Chapter VI · Timeline and Events

The Mourning

Coming events

It began with a map full of toppled figurines and a Council that had no plan. Within a week, Usmon's army was ambushed in the desert, Usmon's holiest man was dragged through a portal that shouldn't exist, and a town hundreds of miles away turned to stone. People call it the Mourning, as if naming it might make it stop.

The Fall of Runswick

Runswick, Usmon's capital and the home of the High Tribunal of Blades, was supposed to be the bastion that stopped any army from advancing into Usmon. An unknown force razed it to the ground. Usmon's scouts couldn't agree on what it was. Some reports said demons from another realm, some said a necromancer's army, and some said an ethereal construct born from the Fiend's Chasm's volcanic ash. Every report agreed that the enemy wielded aetheric manipulation powerful enough to silence the nation's largest city.

In Peltragow, the elderly Custodian Rerrikhih went before the Grand Council of Arcanum. Its walls would never hold, he argued. The army had to meet the enemy at the canyon pass through the Eldritch Mountains, the only route for a force that size, and it needed the Aetheric Nexus to strip the enemy of its aetheric advantage. With some persuasion, Grand Councilor Hogem agreed, on the condition that every Justicar, his personal guard and the Council's mercenaries march with it.

The Battle at the Eldritch Pass

The army marched for days across the desert and camped on a hill overlooking the mouth of the canyon. The enemy waited on the far side for a week. Then sentry horns sounded from the rear. The attack came over the hill the army had marched through, not out of the canyon.

Thousands of skitz swarmed the hilltop, formed ranks and loosed arrows in volleys while a second wave skittered around the flanks. Among them moved figures in what looked like skin-tight armor. They were steel bodies with pistons for muscles and glowing blue eyes: souldriven, inside Usmon, in violation of the treaty. The largest, covered in spikes, seized Rerrikhih and led him calmly toward a swirling, mirror-like oval in the air. It was a portal, which everyone knew was impossible.

A bolt of flux struck the portal. The world went silent and still, and then a thunderclap and a storm tore the battlefield apart.

The Mourning

At that same moment, a storm of thick, sulfurous fog swallowed the town of Wolfpine. Its air tastes of volcanic ash and clings to the skin. Lightning crawls constantly through the clouds along its edge. Everything alive inside it was turned to gem-encrusted stone, in detail fine enough to show the pores of the skin: families at dinner, a boy beside his ball, dogs, pigs and birds. Food on the tables stayed fresh. A gem pried from one of the statues crumbles to dust, and the statue with it.

The storm's edge stopped a few miles outside Murkwell, a wall of fog stretched across the horizon as if something were holding it back. Onlookers line up to watch it. Anyone who touches it turns to stone. Defenses have been set up to contain it, and someone has been attacking them. Now the Mourning is growing again.

Rumors and Reports

• A handful of survivors walked out of the fog alive on a stolen military train. Each bears a strange, scar-like mark on the forearm that seems to move when you aren't looking straight at it. People call them the imbued.
• Some say the souldriven created the Mourning as a weapon. Others say the strangers who came out of it created it.
• Murkwell is emptying. Airships packed with Sovereigni families circle overhead and cut the ropes of anyone trying to climb aboard. Looters and Veil Runners take over abandoned homes.