The First War of Darkness

While the various races of Thyr established kingdoms, nations, fiefdoms, villages, cities, and tribes, Zohronox watched from his dark realm, nursing his hatred for all of the light and life in the world. He despised all of it, and wanted to see it returned to his inky darkness; so he set out to destroy Thyr and all life upon it. He took his darkness and filled the corpses of the blighted humanoids and other creatures that the gods had created; the darkness animated their bodies in a sick and twisted mockery of life: the first undead. Zohronox continued to experiment for a time, creating the many different types of undead, and found that there were some humanoids nihilistic enough to worship him; he taught them the art of necromancy, and blessed his devout with the power to create and control them. With his army of living and undead, the Devourer was ready to make war against his hated enemies.

He took the darkness of his realm and solidified it into an obsidian-like substance, and filled it with his undead monstrosities, and then cast them onto Thyr; these shatter crypts erupted from the ground like jagged pieces of black glass, marring and desecrating the land around them as they cracked open and released their grisly payload onto the unsuspecting inhabitants of Thyr.

Upon seeing these monstrosities, most of the gods were repulsed, but none more so than the Three Brothers, and Ashtar; they bristled at the grotesque mockeries of life the god of darkness had created, and empowered their faithful with weapons of light and fire to burn away and purge the abominations. War engulfed Thyr as they fought for their survival against the undead and the nihilistic followers of Zohronox. As the forces of light and life fought and died, they're dead were denied the dignity of a burial as the priests of the Devourer animated them into more repugnant undead to refill their ranks.   Finally, after 1000 years of war with Zohronox and his undead plague, a powerful priestess of Ashtar named Kirthis Dawnhand created a relic that harnessed the very light of the sun and used it burned away the undead. She sat at the head of the united armies of Thyr and used the relic to decimate the forces of darkness; when the smoke cleared, the threat was finished, but the power of the relic had consumed Kirthis. Thus the Dawnhand was born.