The Era of Shattered Wills
Long before the oldest stone of any kingdom was laid, longer than memory dares recall, there was a time known only to the wind and the bones of mountains. The Era of Shattered Wills. It began when the Primals, the sundered remnants of Elderon, had finished shaping the foundational realms of existence. Myruel the Veiled Flame, Kaethros the Devourer, and Il’Vaara the Mirror of Flesh breathed their last true touch into creation, forging not only the realms but the first deities and devils. Then, seeing that the weave of reality could no longer bear their direct presence, they withdrew into silence. They allowed their newborn gods and enemies to shape the world in their absence.
In the vacuum left behind, the world did not fall into stillness, but into madness. From the fractured remnants of Kaethros’s wrath and Il’Vaara’s sorrow rose the Varnathi. Fiends of ambition, hunger, and chaos. The greatest among them were the Sorrowlords, immortal arch-entities who bent reality with a whisper and thrived on mortal fear. No city stood against them. No king dared speak their names. They shaped Wardenfall to mirror their own twisted desires. Forests wept blood, oceans whispered madness, and the skies fractured into flame. This age was not ruled by mortals or even gods, but by emotions made monstrous.
Yet resistance kindled in the dark. A faction of newly born gods, shaped in part by Myruel’s longing for harmony, arose under the banner of the Ecliptarch Concord. These were divine champions. Some believed to be children of the Primals, others ascended mortals touched by their breath. Allied with the Serathi. Celestial serpents birthed from Myruel’s final flame. They waged a war of essence against the Sorrowlords. As the Sorrowlords could not be slain, the Serathi gave up their eternal forms in a ritual of unbinding. They fused their spirits into a force known only as the Covenant Flame, a sacred prison of memory and light that would hold the Sorrowlords in slumber beneath the bones of the world.
The Era of Shattered Wills did not end with victory. Only with containment. The Sorrowlords were sealed, many within great crystal shards known as Shardhearts of Vael, hidden beneath mountains, oceans, or cursed lands. But their influence still seeps through. Regions near their prisons warp with emotion. A forest may weep with grief for centuries. A city may fall to endless rage and bloodshed. Each Sorrowlord’s prison is tied to a fragment of the Prophecy of Silence, a forgotten scripture born of Il’Vaara’s final whisper. It is said that when the right conditions are met, the seal will break. The world will bleed again.
