The Sorrow

A monster unlike any we have ever known. The world still bears the scars.

File:The sorrow png.png

## **Power**

No one knows where the Sorrow came from. No one knows what Sorrow is. But 30 years ago, it went on a rampage that ripped Kalarain apart. The Sorrow is the father of the Psychotropes, the Undead, the Warped Ones, and probably the Drained. It is the most powerful creature in recorded history.

The Sorrow was defeated, at great cost, decades ago. But it continues to affect the world. The aftereffects of its rampage, the Lamentations of the Sorrow, plague Kalarain. Much of the suffering of the modern era comes can be lain at its feet..

But, it is probably best to start at the beginning.

## The Heralds of Midnight

In the year 1030 AS, around 40 years ago, a swarm of black beetles ravaged a granary in what is now West Mosshaven. These beetles were not of any species previously seen, being unusually aggressive and focused in their destruction. They appeared, destroyed the crop, and then vanished into the night.

This is the first recorded sighting of a Herald of Midnight.

A month later, a Methusian ship was dragged under the waves by a black tentacled horror. The month after that, a pack of enormous black wolves attacked an isolated Lenoran settlement, and then two weeks after that, a gigantic black dragon started ravaging Aethaelore’s coast. And at that point, people started to pay attention.

The Heralds of Midnight are believed to have been the servants of the Sorrow, and while there were never that many of them, over the next decade they popped up in almost every country. The bestial Heralds were easy to spot, oversized, hyper-aggressive creatures coloured midnight black. More insidious were the hidden Heralds, who took on seemingly normal forms. A firebrand Traansadooran preacher who tried to rally the country to a crusade, a bespectacled accountant of Nur who stoked racial tensions, these Heralds got a lot further than their monstrous counterparts ever did. Their goals, without exception, seemed to be causing destruction and harm.

The monstrous Heralds only came at night, the hidden Heralds operated at all hours. The connection between them might have been missed completely, were not for one unifying factor: if a Herald was slain, or captured, they turned into black smoke and vanished. Like the Sorrow, no one is entirely sure what they were.

They were not initially known as the Heralds of Midnight. That title was given after what came next.

## The Ravaging

The night the Sorrow first manifested is known as The Arrival. In 1042, it manifested in Sarea, and the first thing it did was turn every living thing in Sarea to stone. The second thing it did was kill the entire population of Vernon-Lament. The third thing it did was manifest in the Provinces of Ash and tap into six enormous sigilsites.

And then it went on a rampage.

A Sorrow manifestation was heralded by a warning. Around 10 seconds before it arrived, everyone in the region would feel a deep, gut-wrenching anguish. This feeling would increase in intensity, bringing people to the point of tears, and then it would suddenly stop.

That meant the Sorrow had arrived.

The Sorrow was invisible. It is believed to have had a physical form, but no one knows what it looked like. It left footprints, but those footprints would vary, sometimes paws, sometimes tentacles, sometimes incomprehensible twisted shapes (but always, always enormous). It moved across countries, but sometimes it disappeared, and sometimes it teleported, appearing in cities and towns on the other side of the world. It moved with incredible speed.

The Sorrow was able to call upon all six types of magic, perhaps innately, perhaps due to the sigilsites in the Provinces of Ash. It used these to destroy, warp and kill. Towns were incinerated by walls of fire, cities were sucked into the earth. Regions were bathed in mutative magic (the origin of the Warped Ones). Armies that marched against it had the life drained from them. It responded very badly to attempts to destroy it, and attempts to discern the nature of its thoughts broke the minds of mages who attempted it. Even after it left, destructive magics would linger.

Almost every country in the world suffered in one way or another, with only two notable exceptions. The Sorrow never came to the Eternal Thunderland. And it never attacked within the borders of The People’s Happy Utopia. Emperor Bae used the opportunity to viciously invade a number of Utopia’s neighbours. It was later discovered that Malvarzand, the adviser behind Bae’s rise, was a Herald of Midnight.

There was only one window of respite from the Sorrow. Nine months after it began its rampage, a group of mages gathered in the Provinces of Ash to try and sever the Sorrow’s connection to sigilsites. The Sorrow manifested and went berserk. As the last mage fell, something happened. A pulse of something rippled outwards; across the world, thousands of people fell, clutching their chests in agony. When they rose, their skin had turned ghost white, and they were disconnected from magic. This was the birth of the Drained. The Sorrow vanished, and did not manifest for three months.

Two more groups came into being during the Sorrow’s rampage. The first was the undead. The day after the Sorrow struck down the people of Vernon Lament, the entire population rose again. The second was the psychotropes. Many who came into contact with mind-altering magics of the Sorrow found themselves altered in this way.

## The Battle of Black Isle

Two years into the Sorrow’s rampage, the people of the world made their stand. Mogg, the Orcish discoverer of force magic, and Nargal, Troll inventor, led a rainbow alliance of people from groups and nations across the world. On Black Isle, they prepared, and then began an enormous ritual that they believed would destroy the Sorrow.

It was powerful enough to draw the Sorrow’s attention, and it attacked.

