Drakhul'Knaar
It was the end of the age of reconstruction, the time when "The Dying", those living persons who survived the War of Undying, tried to build a new civlization on the ashes of the old.
The eight genasi First Ones led the human and demihuman species (minus the elves who retreated with the druids to a distant land) to build new kingdoms and resettle the vast lands destroyed by the evil Lich King. Then The Betrayal happened. Nobody knows exactly what it was, but one of the First Ones betrayed the others and slew them. None survived, or so it is thought. Their offspring, long lived but not immortal like the First Ones, craved a return to the empire, each believing themselves alone fit to rule all the civilized nations. These betrayed ones began to war upon each other, and the few other struggling civilizations. The Smoke King fought a terrible war against the Kingdoms of the Sands, and almost defeated them, but at the last second necromancers, an art reborn among those violent lands, worked a terrible curse that destroyed the Smoke King's entire army, but also so cursed the land around that it remains a cursed wasteland to this day; it is called the Cursed Waste, and adjacent to it is the Accursed Sea, a land cursed by the first Lich King by magics so terrible the land itself retreated and fell beneath the waves.
This, then, was the Time of Terror. The days when all surviving races began to hunt Aasimar; calling them star touched and cursed ones, and the Dragonborn, believing them to be kin to, and in league with, the terrible evil dragons that serve Corruption. Neither claim is true, but a mob has no reason. The two races banded together for safety, and quickly their leaders realized they were too few to survive, that they would not fight a war with only death as the victor. The two races fled, together with their few friends, far from civilized lands, and used powerful magic to erase their trail and hide their new home. Thousands died to gather Gorget Granite to create the wards, and to establish a few well protected portals they could use to keep watch over the civilizations they left behind.
Nobody knows where they ran to, or if they even survived the journey. It is said that if one is wise, and diligent, and forthright in all things, then perhaps, someday, an Aasimar or Dragonborn will pay them a visit, just to honor the old alliances and friendships. Most believe this to be myth, however, as there has not been a single reported sighting of either race in over 12,000 years.
History
The Beginning
The Aasimar and Dragonborn were both something of an accident. When the world was young and The Corruption had been newly cast down, both the Noble metallic dragons, and the celestial soldiers of The Source were sent to patrol the world. Sometimes these entities would take humanoid form and mingle with the human and demihuman peoples. Sometimes such mingling resulted in romance, marriage, and offspring. Such pairings were rare, but over centuries and millennia two viable and distinct new races of demihumans arose. Both races felt a close kinship one to the other, and a strong kinship to humanity. It was not long before they founded a city of their own in a beautiful mountain valley above a desert plain far to the north of the more settled lands. In time their city became a nation, and the nation grew large and strong. The Dragonborn were never more than about a third of the populace, but their drive and vigor gave the nation strength and a powerful military might. The Aasimar, likewise only about a third of the people, gave the nation wisdom and caring, their influence led to hospitals, orphanages, and a guarantee of personal freedom to every inhabitant of the land. The Humans were most of the remainder, with a few elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes, and others. The humans gave the nation structure and stability, traditions and institutions. It was the human influence that made the nation stable and long-lasting. The people called themselves the Drakhul'Knarr, which meant The People of Peace in draconic. Their nation was called the Empire of Drakhul'Knarr, or The Dragonborn Empire by those who misunderstood the name. For many millennia they lived in peace with the elves to their south, the ocean to their west, and vast deserts to their north and east.
The War of Undying
The Drakhul'Knarr were both fortunate and unfortunate in where they lived. Their neighbor to the south was the oldest and most populous of all the ancient Elven nations, it was where the Elven First Ones built the very first city, and it was the homeland of perhaps the greatest practitioner of the magical arts ever to walk the land. That practitioner had another name once, but the name by which all people know him today is Lachendon. He was cast out of his homeland long before he took the name of Lachendon, and for unknown centuries he built his strength and power in the lands now known as the Lachendon Empire. When he was strong enough he sent his undead horde directly to his original homeland and ordered that they leave nothing alive. When he followed them a few years later, he entered a land utterly devoid of any life, not even mold or moss could grow in that place. He then began to war on the closest neighbor, the people of Drakhul'Knarr. That war was cut short, mercifully, because something drew Lachendon's attention back north. An enclave of elves survived there, and his obsession to eradicate all elves from the world forever drove him to take his horde north. The rest of that story is well known, the terrible battles, the constant retreat of the dying armies, and the unexpected victory at the last battle. The land reacted to the cataclysmic events at the end of the war as many well know, but the land of the Drakhul'Knarr escaped with a small enclave remaining, the original home city and its mountain valley. Eventually, this remnant grew and was ready to provide a seed from which new civilizations might be reborn.
