The Scourging
Era beginning/end
The Scourging was the fourth age of Ardyn that encompassed the second war against The Profane Gods, which devastated civilization and in some cases rearranged the geography of the realm. The exact timeframe is uncertain as most written records were destroyed in the battles but it is estimated to have taken place over 1500 years ago. Following the assault on Aon, conflict against The Profane Gods was rejoined. Most cities that had sprung up during The Magus Era were reduced to ash, leaving Aon once again as the sole bastion of civilization. Historians estimate that no more than a third of the world's population survived this war. The age ended with the defeat of Tharizdun and the construction of the Divine Gate.
Divine Warfare
Following the release of the Profane Gods by Vecruth Na'Qirr, the establishment of their kingdom of Dagbreek, and their assault on Aon, conflict against the Profane Gods was rejoined. In general, the inability of the Profane Gods to work together allowed them to be defeated, though for a brief period there was unity between the Demon Princes for the purposes of fighting the Dawn Deities.
Both deities and mortals crafted legendary artifacts during this period; many of these Remnants of Exodus are buried or lost, but some have been recovered.
Lolth was one of the earliest casualties of the Scourging, as Thor impaled her with his axe before her soldiers saw battle. Over the years, her most loyal drow servants discovered her pooling blood and drank it, transforming themselves into half-spider hybrids called driders. The leaderless drow were driven from the surface world and had to rebuild in the Underdark; their nobility began to be influenced by Tharizdun.
The sequence of some events can be put in order:
- Torog and his followers tunneled beneath a woodland in the Beast's Fangs Mountains that was home to reclusive elves who worshiped Selûne, sinking the plateau into a valley. Torog's servants sapped the life and color from the trees at their roots, creating the Ghost Grove.
- Moradin and Selûne built a trap for Torog. It appeared to be a temple to Torog, but it was a fane that, once Torog had bound himself to it, was instrumental in banishing the Profane God.
- Lathander and Sarenrae drew Torog above ground, defeated him, and banished him to a sliver of the Far Realm that now borders the lowest depths of the Underdark. Torog's tears burned tunnels through Ardyn, and his faithful fled into them
- Asmodeus deceived and betrayed Sarenrae, and killed most or all of her worshipers, in one stroke.
- Desirat, phoenix mount of Asmodeus, was torn from her master and bound beneath Mount Maytara for study.
- Tymora defeated Asmodeus by tricking his armies into fighting each other.
Other battles are harder to place
- All the deities momentarily struck an armistice to strike down the flying city of Exalos, which had developed weapons to kill gods, and the gods' combined might managed to crash but not destroy the city.
- Clemain Astural, a powerful arcanist, looked into a realm beyond the planes for the power to end the war, and he got the power but lost his sanity under the influence of an entity he called the Sightless One. He devastated southeastern Gwessen before heroes brought down his tower and killed him
- In one famous battle, said to occur on the hill that would be named the Throne of the Archeart, Corellon battled Gruumsh, stabbing out his eye.
- At some point, in what would become the Permafrost Tundra, Corellon's right hand, the solar Xalicas, was so badly injured by Rymrgand that she could not see, fly, or leave Ardyn, and had no strength to move for over a century.
- Zehir ambushed and killed many followers of Melora.
- One of the bloodiest battles of the war took place at the site where the Last Bastion would be established, leaving behind a vast amount of weaponry.
- The Raven Queen's black-winged angels saved her from a near-fatal run-in with Tharizdun, but were all consumed in the process.
One of the climactic fights of the war came about when the Dawn and Neutral Deities sought to banish Tharizdun. Moradin used the Core Anvil to craft the Prime Trammels used in the Rites of Dawn Banishment. Mystra baited Tharizdun to her central temple, resulting in her near-destruction were it not for the intervention of her friend Selûne, who helped her safely retreat away from Ardyn and causing her temple to sink beneath the earth in her sorrow. With the blessing of Tymora, four Prime Trammels were attached to Tharizdun, and Lathander prevailed in a battle with the mad god. Badly defeated and wounded, Tharizdun retreated to Acek Orattim's realm, but Lathander chased and banished Tharizdun there, beneath Shadowcap Mountain.
