The Quori-Giant War Begins

Military action

The empire of Giants abuses the gift given to them to fight the alien invasion of the Quori.

The utopia the giants had taken twenty thousand years to build came crashing down almost overnight when the quori, the alien inhabitants of the Plane of dreams, invaded Xen’drik through a planar gate that connected Eberron, the Material Realm to Dal Quor, the Region of Dreams forty millennia ago. Dal Quor’s vile caress brought with it an unspeakable alien doom for the giant empires. Nightmares erupted from the earth and the sky as the Giants faced the psionic power of the quori, a power that all their magical studies had not prepared them to combat. Since the quori found it difficult to operate in the physical world, which operated under such very different natural laws than the Plane of Dreams, the quori created arcane creation forges and actually funneled the primal lifeforce of Eberron, the Material Realm herself to craft the first warforged, living, sentient arcane constructs who swelled the quori’s foul legions. The warforged did not need to eat or sleep, and they proved to be powerful additions to the quori army, especially when paired with docents, spherical, sentient arcane repositories of quori knowledge and memory that could interface with individual warforged to enhance their capabilities. These docents were originally designed to serve as magical safe havens for quori spirits in the event that the Plane of Dreams underwent its cyclical transformation, destroying the entire current race of quori. However, the project met with only limited success and so the docents were later converted into warforged combat aids. After centuries of battle against the quori and their living constructs alongside their rivals and sometimes allies the Cul’sir, the Sul’at’s titan overlords were forced to resort to a desperate gambit to prevent all of Xen’drik from falling before the power of Dal Quor. The Sul’at corrupted the dragons' gift of arcane magic with foul blood rites and brutal sacrifices of their elven slaves and other giants. They returned to the oasis in the Menechtarun Desert where Ouralon had first instructed the titans in the ways of arcane power and constructed a perverse sacrificial altar atop the white ziggurat where the dragons had first made themselves known to the giants of Xen’drik. This altar, the Altar of Blood, soon ran crimson with gallons of blood from the Sul’at’s sacrifices. The oasis paradise where the giants had celebrated their friendship with the dragons was transformed into the horrific Oasis of blood as the Sul’at embraced the dark power granted by blood magic. The majestic marble statues now wept crimson tears and the once-clear pools of healing waters clouded with dark red blood. The white ziggurat still stood, a sand-scoured testament to the broken bond between giant and dragon, but the dark power of blood magic that tainted its altar drew undead denizens and evil spirits like moths to a flame. The giants had tapped these dread powers far beyond their ability to control to forge and empower an incredibly powerful eldritch machine called the Moon Breaker. The Moon Breaker’s baleful power did succeed at driving the quori off of Eberron but nearly took all of Xen’drik with them. The eldritch machine’s activation destroyed Crya, the fourth moon of Eberron, the Material Realm, and in the process severed the planar gate between the world and Dal Quor just as the Sul’at titans’ arcane loremasters had foreseen. As the moon disintegrated, the result was a planetary cataclysm that shook Xen’drik to its core and plunged large chunks of that continent beneath the sea. Mountains collapsed and gaping wounds the size of entire cities were rent open in the earth. The sun’s light was blotted out for a decade as portions of the shattered moon rained down from the sky for years, spreading the unspeakable devastation across the world. The physical connection between Eberron, the Material Realm and Dal Quor, the Region of Dreams was severed, perhaps forever.   At the same time that they unleashed the Moon Breaker, the Sul’at used the shadowy powers of blood magic to empower two other potent artifacts—two Orbs of Dragonkind, one of gold and one of crimson, created through the forced sacrifice of thousands of elven slaves and hidden in the dark shrine of the ancient giant god Rom-Praxis that had been constructed beneath the Oasis of Blood. The Sul’at titans were all too aware that their pursuit of the forbidden rites of sacrificial blood magic might draw down the wrath of the dragons upon their heads, so they created the Orbs to serve as the last line of defense.   The dragons of Argonessen watched all of this tragedy unfold, weeping to see their most precious gift so polluted with evil. They observed from afar as the aftermath of the giants’ involvement in blood sacrilege gave rise to various magical plagues and arcane curses that swept the jungle continent.