Darksun

The Age of the Sorcerer-Kings

2000 BE 0 BE

The struggles would have continued to completion had the Champions not discovered that Rajaat's true plans did not include their survival. Approximately 2,000 years before the current age, the Champions, led by Borys of Ebe, rebelled against their creator and used one of Rajaat's talismans, the Dark Lens, to imprison him in a shadow realm known as the Black. With Rajaat imprisoned, the former Champions renamed themselves Sorcerer-Kings and despotically divided up the surviving city-states among themselves. His escape would spell doom for all of them, so the former Champions selected Borys as Rajaat's warden. As warden, Borys would need to be transformed into a true dragon, a creature nearly unheard of in the setting, in order to be able to cast the spells required to maintain Rajaat's prison. The ritual that transformed Borys into a dragon caused him to go mad and embark on a century-long defiling rampage. The defiling during the Cleansing War had been substantial, but Borys's rampage was the tipping point that turned Athas into a hellish desert.