The Shattering

The Cost of War

The Shattering was a world altering explosion that broke the crust of the world under Arrhynsia as a result of a inauspicious release of deity magic during the Dragon War at the Plain of Enlightenment. The Dragon War was a conflict between two of the original gods (the Voices), Jiisho and Saynleh. During the war the two deities battled head to head, and used major arcana on each other, their followers, and the world. The Shattering occurred when two leylines in conjunction in the Spiral Mountain Range were charged with deity magic. The world's crust, unable to contain the power, shattered the tetonic plate interface under the Spiral Mountains into it's two pieces - the western plate and eastern plate. The Plateau of Jiriah which was the epicenter of the conflict, became a geographical nexus for continetal structural change with the movement of these tetonic plates across the broken seam. The western plate was depressed and slammed eastward, diving under the eastern plate and causing strong lifting of the west edge of the eastern plate and the ridge of the mountain range that sat upon it north of the Plateau of Jiriah. At the same time, the dropping of the western tetonic plate caused a cracking normal tothe ridge line that provided stress relief for the damaged plate creating a deep depression in the world's surface south of the plateau and in the plains west of the Spiral Mountain. This depression filled with water from the mountain range's watershed and underground reservoirs. This enlarged water source became the feeder to the Tiny River which, after the Shattering, was no longer tiny. Further out northeast from the geographic shear plane of the Plateau of Jiriah, the rise of the eastern plate near the spine of the Spiral Mountains sunk the far east portion of the the plate downwards under the blanket of magical waters of the Ur Hilgarria . The eastern lands, rooted in the broken stone as the world's flexed, spread to the northeast, and new underwater mountains were formed. The residual geography left nothing but a scattering of islands throughout the Northeast of Arrhynsia in the North Ur Hilgarria known today as the Shattered Isles. To the south, in the area between the land of the dragons and the lands of Dryadae, the lowlands were submerged, and the Chromatic Continent became an isolated land. This was relatively uninhabited land, but the loss of graing and farmland contributed to the massive econmonic impacts of the Shattering.
Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly elves, perished in the immediate catastrophe, and the economic losses were incalculable. The world's climate was severely impacted for a decade as global cooling ensued from the extreme initial volcanic activity which caused global crop failures, famine and starvation of millions. After most of the dust and ash from the initial upheaval settled out of the atmosphere, the entire planet remained impacted to a lesser degree as the new geothermally active areas continued to produce dust and ash at a much lower level, shadowing the sun's light. Food production shifted to crops with lower sunlight requirements, and a greater reliance on ranging livestock emerged In the history of sapient beings on the continent of Arrhynsia, no single environmental disaster had more profound impacts on the world.