The Nymyrian Fallout

"...has gone mad. Now he worships some creature called Vol Ganayd, I have no idea who or what that is. He has certainly changed, and not for the better -- now talking about the injustice that we have suffered underneath the dragons, but I know of no such injustices done upon us. The town is arming as well. Madness, I say. Something foul is in the air -- I get dirty looks just for speaking out these days. Hold on, someone knocks on the door. I suppose this will suffice for the day's entry."   Nymyria was, three-hundred or so years ago, a territory in the southern Cape Forest controlled by lizard folk who, until this tragic time, had worshipped Umbor the Sun like any of his other subjects. The "kingdom" of Nymyria as they fancied themselves (always subservient to the dragons, of course) was a loyal and prosperous place for hundreds of years before the Fallout, and there had been no reason for them to rebel -- no one had truly chafed under draconic rule. Perhaps then, dear reader, you would have guessed that the influence for the betrayal of Umbor was from without.   It is unknown when the daemonic lord Vul Ganeid began to poison the minds of the lizardfolk of the south. There were murmurs of initial unrest, but no one -- not dragons, not mages, not even the neighbors of the Nymyrians knew of any dark change. Myself, I was somewhere in Kolburra (recall that neither the Krik'tha Flood nor the fall of Uškaya had yet occurred), in Chillwood, I think, and I remember that the most stunning thing about the news, when it finally reached us was the unremarkability of the place this was unfolding. I had barely even heard of Nymyria, and most of my colleagues knew nothing of it either, and here they were saying that a great war was raging there! What exactly happened in those months and years leading to the first incident in 830 wasn't uncovered until after the whole debacle.   From the journal of one of the Nymyrians who did not succumb to the propaganda of Vul Ganeid, we learned that the leader of the head clan of Nymyria began acting strange as far back as 826. Corroborating this journal with several others, it appears that a rift that opened near the town of Uurbazj and, before it could be detected and quelled, a quite powerful daemon, Vul Ganeid, sensed it from his home plane and psychically reached through it. Finding an exceptionally excellent host in the chieftain of the clan that inhabited the town, Vul began to poison his mind, and convinced him to prevent the local Necromancers from investigating the strange signature (coming from the rift) in the area. Vul's puppet told the Necromancers that his clan could handle it and even filled out the paperwork saying that they had shut out a daemon named "Vul Ganeid." Sifting through many, many, many necromantic documents on the region, I did indeed discover the aforementioned document, exactly as described. In actuality, this Vul Ganeid had by then fully possessed the chieftain and began to slowly convince the populace of Nymyria that they were, in truth, draconic slaves who were being kept from their true potential.   After four years of this poison being whispered in the ears of the Nymyrians, tension with the dragons was running exceptionally high, though Ganeid was careful to keep the true state of things from Umbor, whose purview he was under. Finally, when he could contain his followers no longer, he unleashed them into Uurbazj as a test of their willingness to serve him. All doubters and critics were quickly slain, mutilated, and raised again as undead slaves to fuel Vul Ganeid's conquest. Simultaneously, Vul Ganeid was empowering his vessel as he increasingly transitioned his power from his abyssal home into the Material one. Of course, the sudden attack did not go unnoticed, and a relatively large and eager force of dragonborn were sent to quell the disturbance. They were slaughtered.   Calling the sentiments we all felt after this news reached us "shock" would be like calling being struck by lightning a "shock." No draconic lord had suffered such a total defeat in centuries, and with the first responders to Ganeid's invasion, his forces stormed northward across the Unbadd Greenlands uncontested for a full month. By the time Umbor the Sun had mustered a force to respond, Vul Ganeid had his forces entrench themselves. Umbor knew the reclamation of his territory would be costly, but no one truly understood the cunning and power of Ganeid. We quickly learned.   I remember the exact date when we learned: it was the month of Kythorn, on the thirteenth day of the year 830 AC. Of course, I wouldn't hear of this until the thirtieth day, but every living being alive on that day remembers it exactly. It was the day a dragon was slain. Umbor. Dead. "How could this happen? No one has such power!" Such was the folly of our (and his) pride and arrogance. Who were we to believe that the creatures of our plane, these mighty dragons, must be the most powerful of all? There are no accounts of the battle -- only that of Neoju, then of four legs, finding the corpse of his missing father surrounded by an army of dead lizardfolk and revenants, eyes gouged out and with what seemed like ten-thousand scars upon his body. Of course, none of Umbor's followers survived either, but they had all been raised again (those that were still in one piece). It was after this that the draconic lords all convened and, perhaps for the first time in any of their lives, united with a singular purpose. A great army was raised, a force the likes of which has never since been seen. Six great dragons, their broods, grandmasters of every Enclave, the strongest paladins of the gods, and a massive army which included nearly every race that today exists. It was with this force that Vul Ganeid was eventually crushed -- though it took nearly a year of campaign. At the final battle of Uurbazj, Neoju, son of Umbor, slew Vul Ganeid's host, banishing him back to the abyss, though he lost a leg in the process.