The fall of the Dalmer to the demon cult of Zalgoral

== The Cult of Zalgoral ==
=== Context ===
The Dalmer, in the time before Guest theory (Treaty that forbids the dalmer from intervening directly in the affairs of the other races), used to experiment with the limits of their world. A Clan colony ship arrived in a mysterious land, and exploited its resources beyond measure. They enslaved the primitive local population, and built indescribably brilliant machines.
The Dalmer greatly increased the productive pressure on the primitives as the clan wars erupted. This pushed the local populace over the edge, and caused them to turn to demonic forces.
=== The emergence ===
The fall to demonic worship was progressive, as demons usually do.
First, the primitive villages near the sea began catching an unusually large amount of pufferfish. When eaten, the pufferfish poison gave them visions of entities known as the elder heralds. The heralds were massive telepathic pufferfish with a single eye in the middle of the forehead. The heralds serve the Tentacled Dragon from within their underwater temple cities. By using the telepathic poison found in pufferfish, the Heralds could communicate with the primitives.
The communication took some of the edge off the bleakness of the primitives existence. The Heralds taught them many things, notably to read their mysterious language to communicate secretly amongst themselves. Since the Dalmer had other things to worry about, the cult went largely unknown and grew as the spread of the secret language allowed them to organize easily.
=== The cult ===
Through the use of wandering traders and outcasts, the cult starts tempting villagers in desert communities to join the cult by sending them secret shipments of pufferfish. These desert villages water cool lava and drill out obsidian, trading via wandering traders.
The desert villages were the least influenced by the Dalmer, as such were under much less scrutiny. The desert communes built temples depicting the Tentacled Dragon, the Elder Heralds, and other monstrous creatures they saw under the effects of the telepathic poison. Pictures and paintings depicting the demon circulated via trade routes to other villages under the sway of the Dalmer. The cult gathered even more steam this way.
=== Corpse sand ===
With the size and the effects of the cult beginning to show on the faithful, organization was needed. The elders of the cult faked their deaths (using totems of freefall mostly) and continued to write down the messages of the Heralds. In exchange for the gift of the totems, the elders had to sacrifice some of their number who were considered unfit by the Heralds. Using the corpses of their colleagues, the Elders extracted corpse sand, an essence dropped by dead creatures used for all kinds of things.
With the corpse sand, the Heralds sent the faithful to find azuri. With the Azuri they manufactured what they needed for the next part of their masters’ plans. 
Azuri is a semi precious stone the Dalmer mined for its usage as a dye and paint. The faithful sabotaged and crashed an airship transporting the stone to hide its disappearance.
With the corpse sand and azuri secured the faithful constructed enchanters, powerful lecterns that would give power to the incantations and set forth the next part of the Heralds plan.
=== The Schism ===
The fishers suddenly started finding less and less pufferfish, and those that didn’t always contain the telepathic poison. The Elders reorganized the cult so that only the elders and promising members could partake in the poison. Months passed but the elders still could not hear the instructions of their masters. Finally, it was a faithful of the desert community, who had eaten a pufferfish despite the orders against it and received visions. The Elder Heralds bore their unique eye unto the defiler and spoke, it was time for them to meet.
For this the cult broke into two, the old guard of the Demon cult who deemed the Upstart a threat and false prophet, and the new cult, who called themselves the Illegars due to their sickly appearance. The latter opposed the hoarding of the telepathic poison by the Elders, and focused on meeting with the Elder Heralds.
Meanwhile, the clan wars had subsided, meaning the Dalmer lessened the pressure of their automated businesses, but also that they could concentrate on their holdings. They still failed to see the unrest boiling underneath the surface.
=== The Illagers ===
The Illagers started experimenting with the dalmers own machines, hoping to find a way to reach the underwater city of the Heralds, the Cult however experimented with potions, hoping to find a way to synthesize the poison and reach their mute masters.
At this point the ocean's stock of pufferfish effectively disappeared from the sea, leaving both factions guideless and their leaders credibility very thin. Their numbers still grew however, as they were still a better alternative to their gruesome existence serving the Dalmer.