In one of the last battles of the Scourging, Melora and her Free Children battled Bane and his goblinoid legions, this time on the Beynsfal Plateaus of Krahl where Bane was defeated and his armor was scattered across the region.
The final battles of the Scourging took place in the valley that would become known as the Warpstar Wastes.
The Warpstar Cometh
During the last battles of the Scourging, Archmage Vecruth began a ritual to summon a comet from the alien reaches of the Far Realm to come crashing onto Ardyn in a last ditch effort to destroy the gods for good and claim Ardyn under his own dominion. Successful in his efforts; a massive comet known as the Warpstar crashed into Dagbreek obliterating not only the armies of the Dawn and Neutral Deities, but also the remaining armies of the Profane Gods. The endless madness of the Far Realm radiated off the Waprstar and corrupted the once golden land around it into a wasteland of death and horror. Lathander and Sarenrae together protected much of the realm and fought back a great deal of the encroaching shadow and darkness with their cleansing light. With the Profane Gods forces greatly diminished, the Dawn and Neutral Deities cleaned up the last of the Profane forces across Ardyn and thus ended the Scourging once and for all.
Archmage Vecruth, thought to have perished when the comet crashed, managed to escape during this period of chaos, now free of any influence of the Profane Gods.
With the Profane Gods finally defeated and sealed away, the Dawn and Neutral Deities convened in Aon to discuss what they were to do next.
Attempts by mortal to flee the war
Indeed, almost all elven civilization disappeared from Ardyn during the Scourging. A wandering colony of elves fleeing the Scourging formed the beginning of what would become the Orroyen tribes of the jungles of Krahl. The elves of the fallen Court of Ullusa sought shelter in the Feywild and only returned a generation later, eventually settling in the Exalted Expanse. After Corellon's battle with Gruumsh, the elves of northern Gwessen, pleading to Corellon for protection, heard no answer, and retreated to an island cluster off the western coast of the continent.
The Selûne-worshiping elves of Gwessen whose home was transformed into the Ghost Grove retreated underground, beneath the Grove, and became ghostelves. Elsewhere, entirely new races were created by the war.
New Races
The evil god of war and conquest, Bane, transformed nearly all of the Lysteri into goblinoids to fill different roles in his armies, and left them burdened with the Curse of Virulence.
As the Demon Lord Yeenoghu entered Ardyn to do battle, a pack of wild hyenas were caught in the divine eminence and became the first gnolls.
One creation myth holds that when Corellon stabbed Gruumsh, the fallen blood of Gruumsh mutated a number of elves into the first orcs. Another myth says that after this battle, elven horseriders who had died fighting at Corellon's side were fused with their horses and resurrected, creating the first centaurs. The first half-orcs in Ardyn were born in the final days of the Scourging.
When Tharizdun was banished, the Raven Queen's angels, all of whom it had consumed, returned as diminished, mortal kenku.
Reshaped Geography
Across the world, the forces unleashed by unrestrained divine and magical warfare left permanent scars on the land itself.
The continent of Orandala was completely covered in a thick layer of clouds, ash, and raging storms. It is thought that many of the dragons left behind after the war fled to Orandala and created their own kingdoms there, free of mortal intervention.
The once-tranquil island paradise of Miskath, defiled by the Profane Gods and a chunk of the fallen Warpstar, became the dramatically transformed Blightshore.
Some of the most terrible battles of the war reduced the battlefields to ash. In the early years of the Scourging, warring nations in Xhorrun turned the verdant landscape into ash and desert, and during the Scourging a vengeful djinn was responsible for the creation of the Alshafat Desert and the mountain ranges that separate the regions of the continent. Incanter's Rest is so blasted, it's unclear whether it was the site of the biggest battle ever to hit Gwessen or the site of multiple battles. Toward the end of the war, the site of Melora's final battle with Bane was reduced to ash, and plants wouldn't grow there ever again. And in the end, the fortress of Dawn Bane was itself turned to ash, and the Warpstar Wastes are a treacherous land pocked with sinkholes, tar pits, masses of writhing fleshy land and other unspeakable horrors.
