The Ending

"The earth withers, and the heavens lament... All upon the earth are found guilty and devoured; and thus all nations are burned to ash..."
— Siahir, the Viridescent Hare

A curse laid down by the Wolflords. A manifestation of mortal perdition. A plague from beyond the stars. The theories behind the origins of the Ending are legion, but they matter little in the face of its glaring reality.

What is known about it is all that matters: it is the antithesis of the wyr that animates the world, and thus the enemy of all life. It devours magic wherever it spreads, corrupting or killing everything it touches.

And if it ever makes a resurgence, a new era of destruction will not be far behind.

All the Earth Weeps

"The World Beast lay in the depths, awaiting its time to rise and consume all those who walked the earth.
The World Beast slumbered beneath the sacred mountain, awaiting its time to rise and shatter the home of the gods.
And yet, this all-devouring monster was neither leviathan nor dark-loving oretha... but a seed of shadow in the heart of a mortal man, and a blessed woman."
— 'The Branches That Wither', Act I

The Ending's presence in Wyral stretches back as far as the disaster of Ara, making it several thousands of years old at the very least. It was not investigated for a long time, partly due to the lack of witnesses, the intervention of the Wolflords, and the far more urgent calamity that threatened the world.

Yet its emergence could not be fully halted, and over the centuries it blighted the world in several small, isolated incidents. The efforts of mages to suppress it mostly succeeded. Efforts to understand it, though, did not.

And then came the day when a young man, against all odds, found and unleashed utter madness.

The World's Sin

"The spring of the stone warrior was the first victim, he who once held off an endless tide of enemies. Yet they pierced his shadow, and he was turned to granite - and that lingering betrayal turned the clear waters into a flow of corruption as unending as the foes he once fought...

And the rulers of the clans wept, for if even this hero's heart might turn black, what hope did his people have?"
— 'The Branches That Wither', Act II

It is, at the very least, clear why the Ending is such a threat to the world: it consumes and destroys wyr - the lifeblood of Wyral - wherever the two forces meet. Ikayal and most wyr-affected creatures cannot survive without wyr running through their bodies, and so sufficient concentrations of the Ending prove deadly to them. Everything else is contaminated, becoming things... other than they were.

The most notable of these corruptions are the Endsworn - for whom the Ending has replaced blood and breath. These warriors are shackled to the Ending's will, inevitably spreading their own curse across the world. It matters little whether they pursue personal goals or attempt to resist that corrosion.

Facing the 'End's Beginning', none can bear the endless erosion of the will for all the long, weary years that the Endsworn must endure.

Resisting Finality

"With the aid of the strong-winged emissary, the Daughters of Man descended into a place that had long been lost to mortalkind... where ruined towers, weeping shades and crimson waters all inevitably gathered...

The Daughters saw that, no matter how they subdued this monster, it would eventually return to ravage, in a cycle of entropy that would eventually leave only ash and ruin behind."
— 'The Branches That Wither', Act III

There have been many who drew their blades to turn back the Ending's corrosion. The second-generation Harbingers of Ruin faced down that corruption during the devastating Endwar, and won - albeit only with great effort and greater cost. And unbeknownst to ordinary people, there have been several isolated outbreaks of the Ending since then, which have been successfully dealt with. However, many methods used during the Endwar have been lost, and modern research has stagnated.

The Ending may devour wyr, but it can also be repelled by wyr. Storm mages and ocean mages have innate advantages in this field - the former because they can directly manipulate and store wyr, the latter due to their ties to cleansing and purification. But the Ending still poses a significant threat; it takes more power for any mage to defeat an Endsworn than vice versa, and more wyr will be destroyed in doing so.

Some warn that, in the end, this entropic loss of wyr will lead to a world devoid of life, where only the aberrations of the Ending will remain - wandering among the scattered bones of the living world.