The Thousand Year Rebellion and the Last Uprising

16,000 to 15,000 B.C. (Before Collapse)

The only lands that remained free from the Emperors were the Carentan Forest (last enclave of the ancient treants), the fey homeland of Cernoa, the underground kingdoms of the dwarves, and the mountainous gnomic stronghold of Tanatra. The giants were almost exterminated by the invaders in the early waves of attack, while the dwarves closed the gates of their underground cities until the dragons were finally defeated.
The Emperors were each powerful enough to keep the others in check, while the native strongholds of Tanatra, Cernoa, and the Carentan Forest served as beacons of freedom. The millennia passed in detente, with the long-lived draconic dynasties providing political stability to the continent, supported by tens of thousands of slave-citizens. Soon to be known as ausrani, these human, orc, and elven slaves adjusted to their new homelands. Over hundreds of thousands of years some evolved into goblins, halflings, trolls and other humanoids.
There were many attempts to overthrow the rule of the dragons over the course of their two hundred thousand year rule. 17,000 years ago a series of powerful uprisings erupted across the Five Empires, all but the last unsuccessful. By sixteen thousand years ago, the inbreeding of the imperial draconic bloodlines had much weakened the Emperors. At the end of the Thousand Year Rebellion the corruption, incompetence, and cruelty of the imperial courts provoked what would become known as the Last Uprising.
The Uprising began with an revolt of the pastoral wild elves of Kuroshar far in the north. Inspired by the Kuroshari example, and quietly backed by the Tanatran gnomes and the sea kingdoms, the Uprising spread quickly across Ancathra. While there are many myths, legends and heroic figures associated with the Last Uprising, the best remembered is the half-orc Mother Ausra. Ausra was a revolutionary leader in the last decades of the war, leading guerilla units against the remains of the Five Emperors’ slave armies. In some stories, she was a druid of Brea, Mother of All, performing miracles of healing as well as being a masterful tactician. Little is known of the historical Ausra, though her influence is so great that even today, the elves, humans, orcs and the humanoids descended from them refer to themselves collectively as the ausrani .