The Shattering

No event since the Celestial Reckoning has been so destructive nor as significant for the future of Boros as a whole. In an instant, shattered portions of reality manifested all over the world and changed its inhabitants forever more. Creatures and objects caught in these warps became new twisted entities, such as the owlbear, hippogriffs, and many more. No one knows what caused the Shatter, but many schools of thought have differing theories and suspicions surrounding the possible causes.

Eyewitnesses describe seeing hundreds of areas of space warped like a shattered mirror or glass floating about their reality. They would sometimes pass through an individual and do nothing, while passing through someone else and taking an arm off of them, leaving a bloody stump. More unfortunate souls were melded together into grotesque amalgamations of life. Many families hid in their homes, huddling together, hoping to escape the floating rifts. Unfortunately, some of those families emerged from their homes as giant malformed masses of flesh, wriggling arms and legs, mouths wailing to their gods for relief to no avail.

The madness soon took over those abominations and many such monstrosities went on a rampage that day. Creatures in the wilderness were not excluded, owlbears, centaurs, hippogriffs, manticores, bullettes, and many more twisted creatures came into the world in this fashion. Often, they combined the traits of the creatures that were smashed together by the rifts and endured the madness and pain caused by such an experience.

Historical entries referencing the Shatter describe a feeling of great displacement, as if experiencing an out-of-body experience. Others recount actual physical pain, or discomfort; something akin to a "snap" throughout the body of an individual as if a tendon or ligament was realigning itself during strenuous activity. This was nearly always accompanied by the anxiety or premonition of another such "snap" to come shortly after.

While the event itself led to widespread panic and great destruction on Boros, life recovered. However, another effect took place as a result of the shatter that continues to have an effect to the present. Unbeknownst to the populace of Boros at the time, the Shatter caused the barriers between the various planes to experience great fluctuations. No one knows when the first planar bubble surfaced on Boros, but the first recorded account occurred on the Plains of Sorrow. A battle between Varda and Iskaris had taken place shortly before the Shatter and the dead rose to wreak havoc on both armies. Not only that, but at a cathedral in Varderal reported a planetar emerging from the baptismal font. Many more such incursions took place since then. They do seem to be predictable to an extent, places high in certain types of energy seem to be nexuses of planar energy. Graveyards are naturally dense in negative energy, for example. Forests with abnormally large quantities of fey are prone to eliminating the boundaries between the Feywild and the Prime with little warning, and so on.

Wizards from all schools take excursions to such places and attempt to apply their knowledge to explaining the phenomena, but many can only point to the Shatter itself as the common point between these occurnces. The only other confirmed information regarding these incursions is the fact that they are particularly pronounced the nearer to the anniversary of the actual shatter each year, with some years being more or less anomalous than others.