History of Milieurth

In the Beginning

They say that there are a million worlds--each in some measure both wondrous and terrible--floating on the endless sea of existence. Though these realms are in constant motion and often pass inconceivably close to one another, some inscrutable cosmic logic ensures that they never occupy the same space at the same time. Usually. Milieurth sprang into existence when the safeguards of the cosmos failed and two spheres of existence collided.
One of the worlds that gave birth to our own was the Faewilde, a lush world of magic and beauty ruled by King Oberon and his Fairy Court. The other was Draconis, a hellscape of toil and torment ruled with an iron claw by the Dragon of All-Consuming Fire. Where the two planes became entangled, a third and separate dimension, Milieurth, came into existence and gave birth to humankind.

The Waning

As eons passed and the three conjoined realms traveled their path through the aether, both the Fairy King and the Dragon came to the realization that their worlds were fading, becoming more ethereal and less real with the passage of time. The philosophers and scholars of both realms studied, debated, experimented, and eventually came to the same conclusion: Whatever fundamental energy differentiates the real from the imagined was being drained from both worlds by the newly-formed plane that held them together. In time, both Draconis and the Faewilde would be consumed by the world of man.
In the early days of the entanglement, the Fae and the servants of the Dragon were only able to peer into Milieurth through the spots where their realm "poked through" the newly-formed dimension. As time passed and the energy of existence flowed into the middle realm, they gained the ability to take form in these liminal spaces, first as ghostly manifestations and eventually as flesh-and-blood entities. This led to speculation that before the three worlds collapsed into one, the inhabitants of both Draconis and the Faewilde would gain the ability to travel the world of man. Both monarchs vowed that they would conquer the new world and rebuild their homeland upon its ashes.

The Dragon King and the Queen of Mists

Still limited in their ability to affect Millieurth, the beings from its parent realms enlisted humankind to prepare for their coming and eventual conquest. The Dragon was the early victor in the race to bring Milieurth under its sway, leading to the rise of King Atroce, who channeled the power of the Dragon to conquer most of the Milieurth. Despite constant uprisings from the disciples of Oberon, Atroce and his descendants ruled from their court at Camlann for nearly two centuries.
The reign of the Dragon Kings was cut short by the rise of the Queen of Mists, a rebel leader who taught her troops to use stealth and fairy magic to make daring raids on the strongholds of the Dragon King before going back into hiding in the wilderness or among the common folk. After a decade of gathering her army and weakening the forces of the Dragon King through raids and banditry, the Mist Queen's forces began capturing fortresses and occupying the settlements of the Dragon Empire. With each success, support for the Queen of Mists grew among the subjects of the Dragon Empire. In an act of desperation, the Dragon King ordered his sorcerer to cast a spell that would allow the Dragon of All-Consuming Fire himself to manifest on Milieurth long enough to destroy the Mist Queen's armies.
The ritual succeeded in giving physical to form to some part of the Great Dragon's essence, but the manifestation was a raw and unthinking force of chaos and destruction that proved beyond the sorcerer's control. The dragon laid waste to the palace at Camlann and the surrounding country before being violently withdrawn to the Dragon Realm in an explosion of magical force that destroyed the Dragon King and many of his most powerful allies and caused a large swath of coastal Camlann to fall into the sea, creating the Draxtrone Bog. With the Dragon King's forces in disarray, the Queen of Mist rallied her forces and pushed those sill loyal to Draconis out into the unforgiving hinterlands of the north in a series of brutal battles.

With the defeat of the Dragon King, the former Dragon Empire became the Kingdom of Avalon and the Queen of Mists became its High Queen. For nearly 300 years, her descendants have ruled the civilized lands of Milieurth to general approval and support from the citizenry.
In the Savage Lands beyond the borders of Avalon, the former subjects of the Dragon King splintered into a hundred tribes and war bands fighting one another for the wastelands' meager resources. Today, a few of these bands of outcasts still harbor dreams of restoring the Dragon Kingdom to its former glory, many confine their ambitions to mere survival, and some have descended into savagery.