The Elven Uprising and the Fall of the Giants
Revolution
The Giants are punished for their insolence and abuse of power.
The surviving giant civilizations of the Sul’at League and the Cul’sir Empire never quite recovered from the events of the quori invasion. Horrible arcane curses and plagues swept through the land as a result of the Moon Breaker cataclysm and the blood magic that had been practiced to initiate it, and the elves and drow used the opportunity provided by these catastrophes to rebel against their giant masters some thirty-nine thousand years ago. At that time, the elves hardly resembled the proud, powerful race they have become, but they carried the spark of magic within them, even if they were more gifted with divine magic rather than the arcane, like their haughty eladrin cousins back in Thelanis, the Faerie Court. As the decades passed, the elf slaves concealed the fact that they had been learning to practice magic from their giant masters, nurturing these skills to a greater degree with each passing generation. Contemporary Aereni knows little of this time. The extant histories only reliably begin tracking the elves’ history—magical or otherwise—with their escape from Xen’drik. But the legend of the elves’ grand, race-defining escape is still told to all Aereni, forming the foundation of their acceptance of death and reverence for their ancestors in the form of the undying. As all good legends do, the Aereni story begins with a hero, an elf slave named Aeren Kriaddal. Aeren served a powerful giant shaman for the greater part of her life. Eventually earning the powerful creature’s trust, Aeren was allowed to observe and even aid in the giant’s most potent rituals, all of which involved blood sacrifice. Through this participation, she learned to cast simple spells. One day, Aeren was ordered by her master to retrieve the day’s sacrifices for the ritual. Kept in a small pen near the giant’s house, these sacrifices typically consisted of livestock or captured wild animals. This day, however, Aeren opened the door to the large pen and found that it contained only a single small figure: an unconscious female elf. In a numb haze, Aeren took the elf slowly back to her master's abode. Her conditioning was too thorough for her to do anything else and on some level, she doubted her master meant to slaughter her fellow elf simply for the purpose of enhancing his magic. Aeren’s assumption was wrong. The giant shaman plunged a knife—a weapon the size of a large greatsword in an elf’s hands—into the elf, spilling her blood to power a potent magical ritual. Horror struck Aeren just as cruelly. The magic released by the sacrificial ritual was more potent than any Aeren had seen her master perform before. Despite her shock at the death of the sacrifice, the portion of her mind fascinated with magic took note of the power released by the sacrifice of a sentient being like an elf(as opposed to that of a mere beast). But the betrayal of her trust in the giant shaman seeded a new thought into Aeren’s mind: revolt against those who would treat elven lives no better than those of cattle. Aeren began to carefully and slowly build a secret contingent of like-minded slaves, including a few who were eager pupils of the magic Aeren could teach. From these unpromising beginnings, the revolution nurtured the seeds of magical lore, and slowly expanded it with each passing year. Eventually, the elves began divine and arcane magical experiments of their own. The elven slaves at first recorded their trials and successes on pilfered scraps of parchment and leather, but the thefts were too risky—the giants might find them out. Instead, they found that their own blood was an ideal ink, and the bones of their own dead served as a perfect record for their findings. The giant suspected nothing. Aeren never forgot the power unleashed by the sacrifice of one of her own race, and she conducted her own secret experiments apart from those of her conspirators, always seeking to unleash the power of blood just as the giants did. She had no desire to sacrifice her own people for any reason, but she felt that she was close to recognizing some key elements. Aeren’s giant master felt the same way. Many more elves passed across the giant shaman’s sacrificial altar but to no greater effect. Those who were sacrificed wailed in their chains if conscious, asking for release, or fought wildly to avoid the drugs that would render them mutely accepting of the giant shaman’s sacrificial knife. With a flash of intuition, Aeren finally recognized the missing element one day after a particularly vicious sacrifice. Each victim was unwilling. Even when unconscious or drugged, the slaves’ souls cried out for life, not death. Aeren’s insight fired her with steely determination. In the wake of her hard-won knowledge, it was finally time to initiate the elves’ escape from Xen’drik. Aeren shared her theories on the power of blood sacrifice with the trusted core of her secret resistance movement. With this precious knowledge, they hatched a daring plan for the elves to escape the captivity of the giants. But secrecy, even among the elf slaves, was vital, lest betrayal ruin all their years of hidden labor. Of all the thousands of elves held in captivity, Aeren selected only one hundred others to share the magical knowledge necessary to free the elves, as well as the exact time of the escape. When the appointed day of freedom came, Aeren walked into her master’s chambers. All across Xen’drik, her cohort of conspirators did the same. They all spoke the final words of a terrible ritual, prepared in advance over many months. The ritual was powered by the sacrifice of all the collected elf heroes. In that instant, all these participating elves, scattered across the continent in key locations, gave up their lives. Mighty detonations of arcane power were born flaming into the world. Giant citadels fell, towns were expunged of their giant populations—and elves everywhere saw the signal for revolt. Led by agents of Aeren and her inner circle, the elf slaves slipped away in the tumult. During the Flight of the Slaves, as the elves call their exodus, a powerful, mysterious elf cleared the way for the fleeing elves of Xen’drik, diverting giant patrols, guiding lost groups of elves, and even obliterating obstacles (giant or otherwise) in displays of blazing power. Upon arriving at the northeastern coast of Xen’drik, the freed slaves discovered a journal, prepared by Aeren and placed within a platinum urn. Carried to the shore by an unwitting messenger, the journal documented the ritual that resulted in the great sacrifice of the elf heroes, as well as Aeren’s notes on the