> [!infobox|wikipedia] > # The Shattering > [![[Codex/Assets/Lore/The_Shattering_small.webp|cover hsmall]]](Codex/Assets/Lore/The_Shattering.webp) > ###### Lore Information > Attribute | Details | > ---|---| > Type | Lore | > Category | Event | > Era | ~2,500 years ago | > Outcome | Magic, dragons, and monsters loosed into the world | > ###### Status > Attribute | Details | > ---|---| > Status | Historical | **The Shattering** is the cataclysm that ended the old world and made the one [[Elandis]] knows today — the moment, some twenty-five centuries past, when the Dragon Queen tore an opening between her realm and the mortal plane and loosed magic, dragons, and monsters upon a world that had known none of them. What followed was five hundred years of war and the near-extinction of every people alive, ended only by a sacrifice so total it reset the course of history. To most of those living now it is half-remembered legend; in truth it is the hinge on which the entire age turns. ## Overview Before the Shattering, the mortal world was a place without magic and without monsters — a civilisation of iron and learning that had never known a dragon's shadow. That age ended in an instant. The Dragon Queen cracked the barrier between the planes and poured chaos through the breach: arcane power, chromatic dragons, and horrors the world had no name for. The wound she opened could not simply be closed. It took five centuries of ruin — the [[Chaos Wars]] — and, at the last, the lives of seven great champions who spent themselves utterly to banish the Dragon Queen and seal the tear in reality. The blast of their sacrifice killed the better part of everything living for miles, ended the war, and left civilisation to begin again from ashes and rumour. The world remembers almost none of it. ## History ### The World Before The age the Shattering destroyed is barely a memory now, preserved only in ruins and contradictory legend. It was a world *without* magic — arcane power was vanishingly rare, the gift of a handful of mortals plane-touched by the gods, and divine magic only a little less scarce. There were no monsters, only ordinary beasts and the humanoid peoples. What that world possessed instead was knowledge: vast and ancient civilisations, deeply schooled in the sciences, raising great cities and machines of iron and steam without a single spell to aid them. The broken remnants of those cities still litter every continent, their makers and their learning long forgotten. Against that ordered, magic-less world moved the Dragon Queen. She sought entry to the mortal plane, and the breach she opened was only the beginning of her design: her dragons were to gather gemstones in vast hoards, to be spent as arcane reagents in a ritual that would tear the planar door open wide enough and lasting enough for the Dragon Queen herself to step through and rule. The Shattering was the first crack. The Chaos Wars were her attempt to widen it. ### The Chaos Wars For five hundred years the world burned. The [[Chaos Wars]] set the ancient civilisations against the dragons and the monsters bleeding into the world, a grinding, continent-spanning catastrophe that razed cities to their foundations and swallowed untold knowledge. Yet the same chaos that nearly unmade the world also armed it: where once perhaps one mortal in ten thousand was born with a spark of magic, now it was nearer one in ten. The arcane gift, spreading like wildfire through a generation, gave the people a fighting chance they had never had — even as the cost mounted past counting. ### The Sacrifice of the Seven The war ended where it had begun, at the site of the original breach. The dragons fell back to defend the wound in reality, and the free peoples of the world — very nearly all of them — gathered for a final reckoning. As the tide began to turn against the mortal host, **seven great champions** made the last desperate choice. Joining their power in a single ritual of staggering magnitude, the Seven struck at the heart of the breach: they cast the Dragon Queen back into her own realm and sealed the wound she had torn. The release of energy was apocalyptic. It ended the war in a stroke and killed near nine in ten of every living thing — mortal and dragon alike — for a vast span around the breach. The Seven did not survive their own working. They are remembered, where they are remembered at all, as the heroes who bought the world its second age with their lives. ### Aftermath & Legacy The sealing was imperfect. The wound closed, but not cleanly — and scattered across the world remain invisible fractures in reality, the [[Riftshard]]s, each one a leftover scar pointing back toward the place the breach had been. Near a Riftshard the air feels charged, and magic grows wild and unpredictable; adventurers who stumble on them learn quickly to be wary of casting in their presence. Beyond the Riftshards, the Shattering's true legacy is everything that came after it. Civilisation had been knocked back to nothing; the survivors scattered and, over the slow grind of two thousand years, rebuilt from almost nothing, with the history of the world before lost to all but rumour and the ruins that dot the land. Magic, once a rarity, was now woven into the fabric of life. The monsters that had flooded in did not leave — but in time they settled into the wild places and the balance of the world, no longer the roiling horde of the war years. The world of [[Elandis]] as it now stands — magical, monster-haunted, and ignorant of its own past — is the world the Shattering left behind. ## In Memory & Belief For all that it remade the world, the Shattering survives in the common mind as little more than a campfire tale. Most people, living in the long shadow of two thousand years, take the old story for myth and think no harder on it than they would a children's rhyme. It is the longer-lived peoples — the elves, and some among the dwarves, who count fewer generations back to the event — who hold it as something nearer to history, and a scattering of the well-read and the powerful who know it for fact. The tellings differ from teller to teller. In the most common version — sung as often as spoken — the world before magic, an age of "machines of iron and steam," was changed forever when a divine Dragon Queen descended and gifted the world its arcane power, and a great war of seven centuries ended only when the **[[The Pantheon|Seven Divines]]** banished the dragons. Some prefer their cataclysm grander still, and tell of Titans come down from the heavens to sunder the world. The number *seven* runs through nearly every version — the seven who ended the war, the seven gods the world prays to — and the faithful hold that the heroes of the Shattering were divinely chosen, raised up by the gods to do what mortals alone never could. ### [[The Bloody Nails|Campaign: The Bloody Nails]] #### [[Session 02 - Midnight Fangs]] On the road to [[Darmouth]], the caravan performer [[Lilliana Featherfoot]] sang the party "the Legend of [[Elandis]]" — the tale of a world of iron and steam undone when a divine Dragon Queen brought magic into the world, and a seven-century war ended by the Seven Divines. [[Harland Finegold|Harland]] put in that he preferred the telling where Titans come down to sunder the world. It was the party's first brush with the oldest history of all, wrapped in folk-song. #### [[Session 44 - The Elven Archmage]] [[Ayana Syndrosa|Ayana]] laid out the true shape of the history for the party — the [[Chaos Wars]] and the Shattering of the planar barriers some twenty-five hundred years ago, the coming of the chromatic dragons, and the arrival of magic in the world — grounding the campfire legend in fact. ## Trivia - Common folk call it "the Split" or "the Splitting of the World" as often as the Shattering; scholars favour the older term. - The recurring "seven centuries" of the folk legend is a corruption — the [[Chaos Wars]] lasted roughly five hundred years, not seven. The number seven seems to have migrated into the timeline from the Seven who ended it.