The Battle of Black Isle took place over seven days. The Sorrow battered itself against magical defences built up over months as legions of mages reinforced them; incredibly, they held. Speakers, wizards and alchemists worked day and night to complete the ritual. From the second day onwards, huge groups of psychotropes, drawn in by the Sorrow’s rage, assaulted the Isle. Many were newly formed from surrounding communities. The brave warriors of Mogg’s alliance, led by the slightly unhinged Provincial Commander Garamoor, held them back. On the fourth day, the surprise appearance of believed-long-dead Varamir the Revenant drove back an attack was on the cusp of breaking through.

On the seventh day, a veil of darkness fell across the Isle, and all fell silent. No one knows what happened next. No one inside survived. But when the shadows cleared, the Sorrow was gone. Across the world, the remaining Heralds vanished simultaneously in puffs of smoke.

Everything living on the island had been reduced to ash. Only at the very centre of the island could anything be found; a circle of stone figures, Mogg and Nargal among them, clasping hands and smiling. Victorious.

## Lamentations of the Sorrow

The residual aftereffects the Sorrow left behind are known as the Lamentations of the Sorrow. Lamentations are extremely potent and can encompass towns, regions, even whole countries. They are also very persistent; while certain methods can be employed to mitigate some Lamentations, usually only the Nexus can eliminate them completely.

Notable Lamentations include:

* **Limbus fields** - magical fields which amplify negative emotions, notably sadness, anger and apathy. One thread of emotion is usually dominant.

* **Mayfly Elementals (aka ‘devils’)** - Insane, aggressive elementals who form spontaneously, then (usually) go on destructive rampages. Mayfly elementals live only a short time - months to mere minutes,

* **Blighted land** - Areas of disease. death and decay. Blighted land can be found almost everywhere the Sorrow went, the severity ranges from ‘slightly harder to grow crops’ to ‘poisons and kills people who go there within hours’.

* **Null zones** - Areas where healing and magic are weaker and more difficult to use, or even disabled completely. Can render sigilsites nonfunctional.

* **‘Wild magic’ zones** - Areas where magic use can be unpredictable and dangerous.

* **Petrification** - Found only in Sarea. Much of the Sarean population remains petrified to this day.

* **Wraiths** - Spirits of the first tier warped by the Sorrow into mindless creatures of destruction.
	+ Wraiths mostly lie dormant, usually manifesting only during the casting of powerful rituals/ceremonies of healing and life energy. They are also drawn to the Nexus, and constantly attempt to destroy it, generating Blight in the process.

* **Shades** - Spirits of the second tier warped by the Sorrow. These are much rarer than Wraiths.
	+ Shades, like Wraiths, usually remain dormant. Even when awake, they cannot think properly, and can only influence the world in the slightest of ways - a quiet whisper here, a shrivelled tree there. They only become dangerous when they enter a mortal body, but when they do, they become very, very dangerous indeed. A bodied Shade gains a mortal’s intellect, the powers of a second-tier spirit, and an unquenchable desire to destroy and ruin.
	+ Shade possessions only occur when a unique set of prerequisites are met, typically involving specific rituals that have to be performed by mortals. As such, accidental Shade possessions are rare.

* **Sorrowvectors** - Sometimes, Lamentations do not affect a set area, but are instead affixed to a person. These people are known as Sorrowvectors, and have been warped by the Sorrow’s magic into walking sources of Lamentations. A Sorrowvector with the Blighted Land Lamentation will blight the land wherever they go, another Sorrowvector may constantly generate Mayfly Elementals. Usually, they are unaffected by their own Lamentations.

Lamentations can be fixed in place, or they can be transient - sliding across the world like a cloud. They vary in severity, and their intensity can wax and wane. Blighted land is the most common, almost all countries are affected by it in one way or another.

## The Sorrow and The Nexus

Mogg and Nargal had been preparing Black Isle for a very long time, and had been conducting work there even before the Sorrow began its rampage. Nargal is believed to have been the Nexus’ chief architect. It is suspected that the Nexus’ cleansing of the Lamentations of the Sorrow may have been the next step in Nargal and Mogg’s plan, a way to remove the Sorrow’s aftereffects after they defeated the Sorrow itself.

However, what is definitely not clear is how Nargal did it. The Nexus is able to do things beyond what normal magics can achieve. Large-scale, long-range teleportation of the scale that the Nexus can achieve is unheard of. The relative ease at which it cleanses Lamentations seems to be unique.

And unfortunately, there are no known blueprints or written records of the Nexus’ construction; Nargal was notoriously secretive and antisocial, and most of the people that could tell you anything about it died at the Battle’s conclusion. What is known is that Nargal was working on it for at least several months, and multiple mages assisted in the construction, many of them in the final days before the defeat of the Sorrow.

Black Isle remained heavily blighted after the Sorrow’s defeat - no intensive searches were conducted, as the Isle was dangerous to visit. Perhaps buried under a pile of ash, perhaps just missed, the Nexus remained undiscovered for many years.

## Unanswered questions

There is been a lot of debate about what the Sorrow was, and where it came from. Some believe it to have been an elemental, others an immensely powerful spirit. One of the most popular theories is that Dancel-Praise of the Talons of Camara was behind it somehow. It has not gone unnoticed that Sarea, a country in the mental thrall of Dancel-Praise, situated on a sigilsite, was the first place it manifested. Some theorise that Dancel-Praise summoned or created it somehow as a weapon, then lost control of it. Other suggest the Sorrow *was* Dancel-Praise.

Whatever the truth, Dancel-Praise disappeared the night the Sorrow manifested, and has not been seen since.