The Sundering

Disaster / Destruction

A powerful Tor wizard by the name of Petrarch Vitroni, in his pursuit of ascending to the level of god, cast a cataclysmic spell that resulted in devastating consequences for the future of the plane.

Petrarch Vitroni was immediately atomized by the explosion, which shattered his mage tower and created a blast several hundred miles in diameter. The blast was so powerful that tremors from the explosion could be felt on the opposite side of the world, where it woke the slumbering Ancient Red Dragon Rauthuell. The Jungstol Mountains to the West shielded most of the Western continent from the brunt of the blast, which blew Eastward in an oblong spheroid shape.   The parts of the Jungstol Mountain range within the blast radius crumbled into the earth as the shock wave ripped across the continent. The ancient dwarven capital that had long stood at the Easternmost edge of the Jungstol range was caught in the blast and destroyed. In total, half the dwarven population on Divostra was killed by the explosion, including the dwarven royal family. This triggered a decades-long war of succession within the Dwarven kingdom.   The floating cloud giant city of Tel'Akadi, which had floated above the land and out of the reach of the other races, happened to be floating over Vitroni's tower when the explosion occurred. The city took critical damage as the explosion shot up into the atmosphere, knocking the city out of the sky and into the Lareth Sea, killing the entirety of the cloud giant population.   Vitroni's tower had been built on the battlefield where centuries before the Celestials had intervened in the Drow War to stop the Devil God Asmodeus from entering Divostra. Vitroni chose the location because of the arcane power that flowed through its leylines—leftover energy from that divine conflict. The Exotar warriors had set up fortifications throughout the area, keeping immortal watch over the various dimensional rifts that floated around the desecrated landscape.   All three-hundred Exotar warriors were vaporized by the explosion, their souls ripped from their bodies and flung all across Divostra as their corporeal forms returned to the elements. They were trapped on the plane by Asgorath's Barrier, preventing their souls from returning to the higher planes.   The explosion ripped through the continent, sinking the land into the sea as it pushed the earth outward and upward. A ring of mountains formed around a caldera several hundred miles across, cleaving the continent in two and creating the Sea of Hubris. This massive displacement of water caused the seas to recede across the globe and triggered several tidal waves that destroyed coastal cities throughout the plane.   The rock, ash, and dust from the explosion was blown high into the air and carried on the winds, encircling Divostra in a dark cloud that brought on a twenty-year winter. Several animal species died off as plants wilted from the endless night, and the various civilized races throughout the world suffered years-long famines that led to various wars over meager resources.   All of this debris expulsed by the cataclysm was also infused with the thaumaturgic energy that Vitroni had been channeling into his spell. This magical dust settled back onto the world, seeping strong arcane energies into the soil, rocks, and even some of the creatures inhabiting the earth, to be used in the future by practitioners of the arcane to create powerful magical weapons and intensify their spellcraft.