The Big Split

Disaster / Destruction

The magical super-weapon of the Altar malfunctions and creates The Big Split, splitting the continent of Zathara in two halves, Zang and Thara and effectively ending the Split War.

But in the capital the Altar created something so powerful and evil, a weapon of unprecedented power and brimming with magical force. It was never tested and a final effort of the Altar to turn the tide of the war. While the combined army of the enslaved species marched towards the capital, the Altar leader ordered to activate that super-weapon. When it seemed to draw more power than anticipated, the magic-engineers wanted to turn it off again, but the leader ordered to go through with it. One can see this as pure coincidence or the work of The LORD himself, because never before had a malfunction of that size taken place in an altarian machine. The weapon drew more power from the magical field than ever before and released all that energy in a giant beam, that incinerated the whole army of the enslaved species, along with their prophet. Not only every living thing was burned, but stone was melted and seawater evaporated, leaving behind The Big Split, that separated the ancient continent of Zathara in two halves, Zang and Thara. The weapon itself blew up in an explosion so big, it eradicated the whole capital and the surrounding area, taking the majority of the Altar population with it. This event is known under the same name as the geographical mark it left, as The Big Split, marking the beginning of the current time calculation, 0 AS.   This catastrophic event had a devastating aftermath: whole ecosystems were eradicated, the ocean around the capital was heated up, huge masses of water were rushing in where the beam of the weapon left nothing behind, the climate was changing due to this sudden change on a geographic scale. Suddenly all the species had to fight for their survival, because everyone suffered huge losses in the Split War and now the ecosystem of the whole continent was changing. Another big effect of The Big Split was the sudden loss of the magical field. Because the weapon drew so much power from it, the magical field was depleted in one moment and only slowly regenerated over the following centuries. The ones being hit by that the most were the Altar themselves: not only did they lose the majority of their population and their capital, but also they lost their magical abilities, because the field was depleted.