Cacogen comet annihilates Lin

Disaster / Destruction

The second and final war between the Lin Elves and their breakway Cacogen colony on the moon comes to a violent end; Cacogen mages steer a comet off its orbital course and directly into the heartland of the First Continent, utterly eradicating the nation and the people of Lin.

No other episode in the history of the Orbis carries as much historical, cultural and physical force as the literal impact of this event; it redefined the world, bringing the age of "divine wizard" rule by the Lin Elves to an abrupt and astonishing end.   The physical effect of the impact over thirty thousand years ago is obvious from any cursory glance at a map that includes the First Continent; A massive hole has been punched into the world, spawning radiating rings of mountains, near-bottomless lakes, unstable volcanoes and waves of slag, slicing chasms into the ground across an area of well over two thousand square miles. The force of the impact cracked the mantle of the world, according to Yuan-Ti legends, and it was only their mages that held the world itself together until the massive overpressure from the impact had expended itself in cataclysmic volcanic activity; the proof of that activity is obvious in the geology of the first continent, so the story may have some basis in fact.   What had been the flourishing and enlightened high culture of Lin became a plain of black glass a mile thick and 300 miles across in an instant, turning the elves from solid to liquid to gas. Life the world over was plunged into a generations-spanning darkness from which millions of people and the other civilized nations of the time never emerged. Scant, precious writings and artifacts from the time before this event survived the cataclysm. It was, however, a time of great achievements in the early civilizations of the underdark, and a validation of the Grey Elves' decision to move their entire society deep underground for its own protection against the increasingly malevolent magical conflicts between elves, Yuan-ti and other races on the surface.