth cloven from the face of a mountain with a forest on his back, Eregnos would have been born as a radiant being of earthen gold, and the miners from the Rowoon Kingdom had stripped away all of the parts of him that were precious. Contributing to the elementals' anger was the fact that Eregnos would have been Lord Tephron's successor as the leader of their people, and now the elementals must wait until Orochtha consecrates the birth of another elemental lord.