croiduire:orbs:characters:shadow_wars:uduak
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The planets of Tamarsphere are Iliana, rocky planet closer to the sun than Tamaranth; Marnin, a rocky planet further from the sun than Tamaranth, ice covered and very bright; next out is Morathi, a medium sized gas giant; then Esus, the largest gas giant in the sphere; and Tethra, the gas giant furthest out, midway in size between Morathi and Esus. | The planets of Tamarsphere are Iliana, rocky planet closer to the sun than Tamaranth; Marnin, a rocky planet further from the sun than Tamaranth, ice covered and very bright; next out is Morathi, a medium sized gas giant; then Esus, the largest gas giant in the sphere; and Tethra, the gas giant furthest out, midway in size between Morathi and Esus. | ||
- | ==== The Comet ==== | ||
- | Called at various times the Doomstane, the Deathstar, or simply THE Comet--distinct from any other comet or celestial body--a recurrent comet poses the greatest threat that Tamaranth faces. It was the impetus behind the development of astronomy; the calendar was created to mark and calculate its passage. Legends--or perhaps historical, eyewitness accounts--consistently speak of hideous death that follows wherever its shadow falls upon the planet (and no other, lesser comet casts a shadow...) These legends are remarkably consistent, no matter their origin, whether human, dwarven, elvish, gnomish, orcish, or draconic. It returns every 2,510 years, and with each pass has posed an increasingly dire menace to every living thing on the planet. | ||
- | The first appearance recorded by mortals occurred 7,528 years ago, and resulted in the creation of the calendar, but the gods had marked its passage long before. The Alcanti were created 12,543 years ago (five years after the comet' | ||
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- | ==== The Shadows ==== | ||
- | At the same time organic life was evolving on Tamaranth, far out in the roughly spherical cloud of icy planetesimals that spin and dance in the Everflowing nearly a light-year from the Sun, on the body that would become known as the Doomstane, another, far different, creation was developing. The dwarf planet was a giant in that region of space; it had drawn all its neighbours to itself, accreting so much mass that it reached hydrostatic equilibrium, | ||
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- | This stable existence changed when a star passed through that region of space; too far away to draw the world into its orbit, but close enough to cause gravitational perturbations that sent it plummeting toward distant Tamar. At first the inhabitants, | ||
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- | The gods--that is Yeron, Araul, Venall, Urth, Ghorail, Shalniel, Miroch, Ylwain, Fellbane, Gye and Kirmmaw, for Valverus had abandoned the world he'd helped shape over 150,000 years before--had been surprised to discern that intelligent life existed in so unlikely a place, but saw no reason to intervene--species evolve, mature, and become extinct regularly in the universe, and they knew this particular form was inimical to their creation--but they watched, and pondered possible outcomes. | ||
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- | By the second pass the Shadow had become a single entity, the culmination of ruthless self-preservation. It still appeared to be composed of individuals, | ||
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- | By the third pass, the Shadow was ready to make its move. It sent out appendages to cross the space between the comet and Tamaranth--and met the force of the gods. They were not then prepared to destroy the Shadow--although in the subsequent millennia they came to regret their forbearance--but they gave it no purchase on Tamaranth, driving it back onto its own planet. The Shadow was enraged; in its estimation, it was the summit of creation. How dare any entity stand in its way?! Howling vengeance and continued resolve, it continued trying until it passed out of range, travelling back from whence it came. By this time the comet was 15% smaller than when it had first formed. | ||
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- | The Shadow spent the intervening years perfecting it magics, and planning its next attack. It devised a way to (it believed) absorb the powerful dweomer-fuelled barrier that had blocked it before, and go forth and conquer just that much stronger. It was partially successful. On the next pass, its fourth, it cut a wide swath of destruction across the face of Tamaranth before it was turned back, and those remnants that made planetfall caused further havoc before they could be destroyed, for direct, physical manifestations of deific presence on a planetary surface is fraught with danger to the ecological balance, even to the structure of the world itself, and that living, vibrant world was the very thing the gods were striving to preserve. The races of men, and other sapient creatures, had evolved into their present forms by then, but primitive; civilisation was still in its infancy. It would be many years before there would be priests with the wisdom, knowledge, and experience to channel their grace, so they resolved to make representatives that were both greater and lesser than the organic races, with powers both enormous and limited--enormous, | ||
