Article by Caimdearg

It has been difficult to the extreme for me to tell of my past, as the holes in my memories are far too large to enable any cohesiveness to my story. I will therefore attempt fill in gaps as best I can. As I remember nothing linguistic, all names of people and places are probably not the real ones.

*I’m putting this here as a disclaimer that while much of this is based on imagination, some significant parts, especially at the end, are my personal memories, many of which have been verified by my deities. This verification is by necessity not transitive to others’ paradigms, nor should be viewed on the same level as independent corroboration (and may in fact just be personal delusions). Thus any factual information is UPG, not objective and substantiated.*

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Arvalos was a world of beauty. One large continent lay surrounded by ocean and various islands and archipelagos. Lush forests, windswept grasslands, towering mountains… a hint of paradise indeed.

There were two major races that I know of – Humans and Elves (I have reason to believe that there were also nature spirits, such as Dryads, but they were outside of civilization). For the most part, they lived in cooperative exclusivity, excepting trade and diplomacy. Humans tended to live in the south and east while the elves congregated mostly in the west, and both races blended in the sparsely-populated north. Fiën, the largest city, was in the center of the continent, and was ruled by a council of elves and humans. In the other parts of the continent, humans were organized into tribes, each with its own internal government; Elven government was also localized, based around smaller cities and the surrounding areas.

My exact social position I am, as of yet, uncertain of, but it is quite probable that I had a rank of some sort, possibly even what passed as nobility among our people. I lived near the western ocean, in a city called Haerneolin. Haerneolin was located on a cliff overlooking the sea. Built of white marble and sandstone, it shone with the colors of the sunset every evening. It was reachable only by a slender white bridge that spanned the chasm between the city gates and hill road, and thus easy to defend (as was much appreciated later). Cultural life seems to have been similar to the Elenari, but with more emphasis on religion and magic. Our people were skilled in most of the arts, though the humans produced many bards that surpassed our own. Elven cities were set up in areas based on social/cultural function, rather like castes or the Renaissance guilds of Earth, and each city contained a giant library with books and writings on every known aspect of its particular function. Haerneolin was the City of Sound, and as such, I was trained in music and poetry. Of anything I have encountered here, the closest parallel to what my city’s people were are the filí (poets) of pre-Christian and medieval Ireland.

The important part of the story comes at the end of our existence. Arvalos, like the Elenari homeworlds, was struck by the Corruption. I believe that we may have harbored a refugee or two, and the Corruption followed them to Arvalos. It was very subtle, striking deep and unseen. The first sign of things amiss was the breakdown of communication and amiability between us and the humans. Then our own pride was turned against us. Each city began viewing itself as above the rest, and the in-between places were deserted as the rulers of the cities gathered their people together into the cities. We asked the gods what was happening, and they warned of destruction to come. But too many in power had been seized by the Corruption, and the warnings were ignored. Then war broke loose. The humans, even more susceptible than us to the Corruption’s sway, had been festering, jealous of our beautiful cities and the immense stores of knowledge we had collected and archived. Barely two weeks after the gods’ warning, we were being attacked.

The cities of Adarin and Gerios, both warfare centers, were assaulted in the night by more than ten thousand humans. Gerios was razed and only a handful survived the slaughter. In their escape, the refugees discovered an even more disastrous reason for the sudden attacks. The wild lands, deserted and barren, had become wastes. Any animal that hadn’t fled was dead or dying, and the vegetation was rotting as it grew. We found out later that this desolation had begun in the lands of the humans and had driven them westward in search for survival.

One of the refugees made his way to Haerneolin and told us the news. We sent out messages to the other cities, hoping to warn them, and settled in for a siege. Sad was the day when we heard that the great walls of Fiën had been breached and the Citadel of Harmony burned to the ground. Being the farthest west, Haerneolin was naturally the place where those fleeing the destruction went, and our population swelled with the ranks of the war-torn. While our armies attempted to stave off the human flood, we sang and prayed, throwing all the magic we had into trying to turn the land and remove the Abomination. The humans and certain renegade elves, blinded by their taint, were calling up the darkness out of the deep and gruesome places beneath the earth. A good number of the spirits had been consumed and filled with the Corruption, and fought on the enemy’s side (they did, however, often attack their own allies and each other, as the nature of the Corruption is chaos and the complete annihilation of everything not Itself)

It was decided that we would face the enemy in one great battle. Everyone who was capable of aiding our fight left Haerneolin and traveled to the Plain of Remaros. Remaros was once a giant grain field belonging to the City of Farmers, stretching around the now ruined city as far as the eye could see from its great Tower. But now, thanks to the Abomination and the ravaging of the enemy, it was dirt and rock. Our scouts reported the enemy forces as three days away. Two days later, our scouts did not return. The Corruption had grown strong enough in Itself that It had coalesced into a physical entity which was now heading our way as well.

The battle went as most battles go, our armies against theirs. The real war was between our mages, including myself, and the incarnate Corruption. We fell like grain before a scythe, but managed to hold it off for almost three weeks. But each death made us weaker and It stronger. And our own dead began to rot and spread plague if not cremated, a lesson we quickly learned. The night of the full moon, It attacked suddenly, killing everything It touched. We called down the gods to help us, but it was too late. After It had swallowed up the armies, both ours and the enemy’s, It turned on us. Under It’s new strength, we had no chance, and half of us were literally burned out of our bodies by the energy. The last thing I remember is leaping over mounds of dead bodies, two swords flashing in my hand, in a futile attempt to fight it physically. A seemingly human woman with bright red hair, dressed in exquisite battle armor, stepped in front of me and slid a spear through my ribs just as the Corruption touched me with It’s deadly tendrils.

*Everything after this is not memory. It was told to me in this lifetime by the aforementioned deities.*

The woman who killed me did so to save my soul from being annihilated. She is known on Earth by various names, most meaning “Exalted One,” and is a goddess here. Even so, she almost lost me to the Corruption. According to her, my soul was severely damaged, to the brink of dissolution. Arvalos rotted to death, and eventually imploded, as did its sun.

After some significant time (as measured by Earth time), I had recovered enough to be incarnated again, and was placed here on Earth, for purposes largely unknown. I simply know that the gods are worried, and that they are gathering a lot of people to this place and time. Most earthly mythologies speak of an apocalypse… Maybe that’s why. I don’t know. But I am here, and I will do what they ask of me. It’s the least I could do.