Post by Ashurr on May 14, 2011 0:48:44 GMT -5
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The Birth of the Giant Nations:
The massive elemental humanoids known as the giants rose from the ruins of the Dragon–Fiend Wars to establish a vast and powerful civilization on their home continent of Xen’drik. The giants were towering humanoids who were strongly tied to the elemental nature of Eberron, a world forged in part by the Progenitor wyrms from the raw material of the Elemental Chaos. The giants were in some ways the sentient expressions of this part of the world’s nature. At least three major giant civilizations are known to have come into being during this time through the efforts of the greatest of giantkind who were called the titans: the peaceful, intellectually-
inclined Empire of Cul’sir, the Group of Eleven and the militaristic, flame-worshipping Sul’at League. The giants of these civilizations enslaved the elves, recently arrived immigrants to Eberron from the mirror world of Thelanis, also known as the Feywild. The elves were a relatively peaceful,
nomadic folk who enjoyed living in the woodlands and jungles of Xen’drik before the first of their tribes began to be enslaved by the giants. This enslavement had the inadvertent effect of pulling the first of the common humanoid races out of their primitive state.
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The Golden Age of Xen’drik: The dragons of Argonessen’s stormy romance with the continent of Xen’drik began tens of thousands of years ago and, as tumultuous affairs often do, it ended in tragedy. Sixty millennia ago, the dragons gazed across the Thunder Sea at the glorious empires the giants had raised up on Xen’drik and decided to share the power and majesty of arcane
magic with them. Upon the steps of a towering white ziggurat at an oasis deep in the Menechtarun Desert of western Xen’drik, the dragons, led by Ourelonastrix, made contact with the giant kingdoms and began to teach the titan overlords and their fellow giants how to use arcane magic. The giants
started to worship Ourelonastrix as the god Ouralon, the lord of knowledge and law, a faith that replaced the giants’ devotion to earlier, more morally ambivalent gods such as Rom-Praxis. The oasis where the great blue dragon and the giants first collaborated was turned by the titans into a magical
paradise in honor of their draconic patrons. Living marble statues frolicked among pools of crystalline water whose inherent magic promised life everlasting and the cure to all afflictions of the mind, body and soul. Vast orchards of date trees sprouted from the sand of the oasis, their fruit
granting joyous visions of the future to all who partook of them.
A golden age unrivaled in any other era of Eberron’s history soon followed. Giant and dragon stood side by side, crafting newborn utopias among the giant nations where none suffered from hunger or crime. Together, the giants and dragons cheated death, touched the stars and kept the Lords of Dust securely imprisoned underground in Khyber. Under the dragons’ patronage, the giants crafted sky-scraping monuments and wonders of surpassing beauty that would eventually draw the notice of the inhabitants of Dal Quor, the Plane of Dreams. The dragons reveled in the giants’ successes and then returned to Argonessen, drunk with pride and secure in the belief that the decision to teach the
giants the full mysteries of arcane magic was a correct one, for the giants were as trustworthy with the power as the elder great wyrms. Time would prove the dragons disastrously wrong.
The giants quickly mastered the arcane arts taught by the dragons and used this knowledge to create magical wonders and artifacts unequaled even in the present day. The giants used their new power to found multiple new giant settlements across the length and breadth of Xen’drik. Among the
many accomplishments of the fire-worshipping Sul’at League giants, perhaps the most powerful practitioners of conjuration, transmutation and elemental binding magics ever known on Eberron, was the magical infusion of a portion of the essence of Khyber into a community of their elven slaves, creating the separate black-skinned race of elves known as the dark elves or the drow. The
drow were set apart from their elven cousins from the beginning, for the giants often used the drow to hunt down escaped elven slaves or to combat the roaming tribes of freed elven slaves who often launched nuisance guerilla attacks on isolated giants in the deep jungle when they got the chance. In
return for this service many drow received special privileges from their giant masters, although others came to hate their enslavement as much as any elf.
The giants of this period ranged far afield across the length and breadth of Eberron, even sending exploratory parties to Sarlona. In that distant land the giants used their magical might to create a race of half-giants by fusing their own blood with that of the psionically-potent humans of that continent. The half-giants took the elves’ place as the giants’ slaves and servants at their
Sarlonan outposts. Other legends of the half-giants say that these giant outposts in Sarlona were only established after the fall of the giants’ civilizations on Xen’drik when they tried to escape the devastation the dragons rained down on that continent and that they were the descendants of these
giant explorers.
During the twenty millennia of the giants’ golden age, the elves watched and learned much of arcane magic from their place at the giants’ heels. One group of elves known as the Qabalrin broke away from their giant masters and founded their own civilization. The Qabalrin were a reclusive sect
of elves whose arcane might even the giants feared, and these elves lived alongside their drow cousins, who they employed as servants and arcane assistants. Stories tell of how the titans first learned their magic from the dragon god Ouralon, bringer of light and law, even as the Qabalrin drew
on the power of Ouralon’s terrible divine Shadow. Whatever the truth behind the legends, these elves were the mightiest conjurers and necromancers Eberron had ever seen, pioneering many of the necromantic techniques used in the present day—along with most of the fundamental principles of
the necromantic religion that would one day become known as the Blood of Vol. According to legend, the Qabalrin created the first vampires, some of whom might still lie entombed in their ancient ruins.
The Qabalrin lived in a single massive city-state called Qalatesh, a fortress in the legendary mountainous region of Xen’drik known as the Ring of Storms. Left unchecked, the Qabalrin might have one day dominated the land, but fate—or divine providence— intervened. Over forty thousand
years ago, a massive Siberys dragonshard called the Heart of Siberys plummeted from the sky, smashing into Qalatesh. The impact and the resulting devastation (both magical and natural) destroyed the necromantic elves’ civilization. Remarkably, though, the damage did not extend beyond the mountain ring. The giants called this outcome a miracle, citing the harsh justice of Ouralon and the event as a divine warning to those who would traffic with the Shadow.
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The Quori-Giant War Begins:The utopia the giants had taken twenty thousand years to build came crashing down almost overnight when the quori, the alien inhabitans of the Plane of Dreams, invaded Xen’drik through a planar gate that connected Eberron to Dal Quor forty millennia ago. Dal Quor’s vile caress brought with it an unspeakable alien doom for the giant empires.
