Stormcaller Crisis Storms

The Stormcaller Crisis was a brief period of upheaval that affected the entirety of the Pāll-tanír, leading to intense social, political, and economic unrest in the region. The Stormcaller Crisis was the fruition of a centuries-long plan that began with the subsumption of the Ayyanesha royal family into the imperial revivalist faction of the surviving tussari centhiri and would have led to the outbreak of all-out war between the Ayyanesha Caliphate and the Madresha Caliphate. The entire plot unraveled due to the intervention of a number of adventurers who forced the hand of Aestrin Qirienos, the true mastermind who'd been using the Stormcaller as a puppet to attain his goals, ending the Stormcaller Crisis.
The Stormcaller Crisis was more than a socio-political crisis in the Pāll-tanír, however. Through means as of yet unknown to the public, the Stormcaller was able to set a series of natural disasters in motion that served to intensify the chaos gripping the continent. If not for a swift response from the Dominion and the tireless work of the anti-revivalist faction of the Hooded Eye in counter-intelligence and distributing relief, the cost of the crisis in lives and economic damage might have been unimaginable.

Manifestation

The Stormcaller Crisis perpetrated a natural disaster in two parts.
The Pāll-tanír has always been plagued by large, magically-charged sandstorms known as Arventir. These sandstorms are such an integral part of life that the human peoples of the Pāll-tanír have taken to calling themselves Arventiri (lit. Of the storm in Arventiri). However, at the advent fo the Stormcaller Crisis, these arventir did not only become more ferocious, often spanning from one horizon to the other and covering truly vast swathes of the continent, they also became more frequent.
Although most of the public views this first effect of the Stormcaller Crisis as less serious than the second, there is an increasingly large body of evidence that suggests otherwise. Coupled with the increasing incidence of the arventir, the high winds and fine particulate matter suspended in them, caused a significant amount of the damage that the region sustained from the Stormcaller Crisis, if not the majority of it. The copious amounts of sand and dust that the sandstorms left in their wake smothered already-vulnerable crops, leading to widespread food shortages until Dominion emergency stores could be tapped and the resources efficiently distributed. Furthermore, the fine particles that made it past the gaps in shuttered windows and that hung in the air for hours after the passage of the sandstorms caused a significant uptick in the incidence of respiratory illness in the months that followed.
The second consequence of the Stormcaller Crisis was the revival of desert storm spirits who had been thought extinct for thousands of years. They accompanied the arventir, camouflaged in the billowing clouds of sand and dust, causing havoc with their sharp claws and vast numbers. Most of the casualties and fatalities of the Stormcaller Crisis resulted from attacks from these storm spirits. Individuals caught outside, without shelter and without means of fighting off the storm spirits were almost invariably killed.
Because of the visceral nature of the consequences of the reawakening of the storm spirits, they are the most memorable aspect of the Stormcaller Crisis to the average person, but a cost analysis of the circumstances reveals that storm spirits did not have as big of an impact as the sandstorms that they accompanied. Even though the presence of storm spirits severely hampered the economy of the Pāll-tanír by closing land trade routes, merchants who didn't have access to sea routes were already largely confining themselves because of the sandstorms. If anything, because the storm spirits made arventir deadly for the ill-prepared, they reduced economic damages by disincentivizing merchants from setting out regardless of the possibility of arventir, ensuring that the economy would have less difficulty restarting after the crisis.

Localization

The scale of the natural disaster that accompanied the Stormcaller Crisis was vast. The frequent and deadly arventir that persisted for the duration of the crisis affected the entire interior of the Pāll-tanír, sparing only the far-flung regions and settlements on the coast.
One of the areas least affected, at least directly, by the Stormcaller Crisis was the Shār. Though the region experienced a fair few sandstorms of its own, they were less severe and had fewer, if any, storm spirits than those that were experienced in the interior. The effects of the stormcaller crisis on Shār were largely indirect. The city of Qesrir, in particular, experienced a flood of refugees that eventually led to significant civil unrest until help from the Dominion could arrive. Other settlements in the area had to deal with a similar situation, leading to bloodshed in a few tragic cases where more insular communities were involved.

Type

Metaphysical, Elemental