A Dezolaat History
A Dezolaat History
Call me Chronos for time no longer has any hold on me. I call myself a chronicler, one whose fate it is to record history as it happens so it shall never be forgotten. Sustenance I no longer require; I am immortal; the last elf.
I have been asked to detail how our world came to be in as concise and short a manner as I can manage. So much has happened and I witnessed it all; doomed to record the genocide of my own race at the hands of our own kind. But I am getting ahead of myself.
The event we now refer to as the Night of the Ragnarox started out innocent enough. At first we thought it was just another shooting star or meteor shower until it made landfall. Clouds of dust were thrown up that have still have not settled a thousand years since.
Dark magic must have been at its core to wrought all the devastation that followed. Monsters the like we had never seen before began appearing and the dead grew restless in their graves. Crops failed on an epic scale and the prayers of the priests went unanswered.
We all laughed at the idea that we were the forsaken realms at first but when the angels came to fight the demon hordes a few of us started to think something was seriously wrong. Devils and angels equally found themselves trapped as the forest started to die and one winter never ended. Undead rose to power and started to conquer the countryside.
On the Field of Monoliths the once proud elven race committed suicide as a massive war came to an end as elves of the surface and underworld murdered each other to the last. Humanity eventually became enslaved to the dead and the small folk just went insane and those that did not commit suicide themselves eventually descend below the soil and became the being we now call derro. Dwarves held fast in their halls of stone as all the world's lycanthropes became locked in their hybrid forms.
Those undead who can actually think hate what they cannot control so they hunted the beast folk in a never ending war that continues to this very day. Humanity has been stripped of its will and reduced to chattel for their unloving masters as the dwarves still hide in their halls of stone.
About a hundred years ago priests with actual clerical powers emerged from the underground but the entities they serve are not entirely wholesome, but still there are those who need to serve a god, any god, so as to know what to do and who to hate less the path of life be bereft of any compass. Ethics and morality are not as important as being shackled to something greater than themselves. The fact that their souls will be forfeit in the bargain is apparently of little consequence.
Druids and Rangers have long taken umbrage at the events that have unfolded but since they draw power from the land itself their efforts to heal and care for our dying world have been rewarded. Oracles still receive visions and Paladins still do what they can to light a bonfire to banish the darkness even if the efforts remind many of tales of a mad knight who mistook windmills for demons and tilted at them with predictable results. The inquisition has reconvened but now it is those that do not worship the dark ones that are branded as heretics, blasphemers and worse to be persecuted to the extreme for the amusement of the undead lords as long as they still have enough victims to sup for their eternal sustenance.
Cursed are we who still draw true breath as our world must surely be some kind of Hell. We suffer ant toil at the sufferance of dark powers who now rule with an iron fist. Just what crime against the universe did we commit? How can we make penance and thus redeem ourselves? The answers to these and so many other questions are unknown and may never be revealed. Such is the fate of those who dwell on this island on the cosmic see we call Dezolaat.
-Chronos the Chroncler