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- | Although the Shadow was stronger, more devious, and more determined than ever, 2510 years later both the gods and their Alcanti were ready. The comet completed its fifth transit with minimal loss of life on Tamaranth; the gods destroyed or turned back most of every wave, and the depleted vanguard that attempted to establish a presence on the planet were met by the Alcanti and handily defeated. Moreover this orbit had resulted in the vaporisation of a further 5% of the cometary volatiles, and fracture lines were beginning to form. The gods knew well that most long period comets live for only a short time, making no more than half a dozen orbits before breaking up or encountering gravitational stresses that fling them into hyperbolic orbits and out of the solar system never to return. The Shadow comet was much larger than average, but still subject to those same pressures. By their calculations, | ||
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- | Contributing to that optimism was the inadvertent capture of a fragment of Shadow. It was not organised enough to retain the horrific sentience of the whole, but it was sufficient for experimentation--in effect, it was a tissue sample. From it the gods and some of the Alcanti learned that it drew no nourishment from certain types of stone, that a force cage would contain it, and that it was vulnerable to the direct application of fire, provided it was hot enough. With each pass the Shadow had grown more intelligent, | ||
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- | From these seeds a plan--the Plan--was born. With the full approval of the Gods, and directed by them, the Alcanti tasked with guarding the southern hemisphere cleared an island near the south pole, far from all living things, of all volatiles--anything consumable--and prepared a barrier. They intended to channel the gods' power to form a pen to contain the Shadow, and there incinerate it, destroying it forever. Those involved in that enormous project called themselves the Free Men, for the one area where Alcanti have no free will is in the battle against the Shadow. They were created to fight it, and when it threatens Tamaranth, can do nothing else. Those practical dreamers stepped out on faith, believing that the day was coming when the threat of Shadow would be ended forever. | ||
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- | Everything was in readiness. Almost a full turn had been spent in preparation; | ||
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- | Twenty years before the next pass was due, the gods told them, " | ||
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- | However, before they could enact their insurrection they were attacked by the Alcanti who were not part of the plan. A second betrayal; Rincar, the red dragon they had trusted implicitly who had been in on the Plan almost from the beginning, had gone to those unaware of what had been happening. To save himself from any accusations of complicity and to curry favour, or perhaps just out of spite and greed, seeing in strife opportunities for personal gain, he divulged their plans in the most damning ways possible, embellished with lies and lurid impossibilities, | ||
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- | Only then, when they were fighting the Shadow on the ground, did understanding come, and with it shame and penitence. With the methods that had been devised the Free Men could have contained and conquered the Shadow as it had been on the previous pass; what they actually faced was orders of magnitude stronger. The Gods themselves didn't realise just how strong until it was so close, only twenty years out, and had aborted the Plan as soon as they knew. The Alcanti, who are essentially unchanging, didn't believe until they saw with their own eyes. The casualties–-animal and plant–-mounted to horrific levels, and the battle continued for nearly fifty years before all vestiges of the Shadow had been destroyed. | ||
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- | The Burning Times had indelibly scarred–-and justifiably terrified-–the sapient races, but at the same time science, technology and innovation had taken enormous leaps forward. In some cases aided by the gods, but more often independently, | ||
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- | However, consequent to the civil war, conflated as it was with the unspeakable destruction wrought by the Shadow, all the surviving Alcanti completely lost their effectiveness in their role as judges and arbiters between the organic races–mortals fled at the very sight of them. Moreover, the war between the Free Men and the Butchers (or, as they called themselves, the Loyalists, branding the Free Men as Apostates) continued with no diminution of hatred and implacability, | ||
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- | Tensions built in the two years leading up to the pass of -3025. Closest approach would be on the outward leg of the orbit. Battle lines had long been drawn, and both sides waited in tense anticipation. However, as the comet was circling around the sun, a pocket of volatiles deep within the core vaporised and exploded outward, cutting a deep gouge through the body of the planetoid and carrying with it not only the precious, life-sustaining ices but fully one-third of the Shadow itself. Badly weakened yet as desperate as a cornered animal, it frantically threw itself at Tamaranth in wave after wave, but it lacked the science and strategy of its sixth attempt at conquest: too much of its " | ||
