⚔️ The War

The mine was bringing up so much material that it was beginning to affect the cities of the Avatars. Skirmishes broke out and turned into battles. The battles continued and escalated into an outright war for survival.

Eventually the Avatars attacked the mine, with the intention of destroying it. The dragons left their cities to defend the mine, but as mighty as they were simply too many Avatars. Fearing defeat the Dragons left the fight and flew to the cities of the Avatars. There the slaughtered every creature they could find. With each death the Avatars lost a tiny part of their power.

The Avatars realized what had happened and realized that they would lose the war. If they left their armies wouldn’t have enough magic to overcome the dampening effects, if they stayed then the Avatars would slowly lose their strength. The Avatars decided that the only option was one final push to destroy the lab. They would consume all the energy they had left and melt the entire complex into the bedrock.

What they didn’t know is that hiding in the heart of the complex was the secret to it’s ability to produce vast amounts of material. At the core was a tiny sliver of crystal encased in a bed of woven mithril. That shard was the only remaining piece of the artifact that split the energy of creation.

The Avatars drew every last ounce of holy and magic they had. They drew from the troops, from the land itself, and reached into the laylines which connected the planes. They used that energy to draw directly from the astral plane and bound it into a single column of blinding fury.

Though it had been dormant after it’s destruction the massive amounts of energy re-awoke the artifact. The crystal tried to divert the energy as it had been created to do but the fragment was simply incapable of it’s original design. Instead it acted as a lens and focused all that energy down to a single point inside itself.

For a brief moment, less than the heartbeat of a hummingbird, the singular energy of creation was re-created. Without the structure of the astral plane that energy became unbound and tore out through reality. The armies fighting nearby were instantly destroyed and for miles in each direction the ground was turned to magma.

The explosion destroyed the bodies of the avatars but the energy of creation sustained their spirits, etching their souls into substance of the realm. It also echoed through the dragon with the same effect as the initial breaking. The dragons went mad. They destroyed the cities of the Avatars, they turned on their master, and each other. Some say every dragon died that day, others say they tunneled deep into the ground to the border of the plane of earth and plane of shadow.

As the artifact shard burned up it leaked it’s energy back into the matieral, but in doing so combined with the holy energy of the Avatars. In that moment the material changed and took on some qualities of life. If it is left on it’s own it slowly grows and spreads, like moss slipping into the cracks of a rock. It reacts to the will of creatures. If solidified and shaped properly it can be made to generate energy. The explosion drove the material below ground but over the course of milenia it slowly spread underneath the entire realm.

With the cities destroyed civilization fell apart. The elder race once again lost it’s sources of power and survived any way they could. How the groups survived changed them into the founding races. The modern races are the descendents of those people.