Doom Across the Ages Myth in Ruins of the Regalia | World Anvil

Doom Across the Ages

Since our world was spun from chaos in the early moments of the mutliverse, there have been many great calamities and cataclysms that have threatened to extinguish all hope for life. Since factions of primordial entities warred over the body of the world, sculpting elemental manifestations into sentience, since life grew wild and mired their inorganic battlefields in teeming plants and animals, many terrible Dooms were levied upon the world, and we are fortunate now that our ancestors were able to keep the flame of hope alive, for only by that unlikely spark does our mighty nation stand tall to civilize a savage wilderness.  

The Doom of War

In the first days, when primordial gods crushed the earth beneath their feet and wrung water from the air in their battle for domination over the world, two prevailing factions struggled for the future of the world - the Primal Lords and all that served them, and the Reclaimers and their workings. The host of Reclaimers was mighty and proud, and wished to tear apart and consume the world so that nothing could escape the supreme existence that was themselves, and they fought for every drop of water and breath of air. The host of the Primal Lords was not so mighty, nor proud, but cunning and industrious, and they wished not for destruction but dominion, so that all things that walked the world would serve them across the eternity they wished to spend residing on our world. While the Reclaimers were able to draw forth apocalyptic energies from their elemental home, the Primal Lords were able to incorporate the devastation into their own elemental forms, and disperse the dross throughout their mortal slaves and pets. Each time the Reclaimers withdrew to their extraplanar source of energy to shape more weapons, the Primal Lords were able to take advantage of the opportunity with their minions.   As being of innate chaos, destruction and domination, the Primal Lords and the Reclaimers both were disorganised in the extreme, and fought one another almost as often as they fought their opponents. Their wars shaped, broke and reshaped the world many times, and the consequences of this are not possible to discern all these millenia later. Instead, we do know that the Primal Lords eventually began to kneel before one supreme leader, who was able to broker pacts between rivals, form stronger Primal Lords from the bonds and emerge with a power as great as any other Primal Lord, or, it is said, all of them combined. Once he had united his faction, this mighty leader whose name is lost to us disappears from myth, with some accounts indicating It sleeps within or beneath the world, or encircles it beyond the sky, or was simply killed outright during battle. Whatever the true reason for Its disappearance, the central figure vanished and with It, the Reclaimers did not return to this plane again.   With Its departure, the Age of the First Doom, the Doom of War, came to an end. Though battle continued in pockets across the world, the Primal Lords, as a whole, were victorious and reveled in their power, sculpting the world to their liking. Though they wrought change with devastating violence, the Primal Lords were careful not to wipe out their mortal servants, so that they would extend their dominion, and their security, into the future.    

The Doom of Breath

Centuries after the end of the Doom of War, one of the Titans, the great god-kings of the giants who threw off the yoke of the Reclaimers, was discovered to be the cause of this slow and subtle Doom. Fearing the living creatures as irredeemable servants of their greatest threat, the Titan Munamyrr had begun a terrible plot to strangle the life out of the world without the Primal Lords noticing. Each night, cloud giants gently rolled their lofty citadels across the sky while Munamyrr drank in the sky like his creators once did, so that the world's breath would be just a little more thin each morning, and not be noticed. Creatures of flame and air began to dim, the light of the sun became hotter and less hospitable each month, and plant life began to recede from the higher regions of the world, retreating into hardy plains or luxuriant pockets of forest and jungle. This great time of frailty has been identified as the Second Doom, the Doom of Breath.   As life began to flicker and fade, the plot was uncovered by Sthuparthaal, a Primal Lord of wind and lightning who may have taken the shape of a barbed and snapping serpent. Though weakened by the steady sapping of Its life, Sthuparthaal resumed Its war on the cloud giants, striking their castles like a crashing wave of electrical fury. A struggle is said to have occurred within the court of Munamyrr, as his mightiest warrior counselled them to placate the Primal Lord now that the plan was revealed as a failure, for they risked the destruction of every last member of their kind. It is said that Munamyrr had accepted the risk of total annihilation on behalf of the cloud giants, and that they stood with him, but we understand that a significant faction opposed the decision. Sacrificing his own citadel, and all within it, to draw Sthuparthaal into a trap, the Titan and the Primal Lord became entangled, with her grasping his crystalline heart in her jaws while he sapped the wind from her body, leaving the electrical discharge to burn through all who lived within the city. As Munamyrr was unable to withdraw and Sthuparthaal had been punctured by the magical ambush, the two were locked in place; all the while devastating gales roared across the world, tearing down trees and shrieking through mountains to fill the unending wound of the Primal Lord.   In the end, the warrior Strondmaurr led those who could withstand the tempest to the battle, and while his companions drew the lightning into their bodies with great pain and loss of life, he was able to break the bond with his spear. Munamyrr's heart broke into fragments of wind and cloud and thunder and Sthuparthaal withdrew, claiming the shard of Munamyrr that still flashed with Its power and leaving the giants in peace. Being imbued with the elemental energies of the Primal Lord, Strondmaurr's power became equal or greater to other Titans, and he and his followers departed from their former Titan and kinsmen to try and heal the wounds of the world they had caused. In the centuries since this schism, Strondmaur's followers have come to be distinguished as storm giants.             TBA The Doom of Drowning   The Doom of Bones During and in the wake of the Doom of War, the Titan Vorothaur armed legions of fire giants against their Reclaimer masters, and his legend is said to be the inspiration for other orders of giantkind to rebel in their own time. A scant amount of time, thought to be between only one and three centuries, saw the lauded Titan invited to construct a bridge of metal and ice connecting two volcanic peaks, signifying the an end to the intense rivalry between the frost and fire giant tribes. At the completion of the bridge, the host of frost giants betrayed Vorothaur, hacking him apart with their axes and smashing his heart to pieces. The resulting war was bitter and cruel, and many different giants were broken and scattered in the valleys of prehistory, where the fat creeks and deep lakes gave way to

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