Fates of mortal cities
All the flying cities were wiped out, as far as anyone knows. The great magocracy of Exalos was brought down in the north of Gwessen, at least three crashed in Xhorrun (Nova Celes, Zephys and Halopolis) and the Cloud Giant kingdom, Gundvik, crashed just north of the Exalted Expanse.
The dragonborn city-state of Ebonhold was established.
Nearly all of the great dwarven kingdoms and strongholds in the world were destroyed. The dwarven kingdom of Uthtor was destroyed, the dwarven Grimgol clan was nearly wiped out. The strongholds in the Ebonglass Massif, including Xagonstar, were completely raised and ruined. Only Ard Shealladh in the Exalted Expanse remained.
The Yuan-Ti people of Sszashilazj who were not chosen to go into stasis were killed off in the Scourging, and some still haunt the Isles of the Dead as ghosts.
The final battles of the Scourging caused massive floods and tidal surges that swept all civilization from the islands of the Lambent Ocean and Sea of Jewels.
Across Ardyn, most cities that had sprung up during the Magus Era were reduced to ash, leaving Aon once again as the sole bastion of civilization. Historians estimate that no more than one-third of the world's population survived this war
The End of the Scourging
Following the Profane Gods' defeat, Melora, the Wild Mother, first went to the most desolate land, the Warpstar Wastes where the cataclysmic final battles of the war had occurred, and planted the seed of the Arbor Exemplar as a symbol of rebirth.
When the Dawn and Neutral Deities and their allies finally defeated the Profane Gods, they hoped to seal them away for good and held a summit in Aon to decide what they would do next.
Creation of the Divine Gate and the Exodus
To prevent a recurrence of armageddon, the Dawn and Neutral Deities dragged the Profane Gods and their fiendish spawn from the Material Plane. Behind themselves and their defeated brethren, they erected in the Astral Sea a barrier known as the Divine Gate, which would prevent any god, including themselves, from physically crossing over into mortal realms. The disappearance of the gods is known by many names: the New Spark for those who study the arcane, and the Penance for those who seek closeness to their gods. The most common name for this time of warfare and divine separation is the Exodus, and it marked the end of the Magus Era
What was Left Behind
Not all creatures of great power were destroyed or banished before the construction of the Divine Gate. Some servants of the gods remained on Ardyn. Some remained faithful to the gods they had served, while others developed their own interests. The twilight phoenix Desirat, mount of Asmodeus, had been trapped beneath a volcano. The solar Xalicas, who had served Corellon, was left profoundly disabled for more than a hundred years in the Permafrost Tundra. Some immortal creatures remained deliberately trapped in prisons with the hope that they would remain there forever.
Of the greatest magic items bestowed by gods on their champions or crafted by the most powerful mages for the prosecution of the war, most were buried and lost in the devastation, others were locked away out of fear, and some were passed down from generation to generation. These items came to be known as Remnants of Exodus.
Diminished Divine Influence
Many tieflings, who had been persecuted due to others suspecting them of ongoing association with demons and Profane Gods, felt relief after the Exodus seemingly locked those beings safely away.
The gods can still project power onto the Material Plane by whispering and making promises to mortals, bestowing knowledge and some measure of divine magic to their followers, or sending minions who can pass through the lattice of the Divine Gate, but their influence is paltry compared to what it was before the creation of the Divine Gate. Following the banishment of Lolth, her followers could feel the waning of her influence, which created an opening for some of her drow to stray to worship the lesser deity Eilistraee. Many mortal mages grew complacent about the Profane Gods' limits beyond the Gate until the Battle of the Torringheim Heights, when fiends and even a Demon Prince tore their way back into Ardyn in support of supernaturally twisted armies.