Inspired by Dalmer technology but unaware of how to use them, the followers tried to build portals, hoping to reach their masters under the sea. The portals didn't work underwater, the accident caused a portal to the bottom of the sea to be opened. The cataclysmic water pressure caused a massive flood in the city that was passed off as an industrial accident.
=== Zalgoral, the tentacled dragon ===
The demon cult in the meantime had a unique message reach them, under the influence of the synthesized poison, to mine precious stones and build a monstrous sword for their master, whose name Zalgoral was prudently whispered amongst the masters of the cult. The sudden vision and its unfamiliar tone compared to the former messages was suspicious. Despite this, the demon cult threw itself mind and body into this objective.
The cultists mined for precious materials, precious stones, gold, azuri, they made ingots and stored them in secret storerooms and forges unbeknownst to the Dalmer. The cult also unearthed mysterious minerals from their mines near the sea. Crystals and Prisms were extracted and consumed by the faithful during ceremonies. The effects of the crystals and prisms had detrimental effects on the cult, their children were misshapen creatures, with tentacles they hid underneath their work robes. The Demon Cult put them to work in the mines, constantly mining for their master mysterious plan.
With synthesized poison now plentiful, the rest of the demon cult was starting to contest why they were denied its usage, and why they had to eat the crystals and prisms. The political pressure and the threat of losing their small numbers to the followers, the Elders consented. The demon cult all consumed the poison, crystals and prisms in a mass ceremony.
=== The exile ===
The Elders of the followers in the meantime received more visions without the usage of the poison. In these supposed visions they learned the usage of enchanters to enchant their tools and imbue themselves with greater power. With this power, they too started mining with far greater success than the demon cult. The demon cult was on the brink of war, their skin turned pale and their offspring became ever numerous and mutated as their mass ceremonies continued. They eventually learned that the followers were dumping their ingots into the sea.
For this blasphemy the Elders, under the influence of the substances they ingested, ordered the faithful to kill all of the Illagers. The assault was so brutal that the Dalmer intervened by killing all the Illagers and the Demon Cultists fighting each other. The Elders of the demon cult and the followers were chased by the dalmer several kilometers into their mines underneath the sea. The Dalmer eventually gave up on the chase.
The exile did nothing to stop the hostility of the two groups. Both convinced of the others faults the mines became a grotesque war zone of pale tool wielders against monstrosities of eyes, gray flesh and spines. The followers, with their knowledge of enchanting and imbuing were much better warriors and quickly destroyed most of the cultists.
But before the remains of the cult could be destroyed, the Elders of the cult and the followers received a vision from their master. The deaths caused by the infighting created enough corpse sand to summon the demon, which was the plan it had hatched with the elder guardians from the beginning.
=== The Fall ===
And so, the depths of the cave were risen to the surface. The faithful found themselves in a mysterious city under the waves. On the surface, the Dalmer received warnings about a megafauna reaching the surface. They deployed airships and conduit underwater defense platforms to slow the creature down while Maresun (Mass retrain units) could be deployed to immobilize it.
The Dalmer were then horrified when they saw the creature, surrounded by Elder Heralds, monstrous cyclopean grey pufferfish used a magical beam from their eyes to construct an enormous sword that a colossal scaly hand gripped from the depths.
Standing upright, the Tentacled Dragon rose, towering over the bay where the Dalmer extraction city continued to churn. The Tentacled dragon stood tall and without menace or anger, stroked its tentacled chin, raised its sword in both hands and struck sideways through the air.
In a single strike, the ships were sundered, the buildings shattered and crashed to the ground. A tidal wave struck like a blade through the city. The settlements further inland weren't spared, they were pushed below ground and flooded.
Its mission completed, the sword crumbled and fragmented. The Demon returned to its sleep in the depths of the sea. Few of the members of the cult and followers survived the crumbling of the city returned as heroes to the land, having freed the others from the dalmer. All of the elders were dead as well, so it was up to the survivors to take up leadership, under a common name, the cult of Zalgoral.
== The following ==
After they were destroyed, the Dalmer remotely programmed underwater guardians to attack all squid forms which the cultists resemble. When a squid man appeared on the doorstep of the underwater city, they made them hostile to all outsiders of their now ruined water cities. This was all they could do in the state they were in after the strike. 
