Dragon War

A Dispute Amongst Gods

Old stories often start with "Once upon a time..." bringing doubt to the mind of the listener if the tale is true or simply metamorphical, but there is no such ambiguity around the Dragon War - the results of that conflict are all too real - and recent. The gods involved were not Ascended, but two of the original Voices - Jiisho, the goddess of beauty and wild, primitive nature, and Saynleh the dragon god.

The Focus of Desire

Jiisho is known as the Voice of None because she called no peoples to herself during the Calling. Instead, some of those peoples who were not called asked her to be their god, and she reluctantly agreed. She has a distant relationship with sapient peoples, even those who follow her, because they look to civilize her lands. Interestingly, she maintains an ongoing relationship with the orcs, though she is not their goddess, but given the uncivilized nature of that people group, this is perhaps not surprising.
Jiisho is excrutiatingly beautiful by any standards, with a wild careless, youthful beauty, crowned with a sense and wisdom that shines through in her eyes and the barely sketched lines in her face. Those who have seen her all report different characteristics - tall, short, thin, voluptous, a million different skin and eye colors - she is all women - and none.

Come to me my cherished, my beloved. Fly in the winds on the wings of dragons, for your spirit is fierce, your beauty inspires, and your body is the substance of dreams.

— Saynleh

A God of Stregnth and Dominance

There is little wonder that Saynleh would find Jiisho irresistably attractive. Saynleh is a god who emodies the wildest winds, the fiercest fires, the deepest, most tumultous seas, and he would naturally be attracted to the wild primitive nature of Jiisho, and she to him. And so it was - for a while. The two were lovers for eons.

My love is as handsome as the skies at sunset, as powerful as the earthquake from the depths of the world, as relentless as the currents of the Ur Hilgarria. He sweeps me away on wings of light, beyond the fences of my creation to a place at the Core that is filled with the possible.

— Jiisho

Conflict of Lovers

But Saynleh had an aspect to him that Jiisho lacked - a compulsion for a disciplined orderly mind, and so after a time, as was inevitable, he sought to bind Jiisho to him and remake her. This was vehemently rejected by the goddess whose own discipline was of the body and entirely focused on ordering the inherent processes of life itself, not for something as trivial as ordering her behaviors in interactions with other gods. Proud and unyeilding, she fled from Saynleh who pursued her into the lands of the elves in the North Spiral Mountain Range. There she took up residence in the mountains, weaving her defenses through the creation of monsters able to face down dragons, for though she believed that she was a match for the stregnth of the dragon god himself, she was without a people, and dragonkind are the fiercest and most powerful of the peoples. In war, she knew herself to be overmatched.
Saynleh, smug in his superior stregnth brought his people to the North Spiral Mountains, but his objectives - to capture and subdue his love - made conquest tricky. Jiisho to win, needed only to deny him. She played a game of cat and mouse with the dragon god, leading him from skirmish to skirmish though the mountains. Saynleh consistently triumphed in these, and seemingly forced the goddess and her creations to a battlefield from which there was no egress, a high plateau surrounded by mountains on one side, and a deep rift on the other. Here he laid a trap for his lover, seeking to dominate her where she had no escape and no recourse but to capitulate to his demands.
But the place of battle was not of his choosing, though he did not know that, but of Jiisho's plan. On the Plateau of Jiriah, leylines of earth and fire joined. The dragons and wild beasts fought dreadfully upon this site, the dragons using cunning and stregnth and flight and the beasts of Jiisho pitted stregnth against strength, flight against flight, and horror against cunning. And the beasts prevailed upon this battlefield until Saynleh, seeing that fear gripped his people, released his vision from Jiisho, and tended to their courage. Then, in the midst of battle, when the triumph of the dragon god seemed certain, Jisho rent the leylines of the Plateau of Jiriah and caused a rift in the mountains to be and the dragons who opposed her fell into the rift. And the dragon god was angered at the deaths of his dragons, and he drew his power to himself and opposed her. And the rift in the mountains Shattered the entire land from North to South, and mountains rose up and the land fell into the deep and the waters under the land rose up to fill the lesser sea. Then the land itself broke into the depths and the North lands of the Echovad Forrest were spread apart and the north lands sunk below the waters of the Ur Hilgarria until only the mountain tops remained. And the people of Lameravis, the elves of the northlands perished in the floods and destruction.

An Enraged God Intervenes

"I have had more than enough of those two. They are tearing up my forest, sinking my land and killing my elves. It's annoying me and crushing Saimon and it's going to stop right now.

— Lameravis

Lameravis was extremely angry by the destruction of his lands and appealed to the other Voices to intervene and halt the continued conflict between these two gods and the ongoing destruction of his people. This understandable but uncharacteristic intervention by the normally hedonistic and careless elven god put an end to the conflict. Lameravis came down on the side of Jiisho, though the other Voices, most notably the All Father, felt that blame attached to both sides for the destruction as it was Saynleh's oppresion of Jiisho that started the conflict, but Jiisho's escalation that initiated the destruction of the northeast land of Arrhynsia when she never sought intervention or protection from the other Voices before resorting to such extremely destructive measures. The matter looked for a short while as though it would create a widespread civil war of the Voices, but the calm good sense of Crwydryn prevailed and a compromise all could agree on was found.
In the end, the Dragon War came to a quick and quiet end. With all the Voices united against him, Saynleh was bound, and faced the judgment of the other Voices. These however were unwilling to allow dragonkind to be without a god, so the All Father extended his power and divided the self of Saynleh into the aspects of B'hamat the dragon god of law, knowledge, order and death and T'iamat the dragon goddess of impulse, wisdom, chaos, and life. Together, these two aspects of Saynleh manifest in the king and queen of the Chromatic Continent, and rule those of dragonblood jointly.

Scars

The Shattering remade large portions of Arrhynsia, sinking much of the plains and woodlands of the northeast below the waters of the ur Higarria, creating the Shattered Isles, a series of magical islands where species that few have ever seen have evolved and live, and people who wish to be lost to history go. The populations of these Shattered Isles is very small, and their biological and cultural diversity is enormous.
Within the lands of the elves, hundreds of thousands of elves were lost to the flooding and destruction of the northern lands. The wild beasts created by Jiisho took up residence in the remaining area on the east sloped of the Spiral Mountains, while the dragons abandoned the area and returned to their homeland on the Chromatic Continent.
To the west of the North Spiral Mountains, the land sunk, and the lesser sea appeared as a major freshwater inland sea. This body of water became critical infrastructure to cheap transportation of goods and services, and became a major trade highway for the far flung merchant empire of Dryadae, founded by Ancyia, Queen of Ways, one of the Six - the consorts of Lameravis.
The second most profound change to the land was the disturbance of the Spiral Mountain Range. Once nothing more than a young mountain range, the Spiral Mountains became a geothermal, geological and arcane nightmare, practically impassable and uninhabitable effectively dividig the continent of Arrhynsia in two.

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