rite the elves eventually came to call the Ritual of Undying. Aeren, unlike the other elven heroes of the revolt, did not perish. The influx of positive, radiant energy from the astral dominion of Irian, the Eternal Dawn during the finalritual sustained her existence even as it ended her biological life. Aeren Kriaddal was transformed into the first of the undying, though to protect this secret the elves claimed that Aeren had died in the revolt, a claim that most scholars today still repeat. The freed slaves escaped in rafts and boats they crafted by the thousands across the Thunder Sea to the small, tropical island continent that lay south of Khorvaire. They carried with them all the possessions they could manage, including in some cases livestock and even horses. The elves named their new land Aerenal, or “Aeren’s Rest” in the Elven tongue. But the giants were not willing to let the entire underpinnings of their civilization—elven slave labor—simply walk away. The Giants threatened again with destruction so soon after having forced the quori to return to the Plane of Dreams, were wholly unprepared to fight another war. Faced with losing the tattered remnants of their empires to the elves’ rebellion and flight, the giants decided to unleash the power of the same grotesque blood rites they had used to stop the quori on their rebellious slaves. Before the giants could unleash such earth-shaking destruction a second time, and before they could reach the Oasis of Blood to claim the Orbs of Dragonkind that might have been used to spare them from draconic retribution, the dragons of Argonessen decided that their former protégés would not be allowed to repeat their cataclysmic mistake. In a display of draconic power that has not been seen since the Light of Siberys and the Eyes of Chronepsis drafted thousands of other dragons into a military force beyond human comprehension. This draconic armada descended upon Xen’drik. The flights of dragons blotted out the sun and for the first time since their epic war with the fiends, the full might of Argonessen was brought to bear. In less than a week, the dragons cast down the last of the giants and expunged the titans’ empires with their elemental fury and epic magic. When their wrath was spent, the dragons had wreaked almost as much havoc on a continental scale as they had acted to prevent. As a race, they lamented their choice to share their arcane power with the giants. To the present day, that dreadful error is a stain on the memory of all dragonkind and it is one the masters of Argonessen intend never to repeat. The giant civilizations literally disappeared under this fearsome draconic assault, wiped from the face of Eberron, the Material Realm . The drow, many of whom had remained loyal to their giant masters and actually fought against the elven rebels, chose to either view their elven cousins as weak for leaving Xen’drik rather than taking the fight to the giants (the Vulkoori) or as traitors to the giants cause (the Sulatar). Some wanted nothing to do with either side and just wanted to find safety from the dragons' attack(the Umbragen). Most of the drow went into hiding in the Xen’drik countryside or rode out the destruction underground, while the elves had fled to the island-continent of Aerenal that they named after the leader of their mass exodus, the she-elf Aeren. Most of the dark elves eventually divided between the primitive jungle-dwelling drow tribesmen called Vulkoori who worshipped the scorpion-god Vulkoor (an aspect of the Mockery), the sophisticated civilization of powerful underground-dwelling dark elves known as the Umbragen, and the Sulatar, a nation of fire-worshipping drow who maintained the aggressive military and religious traditions of the Sul’at League, their former masters. Following the dragons’ attack, the giants’ titan overlords disappeared from Xen’drik without any explanation for where they had gone, leaving the lesser giants deeply disturbed at their forebears’ absence and simultaneously somewhat relieved that the leaders who had led them to destruction were gone. The more primitive descendants of this period’s giants in later years went so far as to leave sacrificial offerings to the absent titans to keep them appeased—and to keep them from returning. The dragons laid several mighty enchantments upon Xen’drik that were intended to prevent the re-emergence of a giant civilization whose arcane knowledge and lack of restraint could threaten all life (especially draconic lives) on Eberron, the Material Realm. Additionally, the abhorrent blood magic unleashed by the giants to create and power the Moon Breaker not only left their continent in ruins but also tainted that land with many dangerous arcane curses. The Travelers’ Curse warped distance and terrain, making a journey from one point to another in Xen’drik extremely unpredictable. As a result, the same trip could take only days on one occasion and months the next. In addition, the terrain of Xen’drik magically alters its climate and condition at random. A patch of ground hosting a steamy, overgrown jungle one night becomes a misty coniferous forest with the morning sun. Glaciers melt into lakes in hours and deserts sprout temperate flora overnight. The Du’rashka Tul or “madness of crowds” in the Giant tongue was a powerful arcane curse leveled on Xen’drik by the dragons themselves—a complex epic ward intended to prevent the giants from ever rising to power again. According to legend, the curse affects any group of intelligent beings able to establish a sizable civilization on the forsaken continent, so that they are suddenly gripped by homicidal rage and spread out to kill everything in their path (including each other). The giants, drow and other local peoples of Xen’drik became terrified of this curse in later years and avoided organizing into cities or large social groups, ensuring that Xen’drik’s natives remained as relatively primitive hunter-gatherer tribal societies over the millennia. Under these difficult conditions, the Sul’at, Cul’sir and the other civilized giants slowly devolved over the millennia into the far more primitive true giant subraces of the present time— storm, cloud, fire, frost, stone, jungle and hill giants. In many cases, the giants’ elemental nature became more pronounced as they devolved. Some giants fled the devastation to Dolurrh, the shadow fell, where they were altered by exposure to that mirror world’s shadowy necromantic energies and became the dangerous death giants of that foul plane. The various giantkin races—trolls, ogres, verbeeg, firbolgs, and the like—are all related to these races, though they spread across the other continents from Xen’drik.