The Golden Age of Xen’drik

Technological achievement

The Dragons share their Arcane secrets with the Giants.

The dragons of Argonessen’s stormy romance with the continent of Xen’drik began tens of thousands of years ago and, as tumultuous affairs often do, it ended in tragedy. Sixty millennia ago, the dragons gazed across the Thunder Sea at the glorious empires the giants had raised up on Xen’drik and decided to share the power and majesty of arcane magic with them. Upon the steps of a towering white ziggurat at an oasis deep in the Menechtarun Desert of western Xen’drik, the dragons, led by Ourelonastrix, made contact with the giant kingdoms and began to teach the titan overlords and their fellow giants how to use arcane magic. The giants started to worship Ourelonastrix as the god Ouralon, the lord of knowledge and law, a faith that replaced the giants’ devotion to earlier, more morally ambivalent gods such as Rom-Praxis. The oasis where the great blue dragon and the giants first collaborated was turned by the titans into a magical paradise in honor of their draconic patrons. Living marble statues frolicked among pools of crystalline water whose inherent magic promised life everlasting and the cure to all afflictions of the mind, body, and soul. Vast orchards of date trees sprouted from the sand of the oasis, their fruit grafting joyous visions of the future to all who partook of them. A golden age unrivaled in any other era of Eberron, the Material Realm's history soon followed. Giant and dragon stood side by side, crafting newborn utopias among the giant nations where none suffered from hunger or crime. Together, the giants and dragons cheated death, touched the stars, and kept the Lords of Dust securely imprisoned underground in the Raven Below. Under the dragons’ patronage, the giants crafted sky-scraping monuments and wonders of surpassing beauty that would eventually draw the notice of the inhabitants of Dal Quor, the Region of Dreams. The dragons reveled in the giants’ successes and then returned to Argonessen, drunk with pride and secure in the belief that the decision to teach the giants the full mysteries of arcane magic was a correct one, for the giants were as trustworthy with the power as the elder great wyrms. Time would prove the dragons disastrously wrong.   The giants quickly mastered the arcane arts taught by the dragons and used this knowledge to create magical wonders and artifacts unequaled even in the present day. The giants used their new power to found multiple new giant settlements across the length and breadth of Xen’drik. Among the many accomplishments of the fire-worshipping Sul’at League giants, perhaps the most powerful practitioners of conjuration, transmutation and elemental binding magics ever known onEberron, the Material Realm, was the magical infusion of a portion of the essence of the Raven into a community of their elven slaves, creating the separate black-skinned race of elves known as the dark elves or the drow. The drow were set apart from their elven cousins from the beginning, for the giants often used the drow to hunt down escaped elven slaves or to combat the roaming tribes of freed elven slaves who often launched nuisance guerilla attacks on isolated giants in the deep jungle when they got the chance. In return for this service, many drow received special privileges from their giant masters, although others came to hate their enslavement as much as any elf.   The giants of this period ranged far afield across the length and breadth of Eberron, the Material Realm, even sending exploratory parties to Sarlona. In that distant land, the giants used their magical might to create a race of half-giants by fusing their own blood with that of the psionically-potent humans of that continent. The half-giants took the elves’ place as the giants’ slaves and servants at their Sarlonan outposts. Other legends of the half-giants say that these giant outposts in Sarlona were only established after the fall of the giants’ civilizations on Xen’drik when they tried to escape the devastation the dragons rained down on that continent and that they were the descendants of these giant explorers.   During the twenty millennia of the giants’ golden age, the elves watched and learned much of arcane magic from their place at the giants’ heels. One group of elves known as the Qabalrin broke away from their giant masters and founded their own civilization. The Qabalrin were a reclusive sect of elves whose arcane might even the giants feared, and these elves lived alongside their drow cousins, who they employed as servants and arcane assistants. Stories tell of how the titans first learned their magic from the dragon god Ouralon, bringer of light and law, even as the Qabalrin drew on the power of Ouralon’s terrible divine Shadow. Whatever the truth behind the legends, these elves were the mightiest conjurers and necromancers Eberron, the Material Realm had ever seen, pioneering many of the necromantic techniques used in the present day—along with most of the fundamental principles of the necromantic religion that would one day become known as the Blood of Vol. According to legend, the Qabalrin created the first vampires, some of whom might still lie entombed in their ancient ruins.   The Qabalrin lived in a single massive city-state called Qalatesh, a fortress in the legendary mountainous region of Xen’drik known as the Ring of Storms. Left unchecked, the Qabalrin might have one day dominated the land, but fate—or divine providence— intervened. Over forty thousand years ago, a massive Siberys dragonshard called the Heart of Siberys plummeted from the sky, smashing into Qalatesh. The impact and the resulting devastation (both magical and natural) destroyed the necromantic elves’ civilization. Remarkably, though, the damage did not extend beyond the mountain ring. The giants called this outcome a miracle, citing the harsh justice of Ouralon and the event as a divine warning to those who would traffic with the Shadow.