It was a battle of wholesale destruction. The hosts of Sennadar pushed the Demons back, pushed them into the keep, where they holed up. A thunderous charge led by Dragor the Industrious, a mighty warrior and general, opened the front gates at the cost of the mighty general's life. With their defenses breached, the Demons fell quickly to the swords and spells of their human and non-human foes, until the Demon Lord himself was challenged by the Sha'Kar Sorceress known only as Spyder, a Sorceress who had been imbued by the gods with the power to destroy the Demon Lord. She defeated the great monster in a duel of spell and steel against power and claw. At the end of that battle, Spyder turned and struck Val, striking with the granted power given to her by the Elder Gods, and Val was cast down. Val had fallen, but not completely. Stripped of his status as an Elder God, he nevertheless held the powers of a god within him, but without the powers of an Elder God, he became dependent on the mortals who revered him. His was a tiny following, and he faded in ability in heartbeats, and the Elder Gods imprisoned him for his part in starting the war which had so devastated the world.
And then it was over. The cost to the peoples of the world had been ghastly. Entire races had been wiped out by the incredible struggle, and other races suffered greatly. The peoples of the world had been horribly depleted, and the entire continent of Draconia was abandoned to allow it to heal from the scars of the horrendous war. The survivors fled south, to Sharadar, one of the few lands untouched by the war, where the magical realm could feed the refugees, stave off famine and plague, and help nurture the survivors back to health. But the scars of the Blood War ran deep, and many races and people did not wish to remain and remember. The Gnomes, who had been nearly exterminated in the war, simply vanished. Some peoples struck out on ships, sailing into the vast reaches of the unexplored Sea of Storms, never to be seen or heard from again. Some turned east rather than west, vanishing over the Skydancer Mountains to lands unexplored. Some crossed the Sea of Glass to repopulate the eastern continent, which would forever be known as Valkar. Over time, as the peoples who had sought shelter in Sharadar multiplied and strained that ancient land's resources, the ravaged continent healed under the tender care of Elder and Younger god alike. The continent was restored, most of its horrible scars healed, and this restoration brought the humans back. The continent was again recolonized, from the first kingdom of Draconia to the mighty kingdom of Yar Arak, and from there in all directions. The people built, they spread out, and they again began to thrive and prosper.
And as time passed, the memories of the great war were lost over time, until only legend and myth remained.
GoTo: Title EoF
Chapter 1
The Star of Jerod was an old ship, a galleon of Shacean build that had seen many years of rugged action along the coasts of Sennadar. She had sailed further than most, from the Pirate Isles to the southern continent of Sharadar, all along the coastline of the three continents abutting the Sea of Storms and the Stormhaven Isles, which lay to the west of the west coast of Sennadar. She had seen many wondrous sights, had nearly been sent to the bottom more than once, and had become something of a living legend among the sailors of the Sea of Storms. She was called the Divine Lady by many, the one ship that always seemed to come back, no matter what dangers lay in her path. She was a good ship, and to serve on her was an honor. That mystique was part of the reason for her survival. A ship was only as good as her crew, and because many would jump at the chance to serve a tour aboard the Divine Lady, it allowed her captain to pick and choose the best men he could find.
She certainly didn't look like a living legend. The ship showed her age, with roughened, peeling paint that had been dark blue at one time, and more than one visible patches holding along her amidships. The mainmast was missing the top five feet of its length, ending abruptly above the crow's nest, and the sails along the foremast had all been patched and repatched so many times that they looked like a villager's quilt. Her rails were pitted and scratched, the victims of the large grappling hooks used during the many of a boarding attempt, and her decks were gray with age and exposure to the salty water of the sea. She had one particularly large scratch along her port side, from where they had happened a bit too close to a Unicorn Whale, and the stern still had a trident head embedded in it near the captain's quarters from an attack by the dreaded Sahuagin, the Devil-Men of the deep.
She was an old ship, with a colorful history and a colorful captain. Captain Abraham Kern was a stooped man of advancing years, with a head and beard full of dark hair liberally peppered with gray. He was missing both his front teeth, and his voice had been permanently damaged by the salty air and the need to shout at almost all times. He was thin, somewhat bony, given to wearing dirty canvas shirts made of sailcloth and rugged leather breeches, with his polished flare-topped half-boots. For some reason, he wore a black sash around his waist, into which was stuffed a scabbarded cutlass and a very curious little iron object that Keritanima identified as a starwheel pistol. Tarrin had never heard of one of those before, and it seemed to shock Keritanima that he would own one. But that was just one thing surprising about the salty old sea-dog. He was gruff, he was blunt, and he was very vocal. He was given to ranting to nobody in particular, and he liked to smack his men with the polished cherrywood cane which was always in his left hand when they weren't moving fast enough to suit him. But he was, simply, one of the best captains on the twenty seas, and his crew endured his idiosyncracies because they had the most profound respect for the gnarled old man.
Few captains would have dared the ice in the Sea of Storms to journey in any direction but south, but Abraham Kern was absolutely fearless. He would sail into the Nexus itself if he had a good reason to do it, and he would probably come back. He was unshakeable, unflappable, and nothing even caused him to raise an eyebrow. He had seen it all, more than once, and the nights were filled with tales of his prior adventures, tales of mysterious islands, nameless dangers, the monsters that dwelled beneath the waves, and pirates and adventure.
But the grand Divine Lady had never had such an unusual retinue of passengers aboard before. The old ship was carrying some pretty unusual people, and it was something that was new to Captain Kern. And at his age, things that were new were not good. If they didn't fit into his prior experiences, he had a tremendous distrust of them. That distrust had exploded into outright terror when he found out he was carrying a Wikuni High Princess aboard his ship. He began to dream almost nightly of a horde of Wikuni clippers and warships bearing down on his precious old ship and sending her to the bottom, but those fears abated when the harbor at Dineval froze solid with them inside it, trapping them on the Stormhavens for over a month as they waited for a warm spell to break up the ice trapping them in.
The strangest of them all was the Were-cat. They had been warned about him, warned about what he was and what danger he could pose, and that was enough for the crew. They avoided him like Death Herself, giving him a very wide berth and letting him move about without hindrance. Two months with him on deck had dulled them somewhat to him. They didn't recoil from him in fear as they did those first few days, but neither would they talk to him, or get too close to him. It was obvious to them, to anyone, that he was very unhappy. Given the katzh-dashi's warnings about his temper, that was enough to keep everyone away from him until he felt more sociable. No matter how long that took. The month's delay had done little to temper the creature's ire, but Captain Kern had the feeling that it was more than just the delay causing the Were-cat to be so contrary.
Tarrin lay that morning on a yardarm high in the rigging, well up and above the scurrying people below, staring out at the sea before him with disinterested eyes. The air had warmed considerably when they sailed due south from the Stormhavens to avoid the ice, and now they had turned east and north to come back up to Den Gauche, which was their next port of call. The cool air soothed him in ways that the others couldn't understand, the clean, clear smell of the sea and water untainted by the smells of the crew below, carrying faint scents that he couldn't identify. His furred tail swished back and forth over him absently, moving of its own volition, just as his cat-ears tended to move by themselves to track in on any sound that reached them.