Nightmares erupted from the earth and the sky as the giants faced the psionic power of the quori, a power that all their magical studies had not prepared them to combat. Since the quori found it difficult to operate in the physical world, which operated under such very different natural laws than
the Plane of Dreams, the quori created arcane creation forges and actually funneled the primal life force of Eberron herself to craft the first warforged, living, sentient arcane constructs who swelled the quori’s foul legions. The warforged did not need to eat or sleep, and they proved to be powerful
additions to the quori army, especially when paired with docents, spherical, sentient arcane repositories of quori knowledge and memory that could interface with individual warforged to enhance their capabilities. These docents were originally designed to serve as magical safehavens for quori spirits in the event that the Plane of Dreams underwent its cyclical transformation, destroying the entire current race of quori. However, the project met with only limited success and so the docents were later converted into warforged combat aids.
After centuries of battle against the quori and their living constructs alongside their rivals and sometime allies the Cul’sir, the Sul’at’s titan overlords were forced to resort to a desperate gambit to prevent all of Xen’drik from falling before the power of Dal Quor. The Sul’at corrupted the dragons’
gift of arcane magic with foul blood rites and brutal sacrifices of their elven slaves and other giants. They returned to the oasis in the Menechtarun Desert where Ouralon had first instructed the titans in the ways of arcane power and constructed a perverse sacrificial altar atop the white ziggurat where
the dragons had first made themselves known to the giants of Xen’drik. This altar, the Altar of Blood, soon ran crimson with gallons of blood from the Sul’at’s sacrifices. The oasis paradise where the giants had celebrated their friendship with the dragons was transformed into the horrific Oasis of
Blood as the Sul’at embraced the dark power granted by blood magic. The majestic marble statues now wept crimson tears and the once-clear pools of healing waters clouded with dark red blood. The white ziggurat still stood, a sand-scoured testament to the broken bond between giant and dragon, but
the dark power of blood magic that tainted its altar drew undead denizens and evil spirits like moths to a flame. The giants had tapped these dread powers far beyond their ability to control to forge and empower an incredibly powerful eldritch machine called the Moon Breaker. The Moon Breaker’s baleful power did succeed at driving the quori off of Eberron but nearly took all of Xen’drik with them. The eldritch machine’s activation destroyed Crya, the thirteenth moon of Eberron, and in the process severed the planar gate between the world and Dal Quor just as the Sul’at titans’ arcane loremasters had foreseen. As the moon disintegrated, the result was a planetary cataclysm that shook
Xen’drik to its core and plunged large chunks of that continent beneath the sea. Mountains collapsed and gaping wounds the size of entire cities were rent open in the earth. The sun’s light was blotted out for a decade as portions of the shattered moon rained down from the sky for years, spreading the
unspeakable devastation across the world. The physical connection between Eberron and Dal Quor was severed, perhaps forever.
At the same time that they unleashed the Moon Breaker, the Sul’at used the shadowy powers of blood magic to empower two other potent artifacts—two Orbs of Dragonkind, one of gold and one of crimson, created through the forced sacrifice of thousands of elven slaves and hidden in the dark
shrine of the ancient giant god Rom-Praxis that had been constructed beneath the Oasis of Blood. The Sul’at titans were all too aware that their pursuit of the forbidden rites of sacrificial blood magic might draw down the wrath of the dragons upon their heads, so they created the Orbs to serve as the
last line of defense.
The dragons of Argonessen watched all of this tragedy unfold, weeping to see their most precious gift so polluted with evil. They observed from afar as the aftermath of the giants’ involvement in blood sacrilege gave rise to various magical plagues and arcane curses that swept the jungle continent.
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The Elven Uprising and the Fall of the Giants: The surviving giant civilizations of the Sul’at League and the Cul’sir Empire never quite recovered from the events of the quori invasion. Horrible arcane curses and plagues swept through the land as a result of the Moon Breaker cataclysm
and the blood magic that had been practiced to initiate it, and the elves and drow used the opportunity provided by these catastrophes to rebel against their giant masters some thirty-nine thousand years ago.
At that time, the elves hardly resembled the proud, powerful race they have become, but they carried the spark of magic within them, even if they were more gifted with divine magic rather than the arcane, like their haughty eladrin cousins back in Thelanis. As the decades passed, the elf slaves concealed the fact that they had been learning to practice magic from their giant masters, nurturing these skills to a greater degree with each passing generation. Contemporary Aereni know little of this time. The extant histories only reliably begin tracking the elves’ history—magical or otherwise—with their escape from Xen’drik. But the legend of the elves’ grand, race-defining escape is still told to all Aereni, forming the foundation of their acceptance of death and reverence for their ancestors in the form of the undying.
As all good legends do, the Aereni story begins with a hero, an elf slave named Aeren Kriaddal. Aeren served a powerful giant shaman for the greater part of her life. Eventually earning the powerful creature’s trust, Aeren was allowed to observe and even aid in the giant’s most potent rituals, all of which involved blood sacrifice. Through this participation, she learned to cast simple spells.
One day, Aeren was ordered by her master to retrieve the day’s sacrifices for the ritual. Kept in a small pen near the giant’s house, these sacrifices typically consisted of livestock or captured wild animals. This day, however, Aeren opened the door to the large pen and found that it contained only a
single small figure: an unconscious female elf. In a numb haze, Aeren took the elf slowly back to her master’s abode. Her conditioning was too thorough for her to do anything else, and on some level, she doubted her master meant to slaughter her fellow elf simply for the purpose of enhancing his magic.
Aeren’s assumption was wrong.
The giant shaman plunged a knife—a weapon the size of a large greatsword in an elf’s hands—into the elf, spilling her blood to power a potent magical ritual. Horror struck Aeren just as cruelly. The magic released by the sacrificial ritual was more potent than any Aeren had seen her master perform before. Despite her shock at the death of the sacrifice, the portion of her mind fascinated with magic took note of the power released by the sacrifice of a sentient being like an elf (as opposed to that of a mere beast). But the betrayal of her trust in the giant shaman seeded a new thought into Aeren’s mind: revolt against those who would treat elven lives no better than those of cattle.
Aeren began to carefully and slowly build a secret contingent of like-minded slaves, including a few who were eager pupils of the magic Aeren could teach. From these unpromising beginnings, the revolution nurtured the seeds of magical lore, and slowly expanded it with each passing year. Eventually, the elves began divine and arcane magical experiments of their own. The elven slaves at first recorded their trials and successes on pilfered scraps of parchment and leather, but the thefts were too risky—the giants might find them out. Instead, they found that their own blood was an ideal ink, and the bones of their own dead served as a perfect record for their findings. The giants suspected nothing.
