Eä

## Introduction

Eä is the planet on which the events of Conquest are set. Originally formed as a prison for the Primordial Destruction by their fellow Primordial Balance, the planet has become a host to various species both native, fabricated, and alien.

Eä consists of a minimum of four continents, only two of which have been introduced. The largest central continent, Surtoris, contains most of the factions while the northernmost continent is called Mannheim by the Nords. The other two continents, one belonging to the Quiet and the other belonging to the Sorcerer Kings, will be introduced when subsequent factions are released.

## History

### Genesis

After the nameless conflict at the beginning of time, which saw Destruction shatter their sibling Creation into untold pieces in a fit of anger at being wounded, Destruction chose to slumber and nurse their injury before turning to the task of reforging Creation from their shattered remains and beginning the conflict anew. A new Primordial, Balance, was borne from this temporary truce, and sought to prevent both Creation and Destruction from returning to their eternal struggle. To prevent Creation from ever reforming, Balance sent the shards of their shattered sibling spinning in the night sky as stars. To prevent Destruction from awakening, Balance entombed their sibling in a prison woven from the very essence of Destruction itself- the dust hanging in the void that was generated from their eternal struggle. Balance combined this dust with their own essence to form a sphere of stone in which the slumbering form of Destruction raged. Thus the world of Balance was formed.

### The Primordial War

The attempts by the slumbering Destruction to escape their prison caused many changes to Balance. The first Horseman, Famine, betrayed its progenitor and began feasting on Destruction, causing the Primordial to rise in temperature and collapse in on itself to fend the creature off. Famine then turned to the prison itself, causing Balance to create Adamantium in an attempt to create a material dense enough to contain the Horseman. Despite the creation of this material, Famine was able to escape its prison, rending many wounds in the surface of Balance in the process, which then filled with the essence of Destruction. While Famine was eventually contained by Creation's first Horseman, Conquest, and imprisoned once again in Eä, the third Horseman, War, used the wounds inflicted by Famine's escape to create an Abyssal Host to challenge Conquest's Celestial one.

Life was created on Eä from the tears of Balance, who wept as they watched the Horsemen struggle with each other. Initially protected by their insignificance relative to the cosmic scale of the conflict raging around them, Life was able to spread across the surface of Balance and multiply. This exponential growth was able to match and then eventually contain Famine. However, the noise of their constant growth disturbed the slumbering Destruction and so the primordial dreamt the fourth Horseman, Death, into being to bring back the quiet of the Void.

The wail of grief that Balance cried out as the first living thing died attracted the Dragons. Beings born from the fusion of Creation and Destruction, they recognized the unique promise of Life and chose to remove its greatest existential threat: the Horsemen themselves. Initially allied with Conquest, the Dragons defeated and sealed away Death, Famine, and War in the core of Eä once again. They then negotiated a truce with Conquest; instead of being sealed away like their cousins, Conquest would be split up and scattered throughout Balance, so that it could defeat the remnants of the Abyssal Host wherever they appeared.

### The Age of Dragons

The Dragons were the ones to give a name to the world that was Balance. They called it Eä, after the waters that flowed on its surface, and they protected their prize from the remnants of the Abyssal Host. Under their aegis, Life on the surface of Eä flourished, evolving into ever-more complex and diverse forms. Some of these forms even became complex enough to develop their own proto-cultures, but the long-lived dragons, accustomed to the geological pace of evolution, rarely noticed these nascent civilizations until they had already been corrupted by the faster Abyssal Host. The ancient ruins of these dark civilizations, destroyed by the dragons to expunge their heretical worship of Destruction, can be found throughout Eä even in the present day.

These corrupted proto-civilizations were not the only threat to the Dragons. The Exiles, and their arrival on Eä, irrevocably changed the world. Beings from an alien planet that had been shaped under the influence of a shard of Creation instead of Balance, the first Exiles to arrive were pioneers consisting mostly of scientists and explorers who sought to prepare the planet for colonization for their noble masters. The small size of their structures, and the speed at which they developed compared to the dragons' long attention, meant that initially the arrival of these Exiles went unnoticed. It wasn't until a few centuries after the arrival of the first colonists that suddenly hundreds of thousands of refugees began to pour into the planet through the portals that had been set up. These refugees sought asylum from a conflict back on their home world. Over the next century, dozens of Spires, massive living structures, were constructed to house these refugees. The emigration ended with the arrival of the Sovereign, who sealed these portals and isolated the Exiles from their homeworld forever.

Marooned on this new world, the Exiles, under the leadership of the Sovereign, began to grow and expand throughout Eä. This growth finally attracted the attention of the dragons, who correctly identified that these people were not corrupted by Destruction like the civilizations they had previously destroyed. However, they also underestimated these Exiles, thinking that they posed no real challenge to the supremacy of the cosmic beings, instead choosing to send the youngest and weakest of their number to parlay with the alien settlers.