Ortho: The Beginnings

A History of Athra

The second sapient race to colonize Athra was the elves. A complex game in the elven court of Keln resulted in one of their great princes being banished from the land with all his followers. All this was long before the humans rose from hairy savagery, before even the Great Aberrant War of the beholders, and longer still before the founding of the Elven Shaar.

The exiles fled north and east, settling in the forests of Athra where Nature and the moons still called loudly. They made their exile into a virtue, rejecting the ways of their civilized kin. They made friends with the pixies who already dwelled there, founding druidic and bardic orders and learning to hunt so well that they had only to call out into the forest for beasts to sacrifice themselves willingly. Eschewing the grand palaces of Keln, they made their homes among the tall trees and in hollow hills. They grew racially distinct from the elves of Keln, pale as snow, with pale blue eyes like the winter sky; their cousins were dark of hair and olive-skinned, their eyes green as the tropical seas.

Eventually the humans, whom the elves had considered no more than another beast among many, began to speak and sing and finally develop a culture of their own. They learned from the elves in part - mostly accidently, some bardic and druidic lore here and there - but saw the elves and pixies as enemies, wicked tricksters who existed only to bedevil them. And they weren’t entirely wrong.

It wasn’t until one of the Bronze Age empires of Thaera conquered southern Athra that the humans of the northern continent learned writing and wizardry. While the empire soon collapsed under its own ponderousness - the confederacies that would appear later proved to be much more efficient - Athran humanity now had a weapon with which to even the score with the elves.

Athran humanity specialized in necromantic and summoning magic, making constructs empowered with otherworldly energies to use as terrible war machines. It was in this period that one of the moons was shattered, though whether this was the fault of the people of Athra, Keln, or both is very muddled. The elves of Athra were driven to the forests of the north, some even crossing the north pole into Ulfrheim, followed closely by vengeful human tribes. The southern humans began referring to the elves as Snow Elves, and set about domesticating the continent that they were now the primary posessors of.

In the following millennia kingdoms grew into empires, empires schismed into kingdoms, kingdoms declined into tribes and spawned new kingdoms and empires in their place. Gods and prophets were born, their teachings spread across the land, their churches schismed and the religions were ultimately forgotten in favor of new ones. Knowledge was forgotten and regained. Wizard-kings were usurped by their chief warlords, warrior-kings were usurped by their court wizards, and so-on and on in a vicious cycle.

In the northeast portion of the continent, the region called Heka, things were much more stable, influenced as they were by the cultures and caste systems of Shoryko and Bafatai. In Heka the old wizard-kings never lost power. The greatest lich of the late Bronze Age, Jharymias Khorzhoon, foresaw the danger of warlords, necessary as they were. He founded a cabal of wizards who would be aligned with no single wizard-king whose sole duty would be to watch the warlords and ensure none grew too powerful. Though Khorzhoon was slain a mere 800 years later when his apprentice, Karvet Shivaan, threw his body and phylactery into an active volcano, the cabal lived on.

Over time, other cabals formed in order to counter the growing power of the first one. Within a few centuries there were nine cabals in total, each corresponding to a different combination of the grand cosmic forces - Good, Evil, Chaos, and Law. The Ninth Cabal was dedicated to Balance.

So, although they shared a common language, chill Heka grew up along very different lines than neighboring Voll across Lake Querei and the Middlesea, which was much more feudal and wild. Voll was briefly part of Shoryko, but this didn’t long outlast the death of Koryao the Great. The religious and cultural differences between Shoryko and Voll (at least, since the advent of the now forgotten druid-prophet Bastil, who rejected Shoryko’s mysticism as demonic) were too great, and after several crusades over a period of centuries it became taboo for one to lay claim on the other.

The wizard-kings of Heka remained aloof from all this, concentrating on the elaborate games of magical and martial one-upmanship they played against one another using their soldiers and peasants as pawns. But there came a day when Karvet Shivaan of the First Cabal looked into Osgaard, Verinshen and its colonies, Ilmyth, Greater and Lesser Kellany, Chaarkhold and its hinterlands, Mournrest and its protectorates, the many independent duchies, counties, and principalities of Voll - all the nations of the west - and thought to expand the chessboard.