Aeren never forgot the power unleashed by the sacrifice of one of her own race, and she conducted her own secret experiments apart from those of her conspirators, always seeking to unleash the power of blood just as the giants did. She had no desire to sacrifice her own people for any reason, but she felt that she was close to recognizing some key element.
Aeren’s giant master felt the same way. Many more elves passed across the giant shaman’s sacrificial altar, but to no greater effect. Those who were sacrificed wailed in their chains if conscious, asking for release, or fought wildly to avoid the drugs that would render them mutely accepting of the giant shaman’s sacrificial knife.
With a flash of intuition, Aeren finally recognized the missing element one day after a particularly vicious sacrifice. Each victim was unwilling. Even when unconscious or drugged, the slaves’ souls cried out for life, not death. Aeren’s insight fired her with steely determination. In the wake of her hard-won knowledge, it was finally time to initiate the elves’ escape from Xen’drik.
Aeren shared her theories on the power of blood sacrifice with the trusted core of her secret resistance movement. With this precious knowledge, they hatched a daring plan for the elves to escape the captivity of the giants. But secrecy, even among the elf slaves, was vital, lest betrayal ruin all their years of hidden labor. Of all the thousands of elves held in captivity, Aeren selected only one hundred others to share the magical knowledge necessary to free the elves, as well as the exact time of the escape.
When the appointed day of freedom came, Aeren walked into her master’s chambers. All across Xen’drik, her cohort of conspirators did the same. They all spoke the final words of a terrible ritual, prepared in advance over many months. The ritual was powered by the sacrifice of all the collected elf heroes. In that instant, all these participating elves, scattered across the continent in key locations, gave up their lives. Mighty detonations of arcane power were born flaming into the world. Giant citadels fell, towns were expunged of their giant populations—and elves everywhere saw the signal for revolt. Led by by agents of Aeren and her inner circle, the elf slaves slipped away in the tumult.
During the Flight of the Slaves, as the elves call their exodus, a powerful, mysterious elf cleared the way for the fleeing elves of Xen’drik, diverting giant patrols, guiding lost groups of elves, and even obliterating obstacles (giant or otherwise) in displays of blazing power. Upon arriving at the northeastern coast of Xen’drik, the freed slaves discovered a journal, prepared by Aeren and placed within a platinum urn. Carried to the shore by an unwitting messenger, the journal documented the ritual that resulted in the great sacrifice of the elf heroes, as well as Aeren’s notes on the rite the elves
eventually came to call the Ritual of Undying. Aeren, unlike the other elven heroes of the revolt, did not perish. The influx of positive, radiant energy from the astral dominion of Irian during the final ritual sustained her existence even as it ended her biological life. Aeren Kriaddal was transformed
into the first of the undying, though to protect this secret the elves claimed that Aeren had died in the revolt, a claim that most scholars today still repeat. The freed slaves escaped in rafts and boats they
crafted by the thousands across the Thunder Sea to the small, tropical island continent that lay south of Khorvaire. They carried with them all the possessions they could manage, including in some cases livestock and even horses. The elves named thei new land Aerenal, or “Aeren’s Rest” in the Elven
tongue.
But the giants were not willing to let the entire underpinnings of their civilization—elven slave labor—simply walk away. The giants, threatened again with destruction so soon after having forced the quori to return to the Plane of Dreams, were wholly unprepared to fight another war. Faced with losing the tattered remnants of their empires to the elves’ rebellion and flight, the giants decided to unleash the power of the same grotesque blood rites they had used to stop the quori on their rebellious slaves.
Before the giants could unleash such earth-shaking destruction a second time, and before they could reach the Oasis of Blood to claim the Orbs of Dragonkind that might have been used to spare them from draconic retribution, the dragons of Argonessen decided that their former protégés would not be allowed to repeat their cataclysmic mistake. In a display of draconic power that has not been seen since, the Light of Siberys and the Eyes of Chronepsis drafted thousands of other dragons into a military force beyond human comprehension. This draconic armada descended upon Xen’drik. The
flights of dragons blotted out the sun and for the first time since their epic war with the fiends, the full might of Argonessen was brought to bear. In less than a week, the dragons cast down the last of the Giants and expunged the titans’ empires with their elemental fury and epic magic. When their wrath
was spent, the dragons had wreaked almost as much havoc on a continental scale as they had acted to prevent. As a race, they lamented their choice to share their arcane power with the giants. To the present day, that dreadful error is a stain on the memory of all dragonkind and it is one the masters of
Argonessen intend never to repeat.
The giant civilizations literally disappeared under this fearsome draconic assault, wiped from the face of Eberron. The drow, many of whom had remained loyal to their giant masters and actually fought against the elven rebels, chose to either view their elven cousins as weak for leaving Xen’drik
rather than taking the fight to the giants (the Vulkoori) or as traitors to the giants’ cause (the Sulatar). some wanted nothing to do with either side and just wanted to find safety from the dragons attack (the Umbragen). Most of the drow went into hiding in the Xen’drik countryside or rode out the
destruction underground, while the elves had fled to the island-continent of Aerenal that they named after the leader of their mass exodus, the she-elf Aeren. Most of the dark elves eventually divided between the primitive jungle-dwelling drow tribesmen called Vulkoori who worshipped the scorpion-
god Vulkoor (an aspect of the Mockery), the sophisticated civilization of powerful underground- dwelling dark elves known as the Umbragen, and the Sulatar, a nation of fire-worshipping drow who maintained the aggressive military and religious traditions of the Sul’at League, their former masters.
Following the dragons’ attack, the giants’ titan overlords disappeared from Xen’drik without any explanation for where they had gone, leaving the lesser giants deeply disturbed at their forebears’ absence and silmultaneously somewhat relieved that the leaders who had led them to destruction
were gone. The more primitive descendants of this period’s giants in later years went so far as to leave sacrificial offerings to the absent titans to keep them appeased—and to keep them from returning. The dragons laid several mighty enchantments upon Xen’drik that were intended to prevent the reemergence of a giant civilization whose arcane knowledge and lack of restraint could threaten all life (especially draconic lives) on Eberron. Additionally, the abhorrent blood magic unleashed by the giants to create and power the Moon Breaker not only left their continent in ruins, but also tainted that land with many dangerous arcane curses.