After the demon was unleashed and disappeared under the sea to sleep, the cult established manor cathedrals and tower shrines all over the country. The guardians stopped the cultists ships from reaching the temple and attacked anything in the water. Since they had no way of reaching it or the Heralds. After a while, the silence of the heralds cause the temple and the city to be forgotten.
The elders continued to eat the prisms and crystals and mutated. They eventually became identical to the Heralds. The cult then built underwater temples by precisely dropping stones in the correct areas. When the temple was finished, the Heralds invested their newly constructed undersea dwellings, giving their instructions telepathically to the new leaders that replaced the leaders, the Evokers.
=== The cycle anew ===
Over time the cults power waned and the demon became a legend of the past along with the the cults ancestry of slavery. The evokers no longer had instructions from the Heralds. The unwanted tentacled children born from their pleasure ceremonies were made into serfs, slaves forced to toil for the cult forever. 
Despite assurances from the evokers of their connection, the general population was still curious about the Heralds, and wished to find them. The Evokers shut themselves away from the population. They stayed in their manors away from the serf villages, leaving their tithe collectors supply them with what they needed.
=== Rise of the pillager trade lords ===
Soon the villagers became curious of their world where many Dalmer machines still remained. By nature the serfs were not violent, and some went exploring the ruins of dalmer installations. These explorers soon became wandering traders, prompting a romanticism of the outside world. The tithe collectors, under orders from the Evokers forbade this practice, and outcast the traders. The serfs obeyed and all traders were cast out. When the hungry traders banded together to pillage the villages. They were aided by their access to better technology scavenged from the Dalmer ruins. This wasn’t universal, some left behind books to help the villages to fend for themselves. The villagers built hired help iron security golems using the little knowledge they had from scavenging the dalmer. 
The cult tries to retake control, by killing the hired help and reopening the mines, but their soldiers often dissent (by joining the pillagers), the elder guardians are silent, and the villages refuse to kneel, using golems for defense and recruiting human champions to fight off tithe collectors.
The Evokers tried once again to rebuild portals but they could not reach the heralds, but they discovered they could reach new lands deep underground and gather precious resources. But it was too little, too late. The pillagers attacked and conquered many manors. 
=== The potion masters ===
Now the new masters of their world, the pillagers returned to their roots as traders and became trade lords. Trade exploded and the trade lords became rich. The new access to Dalmer ruins and the texts of the Zalgoral cult gave them unprecedented access to potion making and the telepathic poison. The serfs as a whole and their trade lords decreed a return to their original religion, and began worshipping Zalgoral. Those who were against this new religion were outcast, taking the name pillagers. 
The villages of the kingdom built great temples dedicated to the demon and the heralds. The villages near the sea began fishing pufferfish, whose poison gave a few visions of the elder heralds. The heralds taught them to craft potions. The practice of potion making, practiced by clerics spread through trade, and it became a speciality of the lordship. 
Potion master's split from the clerics and left for the swamps to continue their studies in the art of brewing, they became known as witches. The clerics learned to make air potions and commercialize them. The witches snapped when they discovered traders selling coral and deep underwater items, impossible to reach without some kind of water breathing potions. 
Realizing the Serfs could have reached the Heralds long ago but wouldn't because they were concentrated on making money, the witches seceded from the villagers. The witches joined the outcast pillagers, offering their help with defensive and offensive potions in combat.
=== Rise of the witch cult ===
Radical witches left the cult, worshipping the demon in swamps, dark forests and turning villagers to their side by thunder and undead bites. The strongest witches became the new evokers as cult leaders.
Soon the Pillagers took control of neighbouring outposts and learned of a race of people known as the end men in their libraries who lived beyond the portals the evokers had built. They reconstructed portals and captured the end men that came through and studied them. Needing resources and manpower, the cult sent wandering traders as a sort of missionary to the trade lords. These traders were rarely well received, as being near the evoker and the dark rituals of the cult causes pale skin. The witch cult built fortress laboratories are deep underground to stop the end men from warping out. 
Soon, the demon Zalgoral appeared in an Evokers vision, saying that his elder Heralds betrayed him. The Demon granted the evoker many gifts, the ability to summon spirit warriors and spines from the ground, to turn invisible and create illusions. 
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