Battle of Hadrian's Crossing

The Battle of Hadrian's Crossing was the last battle in the War of Undying. This climactic event, often described as a desperate gamble in histories, is not quite what most imagine.

Few know the truth of how the war ended, but it wasn't due to the battle. The massed armies of elves, dwarves, humans, gnomes, and halflings were all but destroyed. As each soldier fell they would almost immediately rise and take up arms against their former comrades; further swelling the ranks of the Lich King's horde. The vast armies that started the fighting at this last battle of a terrible war had dwindled to less than 10,000 desperate defenders of a single keep guarding what was then called Hadrian's Crossing. The only safe crossing of the wild and immense Snowcap river, the major barrier between the devastated lands under the sway of Lachendon, and the last remaining pure wilderness of the Eli'riheni forest (as it was called in those days). Somewhere in that forest lay the last Elven citadel, the last bastion of purity against the Lich King's corruption. The Undying horde needed to capture that keep in order to cross the river, as it was too wide, deep, and far too turbulent to cross at any other point. At Hadrian's Crossing the Snowcap dropped into a steep ravine, and a single stone bridge crossed the river above. The bridge was already gone, sundered by the defenders when they knew they could not survive the onslaught.

Beyond the crossing, the Eli'riheni forest lay defenseless, as there were precious few soldiers (indeed, precious few living beings at all) left to defend it, all had been gambled on the defense of this keep, a defense that it was now clear had failed. Only a very few on the war council of the Dying (as the living called themselves in the war) knew that the Lich King's hordes could not, in fact, be stopped. Their only hope lay in delaying the horror long enough for their secret agent, a very special hunter, to find and destroy the source of Lachendon's Undying power. This battle, to which they committed nearly every remaining soldier in the entire world, was nothing but a delaying action in hopes for a miracle. That miracle came when the hunter (the name is lost to history) succeded. It is known that the hunter succeeded because in a single instant, the Lich King Lachendon, and every undying minion he ever raised to his service, fell to dust. Across the world, every undying servant of the Lich King fell to dust. In the same moment that Il'Niau'Thelistar did utter his terrible prophesy of a return of evil, the Lich King fell. The fall of an evil of such power could not be without consequence.

Fewer still know what was happening on that battlefield when Lachendon fell. The truth is that Lachendon had won. The keep fell but an hour before the end, and Lachendon was performing a powerful ritual that was forcing the entire ravine edge to close over the great river, not to create a bridge, but to close the gap so the entire horde could cross at once. The scouts observing, expecting to pick off undying creatures as they crossed a new bridge were stunned at the magical power expended for a simple crossing. Just as the ritual reached it's height it happened, there was a sound like a single tone from a ringing bell that was heard throughout the world, and at Hadrian's Crossing, the few surviving scouts reported that a scream erupted, as if death itself had been imprisoned and was suddenly released to rage across the universe. In that same instant, before the ringing tone fell to silence, every undying servant fell to dust. The Lich King, however did not end so quickly. From where the Lich King and his assistants were performing the ritual a column of blackness erupted, and as it reached to the sky it began to expand, the land all around began to rise, and it is said that the dust of the Undying shaped the landscape. Wherever a pile of dust lay, the land grew into a high peak, and between the land simply rose. When all was done, and the terrible blackness dissipated, the Copper Scrags now stood in mute testimony to the end of the Undying horde, the entire power of the Lich King's armies pulled into his ritual gone out of control to reshape the landscape. There were similar reshaping of the landscape in other places all over the world at that time, and it is believed that each such change corresponded to one of the places of power Lachendon had established during it's millenia-long campaign.