The Travelers’ Curse warped distance and terrain, making a journey from one point to another in Xen’drik extremely unpredictable. As a result, the same trip could take only days on one occasion and months the next. In addition, the terrain of Xen’drik magically alters its climate and condition at random. A patch of ground hosting a steamy, overgrown jungle one night becomes a misty conferous forest with the morning sun. Glaciers melt into lakes in hours and deserts sprout temperate flora overnight.
The Du’rashka Tul or “madness of crowds” in the Giant tongue was a powerful arcane curse leveled on Xen’drik by the dragons themselves—a complex epic ward intended to prevent the giants from ever rising to power again. According to legend, the curse affects any group of intelligent beings able to establish a sizable civilization on the forsaken continent, so that they are suddenly gripped by homicidal rage and spread out to kill everything in their path (including each other). The giants, drow and other local peoples of Xen’drik became terrified of this curse in later years and avoided organizing into cities or large social groups, ensuring that Xen’drik’s natives remained as
relatively primitive hunter-gatherer tribal societies over the millennia.
Under these difficult conditions, the Sul’at, Cul’sir and the other civilized giants slowly devolved over the millennia into the far more primitive true giant subraces of the present time— storm, cloud, fire, frost, stone, jungle and hill giants. In many cases, the giants’ elemental nature became more pronounced as they devolved. Some giants fled the devastation to Dolurrh, the
Shadowfell, where they were altered by exposure to that mirror world’s shadowy necromantic energies and became the dangerous death giants of that foul plane. The various giantkin races—trolls, ogres, verbeeg, firbolgs, and the like—are all related to these races, though they spread across the other continents from Xen’drik.
The Quori-Giant War and the Draconic Devastation of Xen’drik
Explorers in Xen’drik, Q’barra, or Adar in the present might stumble across a weathered draconic statue or faded image scratched into a cavern wall, but the dragons left few traces of their ancient dominion over the world at the end of the Age of Demons…with one exception. The giants of Xen’drik were the most advanced humanoids of the age after the Dragon-Fiend Wars, and they had
learned much in their interactions with the dragons.
Those giants who worked with Ourelonastrix and his students used draconic magic to carve out empires and dominate their continent. The arcane arts spread, and soon the giants began to explore new approaches to this form of magic. As powerful as they were, the dragons were mired in tradition, and certain paths of magical inquiry they simply refused to tread. The giants of certain long-dead empires, such as the Cul’sir Empire, the Sul’at League and the Group of Eleven, had no such qualms—their exploration of blood magic and other dark arts like necromancy, shadow and pact magic diverged wildly from the codified teachings of Ourelonastrix and the other draconic
Sovereigns who had first tutored the giants. Nonetheless, the dragons remained uninvolved. The elder wyrms of many flights studied the draconic Prophecy, but agreed that it was best not to manipulate its outcome. They simply traced its myriad paths and watched as fate chose its course.
Then the quori came to Xen’drik from the Plane of Dreams. The motivation for this extraplanar incursion remains a mystery, but the giants’ records portray the quori simply as ruthless invaders seeking to capture the power and wealth of the giants’ great civilizations. Other evidence suggests that the quori merely sought refuge from a disaster on their own plane, or even retaliation
against acts of interplanar aggression instigated by the titan lords of Xen’drik. Some scholars have recently suggested that the quori of this age, who belonged to a different race than the quori who serve the Dreaming Dark of Dal Quor today, were aware that the Quor Tarai, the guiding spirit and collective consciousness of the Plane of Dreams, at this time known as the Dreaming Heart, was soon to change, wiping out their entire species. Much like the quori and Inspired of today, the quori of this period may have initiated the invasion and attempted conquest of the world in the hope of preventing the dreams of the thinking beings of Eberron from causing the change in the Quor Tarai and the destruction of their species.
Whatever the root of the Quori-Giant War, it was a struggle that lasted for long centuries. Powerful magical and psionic forces were unleashed by both sides, and, in time, nearly all the arcane knowledge the giants possessed was turned to the war effort. In Argonnessen, students of the draconic Prophecy warned that this struggle could shake the planes of existence themselves, but the
Conclave insisted that the dragons remain aloof. The outcome is known to any student of history; the militaristic giants of the Sul’at League unleashed the doomsday weapon that was the Moon Breaker on the quori. This eldritch machine, created using the foul sacrificial rites of blood magic that were
anathema to the dragons, destroyed Eberron’s thirteenth moon Crya and tore the entire plane of Dal Quor from its orbit around Eberron, bringing a sudden and terrible end to the conflict. The Quor Tarai soon turned, the Dreaming Heart became the Dreaming Dark and the race of quori who had fought the war were wiped from existence and replaced by the current foul natives of the Plane of Dreams.
The giants’ risky gambit devastated their continent and shook the very foundations of Eberron. Their former slaves, the elves and the drow, rose up against their weakened masters. Desperate, the giants began recklessly harnessing their ultimate magical power once more, preparing to unleash the same sacrificial magical forces that had vanquished the quori on the elven rebels. Perhaps they thought victory was possible, but many historians believe it was pure nihilism—if the titans could not rule the world, they would just as soon destroy it.
The dragons saw the giants’ threat to the world traced out in the Prophecy. Shocked and alarmed at the effect the loss of the thirteenth moon had already had on Eberron and the rest of the cosmos, this time the dragons chose to act. A scaled army poured forth from Argonnessen, with flights of all colors led by the militant wyrms of the Light of Siberys.
The conflict was brutal, and its outcome never in doubt. The dragons had no interest in holding territory. They made no effort to avoid civilian casualties; they brought fire, fang, and epic magic to bear in the most destructive ways imaginable. In the end, nothing was left of the proud giant nations of Xen’drik. Giant, elf, and all the other cultures of that continent were laid low by the
dragons, and powerful eldritch curses enacted on Xen’drik by the great wyrms of the Draconic Conclave of Argonessen ensured that the giants would never again create a civilization advanced enough to threaten the world.
Their mission accomplished, the dragons returned to Argonnessen to brood. All agreed that the people of Xen’drik would never have posed such a threat if the dragons had not shared the secrets of arcane magic with them. The Conclave called the event kurash Ourelonastrix in Draconic— Aureon’s Folly—and forbade any flight from sharing the secrets of Argonnessen with “lesser beings.”
