Day of Mourning

Excerpts from the autobiography Witness to Ragnarok: How My Life Began at the End of Days by Ophelia Cyresdottir, sometimes called Ophelia the Orphan - Cyran Avenger, former Mournland relic hunter, former bodyguard to Prince Oargev ir'Wynarn of New Cyre

On the 20th day of Olarune, 994 YK, my homeland, Cyre, the fabled Jewel of Galifar, was destroyed in what can only be described as a magical holocaust of horrific proportions. Over a million Cyrans perished on that day (may they all bask eternally in the light of the Host where the darkness of the Six finds no succor), including Dannel ir'Wynarn, our beloved Queen. Also lost were three massive invading armies that had advanced deep within the borders of our doomed nation. It is beyond me to wish them peace, but I do hope their souls now wander Dolurrh and are not trapped in the bleak hellscape we call The Mournland. Most of we few survivors - often called "lucky" despite the incessant, too-vivid nightmares that plague us all - escaped via lightning rail. A handful of other poor wretches were vomited up by the insatiable dead-grey mists hours, even days later. None of these could explain why they had lived when so many others did not, and their harrowing tales were typically disjointed, contradictory, and sometimes nonsensical...

...Even the circumstances leading up to the apocalyptic event aren't entirely clear. Most existing documents and witness statements agree that the combined Brelish and Thranish armies (led by Princess Borann ir'Wynarn and Bishop-Militant Grodan, respectively), marching under a temporary and tenuous alliance, were engaging a much smaller Cyran force on what is now known as the Field of Ruins. At that same time, a large Karrnathi contingent was marauding through northern Cyre in retaliation for the recent sack of Atur and short-lived occupation of the Nightwood.

Outnumbered and beset from all sides, the outlook for Cyre was bleak. Non-combatants were fleeing their homes in droves, many seeking protection in the capitol, not knowing that Queen Dannel (may she feast forever in the golden halls of the Sovereign Host) had already begun Metrol's evacuation. I was but a girl then, but already had lost my father and one sister to the War and had a mother and two brothers in the field. As my grandmother and I boarded the over-crowded lightning rail car and I took my first breath of that thick, turgid air, I began to weep. I wept not for the family I'd lost nor for the family I feared I soon would. They fought with honor and purpose, after all. If they died, they did so bravely, proud to give their lives for something greater than themselves. No, it wasn't the soldiers I wept for, it was for the rest of us. For everyone else. When I close my eyes, I can still smell that train car, the reek of desperation, fear, and despair. All is lost, we thought. Our world has ended. But we were wrong. There was more to lose. Much more...

...Some accounts claim the Mourning began with a flash of searing light on the Saerun Road at the heart of the battle on the Field of Ruins. Others claim the Mist came first, creeping out from Metrol until it had engulfed the entire nation. As someone who was in Metrol on that day, I can dispute the latter claim. The Mist was not the start of it (how I wish it had been there to obscure my vision and deaden my memories), and although I can't say for certain from my vantage in a fleeing train, it seems unlikely to have originated from the city. Personally, I believe these claims are a not-so-subtle attempt to assign blame for the atrocity at the feet of martyred Queen Dannel. Even in death her enemies seek to hack her down...

...What I saw first was people falling. No thunderclap. No sunburst. Just a score of soon-to-be refugees collapsing simultaneously on the rail platform. My train was just pulling away when the next group fell. This time it was perhaps a dozen, but at their center stood a small boy, seemingly unhurt, still holding the hand of his mother who was dead at his feet. He had a confused look on his dirty, tear-stained face, this boy, then suddenly he looked right at me...and smiled. It was a terrible smile, mouth too wide and too full of teeth. It wasn't until he began running at the train - at me - that I realized it wasn't a smile at all. He was changing - transforming from the inside out - into something hideous, something monstrous. He was nearly unrecognizable as having ever been human by the time he hit the side of the car and was mercifully dragged under...

...Such was the sorcerous fury unleashed on that fell day that the very geography was re-molded: Entire cities shifted from one location to another; fissures ripped apart pasture lands; great hillocks rose from flat earth; and the highlands literally became glass. It is said that the skies above northern Cyre ignited and burned in a pure white conflagration so bright that Thranish soldiers at Angwar Keep across the Brey River were struck blind. Had Queen Dannel access to magic powerful enough to warp reality in this way, even inadvertently, surely she would have unleashed it earlier and used it to claim her rightful place as ruler of a unified Galifar. That she didn't suggests there is something more to the story.

For instance, we know now that House Cannith built an enormous subterranean prison complex deep beneath Cyre where they warehoused dozens of alien, extra-planar threats too powerful to destroy and too dangerous to release. With the hubris typical of the Dragonmarked Houses prior to the Fall of the Tower of the Twelve, Cannith staffed this site with but one true guardian: a warforged rather unimaginatively named Warden. Although the precise location of this underground complex has never been revealed, many speculate that the Glowing Chasm - a vast crack in the earth which emits a cold violet light from impossibly deep within - is the most likely site. We know that the glyphs and wards which served as the prison's fail-safes crumbled on the Day of Mourning, although which of those was the basilisk and which the egg is unclear. In either case, now corrupted by the very entities it was engineered to imprison, Warden unlocked the mystical cages and threw open the gates...

"Ophelia's observations, while invaluable to historians like yourselves, should be mistaken as neither impartial nor completely reliable. There's quite a bit of circumstantial evidence suggesting that Cyre probably did play a role in the Mourning, although it was almost certainly unintentional. Most eyewitnesses report colossal arcane eruptions in the immediate vicinities of the three foreign armies. And is it simply fate's whimsy that the dead-grey mists stop precisely at the Cyran borders? Even Valenar, which had been Cyran territory only decades earlier, remains untouched, almost as if the mist was designed to protect those within from those without. This theory is further bolstered by the odd preservative effect within the Mournland - neither the bodies of the dead nor unprotected foodstuffs are touched by decay. Still, if Queen Dannel did intend to unleash heretofore unprecedented sorcery to protect her nation, why would she attempt to evacuate the citizenry away from that protection? There are no simple answers, sadly. In fact, it's likely that several individual catastrophes created a cascade of ever growing calamity, a 'perfect storm' of misfortune that could neither be planned for nor even imagined."
~ from a lecture given by Minim E. Eivoll to the Korranberg Historical Society