True to his word, the Master Archmage granted his protection, and the people of
Somerschal were given an opportunity to rebuild. The necromantic army of ...
“I grant to you the Summer of Peace. Use it to prepare your defences, for after my bindings wane the tidal waves shall crash onto this plane and the world will bleed.” -Archimedis Spellweaver. True to his word, the Master Archmage granted his protection, and the people of Somerschal were given an opportunity to rebuild. The necromantic army of Jacque du Morde was driven into hiding with the collapse of Vor’Culpa’s extensive catacombs, and though the rogue Jucanite, Ozymandias Rameses, had apparently survived the assault, the Union of Somerschal declared his influence no longer a threat. The corpses of the other Jucanites, hanged for their treason, still remain in some districts as a grisly reminder. The trench carved through the city by ritual magic, now referred to as the Scar of Icarus, drew the sea along its length. The sides were reinforced and the water purified, now serving as a fresh water supply to the city. The ruins of the former Archmage Mordred’s manor house, the target of the ritual, has been demolished and replaced with a monument to the fallen – a great stone obelisk covered in names and standing in the centre of a small island in the city. This peace and reparation lasted for several months, and the areas which were largely unaffected by the war grew prosperous – Hillview, in particular, grew outward and developed into a self-sufficient city. Though still primarily human and human-controlled, districts began to appear where visitors and those who had lost their homes to unliving and elemental assaults claimed asylum and gathered into their own racial communities. Some even said that with enough time the former farming town might rival Jucan in size. As autumn set in, the Third Cataclysm began. The first signs were minor – the Mage’s Guild began to grow in activity as some of the Mages bound to particular planes began to feel uneasiness within them, and some magical weapons which had been infused with had their energies wax and wane seemingly without warning. The real beginning came when the Archmages came together and performed a ritual in the central circle of Fortitude to commune with the elements and attempt to discover what had happened. As they cast their influence out, the wrenching twist of the planes ripped through the world, killing several of the Archmages from the shock outright and crippling High Archmage Solus, who led the ritual. The remaining few learned that the planes of Grey and Neutral, the powers of balance, had been utterly wiped from existence, and that a power of some kind had twisted the planes into a new pattern. After the ritual, elemental rifts that had been closed during the War of the Living were torn open, and the Legions in the Somerschalian army were dispatched to contain them. The land spirits, who once wandered freely about the places which they seemingly represented, found themselves forced into remaining at their circles and holding back the tide which Archimedis once stopped. Scouts were quickly dispatched around the continent, and they found that while the land spirits seemed to be holding away the worst of the outbreak for now, a circle nearest to Hillview either had no corresponding land spirit or, worse, the spirit was consumed by the circle’s power. With the Legions holding back the elementals in other areas, and the Mage’s Guild containing the threat to Fortitude, the newly-appointed master of the Adventurer’s Guild, a human by the name of Byron, quickly organised the newest recruits to the Guild and tasked them with containing the outbreak and using Hillview as a staging ground to investigate the outposts which had stopped reporting. He only hoped that their first true mission wouldn’t end up being their last...