The Birth of the Giant Nations:
The massive elemental humanoids known as the giants rose from the ruins of the Dragon–Fiend Wars to establish a vast and powerful civilization on their home continent of Xen’drik. The giants were towering humanoids who were strongly tied to the elemental nature of Eberron, a world forged in part by the Progenitor wyrms from the raw material of the Elemental Chaos. The giants were in some ways the sentient expressions of this part of the world’s nature. At least three major giant civilizations are known to have come into being during this time through the efforts of the greatest of giantkind who were called the titans: the peaceful, intellectually-
inclined Empire of Cul’sir, the Group of Eleven and the militaristic, flame-worshipping Sul’at League. The giants of these civilizations enslaved the elves, recently arrived immigrants to Eberron from the mirror world of Thelanis, also known as the Feywild. The elves were a relatively peaceful,
nomadic folk who enjoyed living in the woodlands and jungles of Xen’drik before the first of their tribes began to be enslaved by the giants. This enslavement had the inadvertent effect of pulling the first of the common humanoid races out of their primitive state.
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The Golden Age of Xen’drik: The dragons of Argonessen’s stormy romance with the continent of Xen’drik began tens of thousands of years ago and, as tumultuous affairs often do, it ended in tragedy. Sixty millennia ago, the dragons gazed across the Thunder Sea at the glorious empires the giants had raised up on Xen’drik and decided to share the power and majesty of arcane
magic with them. Upon the steps of a towering white ziggurat at an oasis deep in the Menechtarun Desert of western Xen’drik, the dragons, led by Ourelonastrix, made contact with the giant kingdoms and began to teach the titan overlords and their fellow giants how to use arcane magic. The giants
started to worship Ourelonastrix as the god Ouralon, the lord of knowledge and law, a faith that replaced the giants’ devotion to earlier, more morally ambivalent gods such as Rom-Praxis. The oasis where the great blue dragon and the giants first collaborated was turned by the titans into a magical
paradise in honor of their draconic patrons. Living marble statues frolicked among pools of crystalline water whose inherent magic promised life everlasting and the cure to all afflictions of the mind, body and soul. Vast orchards of date trees sprouted from the sand of the oasis, their fruit
granting joyous visions of the future to all who partook of them.
A golden age unrivaled in any other era of Eberron’s history soon followed. Giant and dragon stood side by side, crafting newborn utopias among the giant nations where none suffered from hunger or crime. Together, the giants and dragons cheated death, touched the stars and kept the Lords of Dust securely imprisoned underground in Khyber. Under the dragons’ patronage, the giants crafted sky-scraping monuments and wonders of surpassing beauty that would eventually draw the notice of the inhabitants of Dal Quor, the Plane of Dreams. The dragons reveled in the giants’ successes and then returned to Argonessen, drunk with pride and secure in the belief that the decision to teach the
giants the full mysteries of arcane magic was a correct one, for the giants were as trustworthy with the power as the elder great wyrms. Time would prove the dragons disastrously wrong.
The giants quickly mastered the arcane arts taught by the dragons and used this knowledge to create magical wonders and artifacts unequaled even in the present day. The giants used their new power to found multiple new giant settlements across the length and breadth of Xen’drik. Among the
many accomplishments of the fire-worshipping Sul’at League giants, perhaps the most powerful practitioners of conjuration, transmutation and elemental binding magics ever known on Eberron, was the magical infusion of a portion of the essence of Khyber into a community of their elven slaves, creating the separate black-skinned race of elves known as the dark elves or the drow. The
drow were set apart from their elven cousins from the beginning, for the giants often used the drow to hunt down escaped elven slaves or to combat the roaming tribes of freed elven slaves who often launched nuisance guerilla attacks on isolated giants in the deep jungle when they got the chance. In
return for this service many drow received special privileges from their giant masters, although others came to hate their enslavement as much as any elf.
The giants of this period ranged far afield across the length and breadth of Eberron, even sending exploratory parties to Sarlona. In that distant land the giants used their magical might to create a race of half-giants by fusing their own blood with that of the psionically-potent humans of that continent. The half-giants took the elves’ place as the giants’ slaves and servants at their
Sarlonan outposts. Other legends of the half-giants say that these giant outposts in Sarlona were only established after the fall of the giants’ civilizations on Xen’drik when they tried to escape the devastation the dragons rained down on that continent and that they were the descendants of these
giant explorers.
During the twenty millennia of the giants’ golden age, the elves watched and learned much of arcane magic from their place at the giants’ heels. One group of elves known as the Qabalrin broke away from their giant masters and founded their own civilization. The Qabalrin were a reclusive sect
of elves whose arcane might even the giants feared, and these elves lived alongside their drow cousins, who they employed as servants and arcane assistants. Stories tell of how the titans first learned their magic from the dragon god Ouralon, bringer of light and law, even as the Qabalrin drew
on the power of Ouralon’s terrible divine Shadow. Whatever the truth behind the legends, these elves were the mightiest conjurers and necromancers Eberron had ever seen, pioneering many of the necromantic techniques used in the present day—along with most of the fundamental principles of
the necromantic religion that would one day become known as the Blood of Vol. According to legend, the Qabalrin created the first vampires, some of whom might still lie entombed in their ancient ruins.
The Qabalrin lived in a single massive city-state called Qalatesh, a fortress in the legendary mountainous region of Xen’drik known as the Ring of Storms. Left unchecked, the Qabalrin might have one day dominated the land, but fate—or divine providence— intervened. Over forty thousand
years ago, a massive Siberys dragonshard called the Heart of Siberys plummeted from the sky, smashing into Qalatesh. The impact and the resulting devastation (both magical and natural) destroyed the necromantic elves’ civilization. Remarkably, though, the damage did not extend beyond the mountain ring. The giants called this outcome a miracle, citing the harsh justice of Ouralon and the event as a divine warning to those who would traffic with the Shadow.
–40,000 YK
The Quori-Giant War Begins:The utopia the giants had taken twenty thousand years to build came crashing down almost overnight when the quori, the alien inhabitans of the Plane of Dreams, invaded Xen’drik through a planar gate that connected Eberron to Dal Quor forty millennia ago. Dal Quor’s vile caress brought with it an unspeakable alien doom for the giant empires.
