Scene 2: Death of a Kingdom

Overking Ivid V decided to command his armies personally in the campaign of CY.584, the greatest mistake he ever made. Paranoid virtually beyond the limits of mere insanity, the Overking's assault on Nyrond was broken at the battle of Innspa where Aerdy forces were utterly routed. Ivid's response was characteristic: he executed anyone involved in leading the armies. He executed more of his own nobles. He executed servants, sages, and serfs.

Finally, Ivid V decided to create utterly loyal servitors among his generals and nobles. He expediently had them murdered and raised in unique undead forms; each was revived as an animus, an undead being possessing all the skills and talents of the former living person. With the logic of the terminally deranged, Ivid came to see this revivification as a reward for his favored courtiers.

Unsurprisingly, as Nyrond defeated Aerdy forces and their demented monarch offered them death and eternal restlessness as a gift, the nobles of the Great Kingdom schemed and plotted and had Ivid assassinated. Unfortunately for them, priests of Hextor (with fiendish aid, most agree) revivified Ivid who rose as an animus monarch. Executions were no longer enough for Ivid. Now he instigated wholesale massacres and genocide.

The North Province seceded, and with the aid of humanoids from the Bone March, succeeded in repelling Nyrondese forces in the Flinty Hills. Wisely, the Nyrondese held off from further massed battles, perhaps sensing the imminent collapse of Aerdy. The North Province’s secession did indeed trigger the complete disintegration of the Great Kingdom. Animus nobles across the land (and the few still living) withdrew all support and the remnants of their armies from the Overking. The Great Kingdom was no more; a welter of petty states, ruled by disputatious nobles (many of them undead), was all that was left. An empire that had stretched from Perrenland to the Aerdi Sea had been wholly expunged in less than four hundred years. Sic transit gloria mundi (or its Oeridian equivalent): so passes away the glory of the world.