The name "Kurant's Ambition" can refer to two different things: the crater of wild magics which was once called the city of Alarahn, and the failed ascension to demonic princehood of Balberos Kurant. This event is considered the fifth instance of world-class magics being used in the history of Ipholas.
Balberos Kurant
Balberos Kurant, once the richest man in Alarahn and a scholar of void magics, funded countless void-related research projects, most notably:
- Astral Divination: divination utilizing the gaps in the weave to survey creatures and locations with greater clarity than typical divination magics.
- Chaos Brandings: manmade, tattoo-like brands harnessing the energies of chaos to grant limited spellcasting ability to its wielder.
- Void Tunneling: a more efficient form of teleportation magic performed by creating a wormhole-like structure from the gaps in the weave between two points in the multiverse.
- Abominations: utilizing the chaotic energies of the far realm to forcefully mutate a creature, typically humanoid or beast, to have otherwise unnatural characteristics. This was generally performed with the goal of creating a sort of humanoid-aberrant super-soldier.
Kurant was a devotee of Vedir, the demon prince of the void. However, Kurant had greater ambitions and aimed to ascend into near godhood by usurping Vedir's place as a demon prince. Although most demon princes would destroy anyone who could even pose such a threat to their power, Vedir is different and even aided Kurant in the development of a powerful, world-class ritual of demonic ascension. Vedir, being the prince of the void, wished to further see what was possible with manipulating the magics of chaos and nothingness he has domain over.
Events of Kurant's Ambition
Kurant had devised and contracted the refurbishment of a nagakin mythallar discovered deep beneath the city of Alarahn to collect and store the immense amount of mana necessary to perform the ritual. The mythallar's reconstruction was performed in an old nagakin temple deep in the earth beneath Alarahn, bordering on the upperdark. Upon its completion, Kurant gradually filled the magical battery for his ascension. However, Kurant's plot was foiled by the Usurpers of Alarahn party in a coordinated strike at the cusp of his ascension. During the fight between Kurant and the Usurpers of Alarahn, the revolutionaries caused catastrophic damage to the mythallar, shattering the barrier containing an incomprehensible amount of magic which shunted the entirety of the city of Alarahn and its surrounding area into the astral plane, leaving only a crater of wild magic in its wake.
Fallout of Kurant's Ambition
The once great Alarahn---City of Ivory and Gold---is left a crater, as though the earth beneath the once "prosperous" city had been neatly excavated. Where once the air was filled with Alarahni factory smog, there is instead clear skies amongst the regions of residual magics and starry mists. The great name Alarahn means little to describe the area today. Now, the crater of this lost city is called
Kurant's Ambition, the Crater, in reverence to the events which wiped a city clean off the face of Ipholas. The crater goes so deep down, that it is even possible to peer into the highest regions of the upperdark beneath Kurant's Ambition, where the sun hasn't been seen since well before the reign of the Nagakin.
The Alarahni Empire as a whole has been reduced to small port towns and even smaller inland settlements, as the majority of the ruling class went with the nation's namesake city. The once profitable Leashire "adventuring towns" have been largely abandoned, or in rare cases repurposed into genuine port towns, their tourism lost to history.
Many mages and other arcane circles believe the residual, chaotic magics of Kurant's Ambition to be a result of a thinner boundary between the material and astral planes. There are also reports that some individuals stumbling into the constantly collapsing and reforming clouds of astral mist (which have been determined to be areas of ruptured weave collapsing in on itself and later tearing open again in a regularly reccurring cycle) never stumble out of them, indicating either a horrible death or some manner of planar transportation. Research of this wounded region of Ipholas is ongoing.
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