Nightmares erupted from the earth and the sky as the giants faced the psionic power of the quori, a power that all their magical studies had not prepared them to combat. Since the quori found it difficult to operate in the physical world, which operated under such very different natural laws than
the Plane of Dreams, the quori created arcane creation forges and actually funneled the primal life force of Eberron herself to craft the first warforged, living, sentient arcane constructs who swelled the quori’s foul legions. The warforged did not need to eat or sleep, and they proved to be powerful
additions to the quori army, especially when paired with docents, spherical, sentient arcane repositories of quori knowledge and memory that could interface with individual warforged to enhance their capabilities. These docents were originally designed to serve as magical safehavens for quori spirits in the event that the Plane of Dreams underwent its cyclical transformation, destroying the entire current race of quori. However, the project met with only limited success and so the docents were later converted into warforged combat aids.
After centuries of battle against the quori and their living constructs alongside their rivals and sometime allies the Cul’sir, the Sul’at’s titan overlords were forced to resort to a desperate gambit to prevent all of Xen’drik from falling before the power of Dal Quor. The Sul’at corrupted the dragons’
gift of arcane magic with foul blood rites and brutal sacrifices of their elven slaves and other giants. They returned to the oasis in the Menechtarun Desert where Ouralon had first instructed the titans in the ways of arcane power and constructed a perverse sacrificial altar atop the white ziggurat where
the dragons had first made themselves known to the giants of Xen’drik. This altar, the Altar of Blood, soon ran crimson with gallons of blood from the Sul’at’s sacrifices. The oasis paradise where the giants had celebrated their friendship with the dragons was transformed into the horrific Oasis of
Blood as the Sul’at embraced the dark power granted by blood magic. The majestic marble statues now wept crimson tears and the once-clear pools of healing waters clouded with dark red blood. The white ziggurat still stood, a sand-scoured testament to the broken bond between giant and dragon, but
the dark power of blood magic that tainted its altar drew undead denizens and evil spirits like moths to a flame. The giants had tapped these dread powers far beyond their ability to control to forge and empower an incredibly powerful eldritch machine called the Moon Breaker. The Moon Breaker’s baleful power did succeed at driving the quori off of Eberron but nearly took all of Xen’drik with them. The eldritch machine’s activation destroyed Crya, the thirteenth moon of Eberron, and in the process severed the planar gate between the world and Dal Quor just as the Sul’at titans’ arcane loremasters had foreseen. As the moon disintegrated, the result was a planetary cataclysm that shook
Xen’drik to its core and plunged large chunks of that continent beneath the sea. Mountains collapsed and gaping wounds the size of entire cities were rent open in the earth. The sun’s light was blotted out for a decade as portions of the shattered moon rained down from the sky for years, spreading the
unspeakable devastation across the world. The physical connection between Eberron and Dal Quor was severed, perhaps forever.
At the same time that they unleashed the Moon Breaker, the Sul’at used the shadowy powers of blood magic to empower two other potent artifacts—two Orbs of Dragonkind, one of gold and one of crimson, created through the forced sacrifice of thousands of elven slaves and hidden in the dark
shrine of the ancient giant god Rom-Praxis that had been constructed beneath the Oasis of Blood. The Sul’at titans were all too aware that their pursuit of the forbidden rites of sacrificial blood magic might draw down the wrath of the dragons upon their heads, so they created the Orbs to serve as the
last line of defense.
The dragons of Argonessen watched all of this tragedy unfold, weeping to see their most precious gift so polluted with evil. They observed from afar as the aftermath of the giants’ involvement in blood sacrilege gave rise to various magical plagues and arcane curses that swept the jungle continent.
–38,000 YK
The Elven Uprising and the Fall of the Giants: The surviving giant civilizations of the Sul’at League and the Cul’sir Empire never quite recovered from the events of the quori invasion. Horrible arcane curses and plagues swept through the land as a result of the Moon Breaker cataclysm
and the blood magic that had been practiced to initiate it, and the elves and drow used the opportunity provided by these catastrophes to rebel against their giant masters some thirty-nine thousand years ago.
At that time, the elves hardly resembled the proud, powerful race they have become, but they carried the spark of magic within them, even if they were more gifted with divine magic rather than the arcane, like their haughty eladrin cousins back in Thelanis. As the decades passed, the elf slaves concealed the fact that they had been learning to practice magic from their giant masters, nurturing these skills to a greater degree with each passing generation. Contemporary Aereni know little of this time. The extant histories only reliably begin tracking the elves’ history—magical or otherwise—with their escape from Xen’drik. But the legend of the elves’ grand, race-defining escape is still told to all Aereni, forming the foundation of their acceptance of death and reverence for their ancestors in the form of the undying.
As all good legends do, the Aereni story begins with a hero, an elf slave named Aeren Kriaddal. Aeren served a powerful giant shaman for the greater part of her life. Eventually earning the powerful creature’s trust, Aeren was allowed to observe and even aid in the giant’s most potent rituals, all of which involved blood sacrifice. Through this participation, she learned to cast simple spells.
One day, Aeren was ordered by her master to retrieve the day’s sacrifices for the ritual. Kept in a small pen near the giant’s house, these sacrifices typically consisted of livestock or captured wild animals. This day, however, Aeren opened the door to the large pen and found that it contained only a
single small figure: an unconscious female elf. In a numb haze, Aeren took the elf slowly back to her master’s abode. Her conditioning was too thorough for her to do anything else, and on some level, she doubted her master meant to slaughter her fellow elf simply for the purpose of enhancing his magic.
Aeren’s assumption was wrong.
The giant shaman plunged a knife—a weapon the size of a large greatsword in an elf’s hands—into the elf, spilling her blood to power a potent magical ritual. Horror struck Aeren just as cruelly. The magic released by the sacrificial ritual was more potent than any Aeren had seen her master perform before. Despite her shock at the death of the sacrifice, the portion of her mind fascinated with magic took note of the power released by the sacrifice of a sentient being like an elf (as opposed to that of a mere beast). But the betrayal of her trust in the giant shaman seeded a new thought into Aeren’s mind: revolt against those who would treat elven lives no better than those of cattle.
Aeren began to carefully and slowly build a secret contingent of like-minded slaves, including a few who were eager pupils of the magic Aeren could teach. From these unpromising beginnings, the revolution nurtured the seeds of magical lore, and slowly expanded it with each passing year. Eventually, the elves began divine and arcane magical experiments of their own. The elven slaves at first recorded their trials and successes on pilfered scraps of parchment and leather, but the thefts were too risky—the giants might find them out. Instead, they found that their own blood was an ideal ink, and the bones of their own dead served as a perfect record for their findings. The giants suspected nothing.