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- | Before the comet' | ||
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- | Despite the casualties and destruction of the seventh cometary passage (the second recorded by mortals), these advances were not lost, and the civilisations of men flourished over the next twenty-five hundred years, the Golden Age of Tamaranth. The towns began to grow into cities, many of great size and beauty, becoming centres of commerce and scholarship. Knowledge was in full flower. From the simple concepts of number, magnitude, and form that had sufficed before the Burning Times, they developed sophisticated mathematics, | ||
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- | Such was the world when the comet made its eighth pass. Under the spur of desperation the Shadow had also made advances, patching the fissures in its disintegrating world as much as it could, but devoting the greater part of its time and energy into shaping itself into a terrifying enemy armed with alien but prodigiously effective magic. The Alcanti had been making preparations as well. In -515, 2,342 Alcanti still survived; the 1,360 who had never questioned the gods persisted in vilifying and slaughtering at every opportunity the 982 remaining Free Men. They were tired, so desperately tired, of the persecution and resolved to try one last time to divert the Shadow to the island that they had restored to a holding pen. When the comet made its closest approach to Tamaranth and the waves of Shadow surged out to try, yet again, to establish a beachhead, the Free Men tried to finally implement the Plan, hoping to end the Shadow, and perhaps the conflict, once and for all. They failed spectacularly, | ||
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- | Only Shadow magicka had kept the comet intact; it was less than half its original size, and running out of precious volatiles. One more pass would finish it…one way or the other… | ||
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- | ==== Valverus ==== | ||
- | * **Insanity.** n. mental illness of such a severe nature that a person cannot distinguish fantasy from reality... | ||
- | * **Megalomania.** n. A delusional state where someone believes that he is superior to others. He may believe himself to be a god...\\ | ||
- | //But what if he really is a god?\\ | ||
- | Then, while he is still very ill, he is also unthinkably dangerous...// | ||
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- | Valverus was just such a being, obsessively preoccupied with personal adequacy, power, prestige and vanity, and wholly unable to see the destructive damage he caused to himself and to others. | ||
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- | At the end of the last galactic cycle, as all matter and energy converged upon itself, twelve once-mortal beings of vast power and learning devised a method they hoped would allow them to step outside the rapidly imploding universe; together they formed a force cage, a dodecahedron able to resist gravity, entropy, and the ravages of time itself. They were each responsible for one face of the structure, and if one facet failed, they all would fail, sending them plummeting into the tiny ball of darkness more intense than the brightest light had ever been. They held on grimly, though the battle taxed them, each and all, to the limits of their strength and endurance, millennia after grim millennia, until the stresses within the black hole singularity triggered an explosion, and the outward expansion of the universe began again. | ||
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- | They, as they jubilantly told themselves, were the luckiest people who had ever lived! They'd survived the Big Crunch and now rode the energy of the Big Bang outward, their force cage converted into a craft that protected them from the rushing, surging energy and dweomer, surrounded by the indescribable beauty of the birth of stars...and of gods. They watched in fascination as the universe matured, and suns and solar systems formed. Those main-sequence stars between 5000 and 6200 K in temperature and around two nonillion kilograms in weight almost always formed a crystal sphere outside their most distant planets; they were amazed to discover that it was much like the wall of an ovum, controlling the turbulent, and--in excess--destructive, | ||
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- | Eventually they found a solar system that fit their criteria and built their own crystal sphere around it, an artificial construct but identical in all particulars to the natural formation, and then began settling into their new home. The planets and moons had already formed, although accretion and changes in composition were still going on due to heavy bombardment from remaining debris. They nudged the planet that would eventually be known as Tamaranth more securely into the zone of habitability...and again ran square into Valverus, who decreed that the number of moons should be one, and only one. The vote for multiple moons ran ten to two, with Shalniel calmly and reasonably offering cogent arguments in favour of one...and they came to very satisfactory agreement, acknowledging and incorporating the points that Shalniel had raised, balancing the two largest moons so that, in the fullness of time, the length of a day and other rotational effects would be stabilised, and edging the others out far enough that their gravitational pulls were minimal. | ||
