The Last War raged on, the day of The Mourning, 20 Olarune, 994 YK. Across Khorvaire, armies vied for control of various strategically relevant assets and positions. In Cyre alone, mercenaries mixed it up with platoons of every side, battalions clashed on wartorn expanses, and wizards blasted away at one another in a never-ceasing prismatic spray of alliance-shifts and vengeance declarations.
Amid the chaos, a number of embassies acted as tiny bastions of sanity. Diplomats and dignitaries tried their hands at international politics, just as their parents and grandparents had. On the one hand, no one wanted to be at war. On the other hand, there was just too much bad blood to simply forgive and forget. The only viable option was continued social manipulation; at least that kept the deaths to a minimum.
That day in Cyre, the largest Brelish Embassy was set to host a lavish soirée, boasting attendees from several nations, as well as famous College of Creation bard extraordinaire, Fend Phadian. The Thranish Embassy was on lockdown over an eldritch-machine threat. The Karrnathi Embassies were being evacuated as Cyran forces were rumored to be preparing for simultaneous strikes on all twelve of them. The Aundairan Embassy was invaded by Karrnathi forces. Diplomacy was not doing particularly well.
The weather, by all accounts —and there were not many afterward— was clear. Sunny, cloudless, and windy. (That is obviously not counting the numerous Control Weathers, Gust of Winds, Create Waters, and Call Lightnings being bandied about. Weather forecasters had long-since disavowed spell-based interference as Meteorological Anomalies Generating Individualized Climates and let the world pull out their umbrellas as a free action.) But for the most part…clear.
That is, until the fog rolled in. Or more precisely, rolled out.
No one knew where it had started from, or even if it had originated inside Cyre, because anyone on the scene was overtaken and is no longer with us. In fact, at least one Aundairan mage was scrying on a Cyran site from outside Cyre and was permanently blinded at the moment the Mourning swept over his target. In fact, there are a number of magic users who were outside Cyre but whose magic was overlapping the Cyre border at the time of the Mourning. They are scattered back to where they came from now, held for observation by governments or research organizations trying to determine why they are the way they are. Because, to various degrees, they are certainly not All Right.
One possibility: their active spells came to life and escaped, taking part of their casters’ essence along with them. Another possibility: the effect that caused the Mourning was designed to prevent witnesses, or perhaps just really had it out for magic users.
Whatever the case, the immediate effect was like flicking off a life switch. Armies fell dead, either from the rolling fog’s effect or from being frozen at the sight and cut down by an enemy. Only those able to magically escape the country’s borders ahead of the haze were spared. Their stories are the only eyewitness accounts that exist. (And they are, to a one, emotionally scarred by their harrowing experience.)
The fog rolled out and stopped at the borders of Cyre. The exact borders. There could be no clearer sign that this had been an attack on Cyre specifically, that the armies and adventurers slain were just collateral damage in the wholesale destruction of over 1 million Cyran citizens.
But the horrors didn’t stop there. The fog stayed. No magical wind could sweep it aside in any lasting way. No Dispelling or Protective Bubble of Sanctify spell could permanently ‘cure’ any part of the affected land. And the fog itself? Those who stay for too long in it begin to hallucinate, to mutate, to sicken or age prematurely, even to just disappear into the fog, as if swallowed whole. And nothing rots in the fog. Upside: there is still fresh fruit in baskets on the grounds of Cyran orchards, picked on the day of the Mourning. Downside: there are still fresh corpses dripping blood on battlefields across the countryside. Perhaps worse, that rot prevention also works the other way: wounds don’t heal in the Mournlands. Natural heading doesn’t work, and magical healing only does a fraction of what it should.
Which might even be fine for short periods of time if you were the only thing in the fog. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
Magic was given life by the Mourning. Spells twisted free of their casters and surged to bestial dominance of the country. These living spells ooze, flit, and drip across the landscape, attacking the living like rabid guard dogs protecting a sprawling junkyard. The junk too is alive; swords, shields, and armor held together by mud and anger skitter and crunch across battlefields, prepared to devastate any in their paths. Mutated adventurers driven mad by their time in the fog attack—and reportedly eat—those unlucky enough to stumble across them.
In the four years since the Mourning, some small strides have been made. Certainly, the largest was the Treaty of Thronehold; many saw the Mourning as a sign that war might finally be getting out of hand, and the desperate rush to declare a final and all-encompassing peace was both heart-warming and—to conspiracy experts—deeply suspicious. In the peacetime after though, the King’s Wands reportedly have successfully created a small number of protective suits that hold fast against the debilitating mutating fog. Most fascinating, some adventurers have potentially discovered that embassies maintained their international status during the Mourning, and even to this day have not been overtaken by the fog.
And we haven’t even mentioned The Lord of Blades.