Aeren never forgot the power unleashed by the sacrifice of one of her own race, and she conducted her own secret experiments apart from those of her conspirators, always seeking to unleash the power of blood just as the giants did. She had no desire to sacrifice her own people for any reason, but she felt that she was close to recognizing some key element.
Aeren’s giant master felt the same way. Many more elves passed across the giant shaman’s sacrificial altar, but to no greater effect. Those who were sacrificed wailed in their chains if conscious, asking for release, or fought wildly to avoid the drugs that would render them mutely accepting of the giant shaman’s sacrificial knife.
With a flash of intuition, Aeren finally recognized the missing element one day after a particularly vicious sacrifice. Each victim was unwilling. Even when unconscious or drugged, the slaves’ souls cried out for life, not death. Aeren’s insight fired her with steely determination. In the wake of her hard-won knowledge, it was finally time to initiate the elves’ escape from Xen’drik.
Aeren shared her theories on the power of blood sacrifice with the trusted core of her secret resistance movement. With this precious knowledge, they hatched a daring plan for the elves to escape the captivity of the giants. But secrecy, even among the elf slaves, was vital, lest betrayal ruin all their years of hidden labor. Of all the thousands of elves held in captivity, Aeren selected only one hundred others to share the magical knowledge necessary to free the elves, as well as the exact time of the escape.
When the appointed day of freedom came, Aeren walked into her master’s chambers. All across Xen’drik, her cohort of conspirators did the same. They all spoke the final words of a terrible ritual, prepared in advance over many months. The ritual was powered by the sacrifice of all the collected elf heroes. In that instant, all these participating elves, scattered across the continent in key locations, gave up their lives. Mighty detonations of arcane power were born flaming into the world. Giant citadels fell, towns were expunged of their giant populations—and elves everywhere saw the signal for revolt. Led by by agents of Aeren and her inner circle, the elf slaves slipped away in the tumult.
During the Flight of the Slaves, as the elves call their exodus, a powerful, mysterious elf cleared the way for the fleeing elves of Xen’drik, diverting giant patrols, guiding lost groups of elves, and even obliterating obstacles (giant or otherwise) in displays of blazing power. Upon arriving at the northeastern coast of Xen’drik, the freed slaves discovered a journal, prepared by Aeren and placed within a platinum urn. Carried to the shore by an unwitting messenger, the journal documented the ritual that resulted in the great sacrifice of the elf heroes, as well as Aeren’s notes on the rite the elves
eventually came to call the Ritual of Undying. Aeren, unlike the other elven heroes of the revolt, did not perish. The influx of positive, radiant energy from the astral dominion of Irian during the final ritual sustained her existence even as it ended her biological life. Aeren Kriaddal was transformed
into the first of the undying, though to protect this secret the elves claimed that Aeren had died in the revolt, a claim that most scholars today still repeat. The freed slaves escaped in rafts and boats they
crafted by the thousands across the Thunder Sea to the small, tropical island continent that lay south of Khorvaire. They carried with them all the possessions they could manage, including in some cases livestock and even horses. The elves named thei new land Aerenal, or “Aeren’s Rest” in the Elven
tongue.
But the giants were not willing to let the entire underpinnings of their civilization—elven slave labor—simply walk away. The giants, threatened again with destruction so soon after having forced the quori to return to the Plane of Dreams, were wholly unprepared to fight another war. Faced with losing the tattered remnants of their empires to the elves’ rebellion and flight, the giants decided to unleash the power of the same grotesque blood rites they had used to stop the quori on their rebellious slaves.
Before the giants could unleash such earth-shaking destruction a second time, and before they could reach the Oasis of Blood to claim the Orbs of Dragonkind that might have been used to spare them from draconic retribution, the dragons of Argonessen decided that their former protégés would not be allowed to repeat their cataclysmic mistake. In a display of draconic power that has not been seen since, the Light of Siberys and the Eyes of Chronepsis drafted thousands of other dragons into a military force beyond human comprehension. This draconic armada descended upon Xen’drik. The
flights of dragons blotted out the sun and for the first time since their epic war with the fiends, the full might of Argonessen was brought to bear. In less than a week, the dragons cast down the last of the Giants and expunged the titans’ empires with their elemental fury and epic magic. When their wrath
was spent, the dragons had wreaked almost as much havoc on a continental scale as they had acted to prevent. As a race, they lamented their choice to share their arcane power with the giants. To the present day, that dreadful error is a stain on the memory of all dragonkind and it is one the masters of
Argonessen intend never to repeat.
The giant civilizations literally disappeared under this fearsome draconic assault, wiped from the face of Eberron. The drow, many of whom had remained loyal to their giant masters and actually fought against the elven rebels, chose to either view their elven cousins as weak for leaving Xen’drik
rather than taking the fight to the giants (the Vulkoori) or as traitors to the giants’ cause (the Sulatar). some wanted nothing to do with either side and just wanted to find safety from the dragons attack (the Umbragen). Most of the drow went into hiding in the Xen’drik countryside or rode out the
destruction underground, while the elves had fled to the island-continent of Aerenal that they named after the leader of their mass exodus, the she-elf Aeren. Most of the dark elves eventually divided between the primitive jungle-dwelling drow tribesmen called Vulkoori who worshipped the scorpion-
god Vulkoor (an aspect of the Mockery), the sophisticated civilization of powerful underground- dwelling dark elves known as the Umbragen, and the Sulatar, a nation of fire-worshipping drow who maintained the aggressive military and religious traditions of the Sul’at League, their former masters.
Following the dragons’ attack, the giants’ titan overlords disappeared from Xen’drik without any explanation for where they had gone, leaving the lesser giants deeply disturbed at their forebears’ absence and silmultaneously somewhat relieved that the leaders who had led them to destruction
were gone. The more primitive descendants of this period’s giants in later years went so far as to leave sacrificial offerings to the absent titans to keep them appeased—and to keep them from returning. The dragons laid several mighty enchantments upon Xen’drik that were intended to prevent the reemergence of a giant civilization whose arcane knowledge and lack of restraint could threaten all life (especially draconic lives) on Eberron. Additionally, the abhorrent blood magic unleashed by the giants to create and power the Moon Breaker not only left their continent in ruins, but also tainted that land with many dangerous arcane curses.