Karvet began with great subtlety, using shape shifters he created in his laboratories to infiltrate many of the western governments. The leaders of the other eight Cabals soon followed suit, and soon all of Athra had succumbed to their game. In doing so, however, they encountered more playing pieces than they knew how to deal with.

The spies the wizards of the Fourth Cabal had placed in the Principality of Southern Voll, for example, turned out to have much more magical knowledge, developed during the crusades and hardly used since, than the Hekans had anticipated. They began using it against the neighboring Duchy of Western Voll, which was under the control of the Second Cabal. The Eighth Cabal, based in Chaarkhold, countered with the strange incantations that the northern druids had gotten from some long-ago god, while the Ninth Cabal, which had taken over Mournrest, tried frantically to keep innovation down to a reasonable pace. Ruled as it was by nearly immortal rulers who controlled the population utterly, Heka was not used to change and dealt with it poorly.

The situation escalated for a number of centuries.

Jhary Etreiu, a minor member of the Ninth Cabal, was more interested in his study of insects than in the games his colleagues played. He admired the way they organized themselves. When he was stationed in the Duchy of Eastern Voll as a “court wizard,” however, the shy, retiring wizard developed a friendship with the nation’s duke, Carolinus IV. He became convinced that what the Hekans were doing was wrong, both ethically and pragmatically. Unearthing ancient battle-magic, he summoned energy from the Abyss to shock his colleagues into reconsidering their actions.

A few least tanar’ri by themselves wouldn’t have done much more than destroy a few buildings, but the Ninth Cabal assumed the terrorism was the action of a rival Cabal, and retaliated accordingly. The other Cabals retaliated in the same kind. It was unfortunate for them that they were summoning beings from the realm of the Abyssal lord Alzrius, and Alzrius spreads like flame - the more sparks in play, the hotter and more quickly he burns.

Before the repraisals ended, the North had become a conflagration, with Alzrius himself (it is said) setting up a throne in the remains of Chaarkhold. Most of the northern states were erased from the map forever.

Jhary had gotten his wish - the games ended as the struggle became a matter of survival for the entire continent, if not the entire world. In punishment for their actions, Karvet had the entire Ninth Cabal eliminated. Jhary escaped only because Carolinus gave him refuge; Karvet had not imagined such loyalty from an outsider. This only made things worse, however, for without the Cabal of Balance the more extreme Cabals became more at cross-purposes than ever before.

A few centuries later, Jhary Etreiu was trying to undo his mistake by helping a descendent of Carolinus, Prince Rommel, to unite his nation and ultimately take on the Flame of the North himself. In the intervening time Jhary had grown much more experienced and canny, traveling the world and the planes to learn more magic. He had also grown harder, less introverted but no less ambitious in his determination to change things in what he saw as a pragmatically and ethically superior direction. While his fellow Knights of Harmony battled various intractable monarchs in their plan of uniting the land, never sure why some were willing to ally themselves and other, equally good rulers were not, Jhary was carefully destroying the power bases of the chaotic Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Cabals while making pacts of mutual aid with the lawful Second, Third, and Fourth Cabals.

Although he was tempted to try and destroy Karvet of the purely evil First Cabal, he did not; in fact, the powerful lich became a vital part of his plan. Karvet surpassed Jhary’s expectations, personally dueling an avatar of Alzrius while the Knights of Harmony destroyed the gates to the Abyss. In the end, the ancient lich agreed to allow the formation of the Harmonium in exchange for being made absolute ruler of all the old Hekan kingdoms and a member of Ortho’s Council. Many other Hekan wizards joined the Knights of Harmony in the new capital of Harmony’s Glory, adding their knowledge to the nascent Harmonium’s arsenal.

The slaughter of the snow elves and their pixie allies during the next century was not Jhary’s idea, or part of the plan of the Knights of Harmony or any of the Cabals. During the long war with the Elven Shaar the general population began to believe all elves were enemy sympathizers and began attacking them on their own accord. Some of them managed to escape through moon-gates they opened into other planes, but many did not.

Another excellent piece, Rip...Finally Heka and Voll get some in-depth ink (so to speak)...The only things I'd change are some of the names, perhaps SuVoll, NorVoll, EstVoll and VestVoll for South, North, East and West Voll, respectively; something equivalent to the -sexes of England...The only reason I suggest this is cause of the Greyhawk fan "complaints" concerning the Uleks and Urnstes...Just a suggestion...I know its very superficial, but...
Kwint