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- | Everyone was happy...except Valverus, who was enraged by their " | ||
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- | Like all known planets, Tamaranth was originally molten, due to extreme volcanism and frequent collisions with other celestial bodies, but quite quickly (in geologic terms) it cooled enough that rocks and continental plates began to form. Outgassing and volcanic activity produced the first atmosphere; condensing water vapour, augmented by ice delivered from comets, formed the oceans; and life, that ubiquitous and quotidian miracle, began. As the gods learned more about building a planet, they worked with the natural forces to establish a magnetic field to prevent the planet' | ||
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- | It was then that they discovered (or were given) the Templates. In simple, prosaic terms these were planting instructions and seedcorn; adherence would result in a creation that would fit comfortably within a galactic matrix, one very familiar to the gods of Tamaranth, for once they had been part of just such ecosystems. Rejection would limit the eventual beings of Tamaranth to their own, possibly unique, planetary environmental conditions. There was no pressure, no " | ||
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- | Again Valverus unilaterally opposed the general agreement. This time he did not confront his fellow gods directly, instead attempting by more subtle means to destroy the cyanobacteria and undo the Third Intervention. He was stopped before he could cause damage, and his anger and hatred knew no bounds. | ||
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- | For the most part the gods were content to watch the incredible miracle of evolution, doing little more than encouraging a favourable mutation here and there, as prokaryotes were joined by eukaryotes then multicellular organisms. These simple creatures evolved into differentiated plants and animals, then, about 500 million years ago (or some 4 billion years after the world formed) began the conquest of the land. The first vertebrate land animals appeared 380 million years ago. Once again the gods debated intervention, | ||
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- | However, at last true primates came forth, and it was time to intervene again if they wanted a world that was compatible with the ones emerging under the guidance of other gods in different spheres. Again Valverus demanded they cease and desist; again the vote was eleven to one in favour of intervention, | ||
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- | The eleven decided to divide into cooperative teams, the better to encourage the further development of this species, so full of potential, so amazingly close to their brethren, born on worlds that orbited far-distant suns...so achingly close to the beings they themselves had been billions of years before. Yeron, Araul, Venall and Urth focussed on the basic phenotype, making very few changes beyond an enhanced adaptability. Ghorail, Shalniel and Miroch divided the species into elves, gnomes and dwarves, breeds that were slightly closer genetically to each other than to humans despite their apparent differences in physiology, and Ylwain, Fellbane, Gye and Kirmmaw shaped orcs, goblins and hobgoblins from the original racial matrix; they also, just for fun, experimented with magically integrating genes from mammalian and reptilian creatures...and thus dragons were born. | ||
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- | Valverus could no longer stand the frustration, | ||
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- | The various races of men matured; the population increased slowly, faster amongst the relatively short-lived humans (a stable breeding stock was the gods' most compelling reason for leaving the strain almost untouched) more slowly for the longer-lived elven, dwarven, and gnomish races, moderately for the short-lived but more aggressive goblinoid races--the gods were scientifically trying to perfect a balance between desirable mutability, physicality, | ||
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- | Five hundred years after the eighth cometary pass Valverus returned. None too sane when he left, after over 150,000 years subjected to the raw dweomer of the Everflowing, | ||
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- | After billions of years of community and consensus, the gods had grown together so closely they literally could not act without unanimity, but they remained distinct, strong personalities. This was both a great strength and occasionally a severe weakness; it had been the latter in the case of the Doomstane: during the first, second, and even the third cometary pass the Shadow could have been exterminated, | ||
==== Personality Chart ==== | ==== Personality Chart ==== |
croiduire/orbs/characters/shadow_wars/uduak.txt · Last modified: 2020/03/13 15:09 by Croi Duire