The Travelers’ Curse warped distance and terrain, making a journey from one point to another in Xen’drik extremely unpredictable. As a result, the same trip could take only days on one occasion and months the next. In addition, the terrain of Xen’drik magically alters its climate and condition at random. A patch of ground hosting a steamy, overgrown jungle one night becomes a misty conferous forest with the morning sun. Glaciers melt into lakes in hours and deserts sprout temperate flora overnight.
The Du’rashka Tul or “madness of crowds” in the Giant tongue was a powerful arcane curse leveled on Xen’drik by the dragons themselves—a complex epic ward intended to prevent the giants from ever rising to power again. According to legend, the curse affects any group of intelligent beings able to establish a sizable civilization on the forsaken continent, so that they are suddenly gripped by homicidal rage and spread out to kill everything in their path (including each other). The giants, drow and other local peoples of Xen’drik became terrified of this curse in later years and avoided organizing into cities or large social groups, ensuring that Xen’drik’s natives remained as
relatively primitive hunter-gatherer tribal societies over the millennia.
Under these difficult conditions, the Sul’at, Cul’sir and the other civilized giants slowly devolved over the millennia into the far more primitive true giant subraces of the present time— storm, cloud, fire, frost, stone, jungle and hill giants. In many cases, the giants’ elemental nature became more pronounced as they devolved. Some giants fled the devastation to Dolurrh, the
Shadowfell, where they were altered by exposure to that mirror world’s shadowy necromantic energies and became the dangerous death giants of that foul plane. The various giantkin races—trolls, ogres, verbeeg, firbolgs, and the like—are all related to these races, though they spread across the other continents from Xen’drik.
The Quori-Giant War and the Draconic Devastation of Xen’drik
Explorers in Xen’drik, Q’barra, or Adar in the present might stumble across a weathered draconic statue or faded image scratched into a cavern wall, but the dragons left few traces of their ancient dominion over the world at the end of the Age of Demons…with one exception. The giants of Xen’drik were the most advanced humanoids of the age after the Dragon-Fiend Wars, and they had
learned much in their interactions with the dragons.
Those giants who worked with Ourelonastrix and his students used draconic magic to carve out empires and dominate their continent. The arcane arts spread, and soon the giants began to explore new approaches to this form of magic. As powerful as they were, the dragons were mired in tradition, and certain paths of magical inquiry they simply refused to tread. The giants of certain long-dead empires, such as the Cul’sir Empire, the Sul’at League and the Group of Eleven, had no such qualms—their exploration of blood magic and other dark arts like necromancy, shadow and pact magic diverged wildly from the codified teachings of Ourelonastrix and the other draconic
Sovereigns who had first tutored the giants. Nonetheless, the dragons remained uninvolved. The elder wyrms of many flights studied the draconic Prophecy, but agreed that it was best not to manipulate its outcome. They simply traced its myriad paths and watched as fate chose its course.
Then the quori came to Xen’drik from the Plane of Dreams. The motivation for this extraplanar incursion remains a mystery, but the giants’ records portray the quori simply as ruthless invaders seeking to capture the power and wealth of the giants’ great civilizations. Other evidence suggests that the quori merely sought refuge from a disaster on their own plane, or even retaliation
against acts of interplanar aggression instigated by the titan lords of Xen’drik. Some scholars have recently suggested that the quori of this age, who belonged to a different race than the quori who serve the Dreaming Dark of Dal Quor today, were aware that the Quor Tarai, the guiding spirit and collective consciousness of the Plane of Dreams, at this time known as the Dreaming Heart, was soon to change, wiping out their entire species. Much like the quori and Inspired of today, the quori of this period may have initiated the invasion and attempted conquest of the world in the hope of preventing the dreams of the thinking beings of Eberron from causing the change in the Quor Tarai and the destruction of their species.
Whatever the root of the Quori-Giant War, it was a struggle that lasted for long centuries. Powerful magical and psionic forces were unleashed by both sides, and, in time, nearly all the arcane knowledge the giants possessed was turned to the war effort. In Argonnessen, students of the draconic Prophecy warned that this struggle could shake the planes of existence themselves, but the
Conclave insisted that the dragons remain aloof. The outcome is known to any student of history; the militaristic giants of the Sul’at League unleashed the doomsday weapon that was the Moon Breaker on the quori. This eldritch machine, created using the foul sacrificial rites of blood magic that were
anathema to the dragons, destroyed Eberron’s thirteenth moon Crya and tore the entire plane of Dal Quor from its orbit around Eberron, bringing a sudden and terrible end to the conflict. The Quor Tarai soon turned, the Dreaming Heart became the Dreaming Dark and the race of quori who had fought the war were wiped from existence and replaced by the current foul natives of the Plane of Dreams.
The giants’ risky gambit devastated their continent and shook the very foundations of Eberron. Their former slaves, the elves and the drow, rose up against their weakened masters. Desperate, the giants began recklessly harnessing their ultimate magical power once more, preparing to unleash the same sacrificial magical forces that had vanquished the quori on the elven rebels. Perhaps they thought victory was possible, but many historians believe it was pure nihilism—if the titans could not rule the world, they would just as soon destroy it.
The dragons saw the giants’ threat to the world traced out in the Prophecy. Shocked and alarmed at the effect the loss of the thirteenth moon had already had on Eberron and the rest of the cosmos, this time the dragons chose to act. A scaled army poured forth from Argonnessen, with flights of all colors led by the militant wyrms of the Light of Siberys.
The conflict was brutal, and its outcome never in doubt. The dragons had no interest in holding territory. They made no effort to avoid civilian casualties; they brought fire, fang, and epic magic to bear in the most destructive ways imaginable. In the end, nothing was left of the proud giant nations of Xen’drik. Giant, elf, and all the other cultures of that continent were laid low by the
dragons, and powerful eldritch curses enacted on Xen’drik by the great wyrms of the Draconic Conclave of Argonessen ensured that the giants would never again create a civilization advanced enough to threaten the world.
Their mission accomplished, the dragons returned to Argonnessen to brood. All agreed that the people of Xen’drik would never have posed such a threat if the dragons had not shared the secrets of arcane magic with them. The Conclave called the event kurash Ourelonastrix in Draconic— Aureon’s Folly—and forbade any flight from sharing the secrets of Argonnessen with “lesser beings.”