Age of Reconstruction
The Aasimar and Dragonborn were not completely destroyed by the War of Undying. Partly because of where their largest population centers were, and partly because they were difficult to raise as undead, many attempts simply dissolved the body and animated a mindless skeleton, technically a construct, instead. Near the end of the war the hordes of Lachendon were so focused on the Elven forests that they left the Drakhul'Knarr empire to a small occupation force. During the Age of Reconstruction, following the dramatic end to the War of Undying and after the long night of the Lost Times, the inhabitants of Drakhul'Knarr, a mix of Dragonborn, Aasimar, humans, and many refugees, were instrumental in helping the few survivors restore life to their homelands and begin the long process of rebuilding. It was Drakhul'Knarr libraries that offered knowledge, it was Drakhul'Knarr wizards and priests who hunted and destroyed Lachendon's lieutenants during the Lost Times, and it was Drakhul'Knarr farms that provided seeds to the survivors while they worked to restore plant and animal life to their blasted homelands. The Aasimar spirit of generosity ensured that, though fiercely protected by their Dragonborn allies, the resources of the empire were offered to all who truly needed them. For many centuries the Drakhul'Knarr served as one of the few surviving bastions of civilization remaining in the world, and the only such place on the continent of L'Ahr'Thresi, the land most impacted by Lachendon's wars. Eventually the other nations began to truly recover and became self-sufficient. Even as the world began to truly recover from the War of Undying, the land of Drakhul'Knaar began to decline. A side effect of the destruction of Lachendon was the cursing and destruction of his homeland, the name of which was scoured from all records during the times of war and recovery. Drakhul'Knarr stood adjacent to that land, and when it was destroyed their southern border became a place of great danger as it went from a pleasant countryside to the shores of the Accursed Sea. For centuries the peoples of Drakhul'Knaar continued mostly as before, transforming trade and farming cities to seaports and fishing villages. But as the true nature of the submerged landscape began to assert itself, and the cursed hordes began to assault the coasts, the peoples of Drakhul'Knaar were forced to abandon the new southern coast, demolish their cities and villages, and devote ever increasing numbers of their military just to keeping the cursed undead from reaching too far inland. Still, they had their western coast, and the varied lands between the coast and the Sandwall Mountains, and they managed well enough. Unfortunately corruption is never far from the hearts of all living things, and the rapidly growing Kingdoms of the Sands began to grow jealous of the fertile and well watered lands of the Drakhul'Knaar. They began to quietly invade the Drakhul'Knaar empire posing as farm workers or poor and homeless refugees. In the space of a few generations the Drakhul'Knaar discovered that fully half their population considered themselves Kirianesti, the People of the Sand, not Drakhul'Knaar. Internal strife began to grow and famine stalked this fertile land as fields were too often watered in blood from frequent internal conflicts. By the time of The Betrayal, when The Traitor slew its siblings and ended the rule of the First Ones, the lands of Drakhul'Knaar were already at a breaking point. It was only a few years after The Betrayal before the rumors began, claims that the land of Drakhul'Knaar survived the war only because they were secretly supporting the hordes of Lachendon. Soon the rumors grew to claim that all Dragonborn were decendant of warlocks, and this was why they were difficult to raise as undead. The Aasimar were slandered as Children of Deception, and it was claimed that their true heritage was a result of fiendish pacts, that they were kin to the "warlock dragonborn". It didn't take long for these lies to become a rallying cry, and mobs of Kirianesti were soon burning down Drakhul'Knaar homes and killing their inhabitants.
The leaders of the people, wise and just individuals, quickly realized they could not survive the coming war, and even to fight meant only more death. Despondent at the death of their homeland, and heart-broken at the mistreatment of their people, they called on all true Drakhul'Knaar to join them in a final defense of their capital, the original home of their people. When all had gathered, and with powerful magics to detect any spies, they revealed their true plan, a friend of their people had found a place of refuge, a place far from any others but similar to their original homeland in climate. Their greatest and bravest people had sacrificed health, lives, sanity, everything to gather enough Gorget Granite to create spells to hide their refuge from the world. And their friend, this great friend of their people, had worked a great ritual to allow all who wished to join their exile to travel instantly to this place of refuge. It would be a hard and difficult life for generations to come, as they now had to rebuild their civilization, and without any help. It would, however, be a chance to survive without a pointless and incredibly deadly war.
Almost the entire people of Drakhul'Knaar volunteered to leave their home and travel to this new place. This place hidden from the world at terrible cost in blood and treasure. That night the city emptied of persons, only a few thousand remained, sacrificing their own lives to defend the city and hide their escape for a time. Their ruse worked all too well. When the second Smoke King, far more corrupt than any imagined at the time, was informed that the entire people of Drakhul'Knaar had retreated to their home city, he gathered the necromancers he had secretly been supporting, and ordered they work their most terrible curse to destroy that hated city and curse it's inhabitants with eternal unliving servitude. The necromancers did, indeed work a curse of such horror as to sear the mind. They did not, however, know of the store of Gorget Granite in the city to support the ritual that transported the peoples to safety. When their curse interacted with that powerful font of raw magic, the result was devestating. The Smoke King's entire army was turned to stone where they stood. The Kirianesti throughout the lands of Drakhul'Knaar were transformed to free-willed undead in an instant. The land itself rejected that terrible magic and was wracked with massive earthquakes and upheavals for days. In the end the entire land of Drakhul'Knaar was left a barren, broken, shattered and cursed wasteland that, today, is known only as the Cursed Waste. As for the Second Smoke King, he was consumed in the ritual, along with all of his necromancers, and the spot where they stood is a black pit of death somewhere in the Cursed Waste, a place where no living thing can ever go and return. The events of the Curse War, as this conflict was called, were instrumental in forming the Code of Cai'relion, and ensuring that no future nation would follow that same corrupt path. Thanks to the evil of their enemies, however, the Drakhul'Knarr were thought utterly destroyed, and it would several thousand years before anyone learned differently.
The Exile and Discovery
When the people of Drakhul'Knarr fled to their hidden refuge, they were not all of the Aasimar and Dragonborn in the world, and those who remained, scattered among the nations, were themselves blamed, initially, for the creation of the Cursed Waste. This led to even more vicious and violent attacks, and within a few decades the very last of both races were hunted down and murdered. The world, as far as most were concerned, had successfully commited the first genocide of an entire race, and both Dragonborn and Aasimar were gone forever. There was little celebration of this terrible accomplishment, as the Traitor's War was growing, and the few nations not yet embroiled in pointless conflict would be soon. For 3,000 years the fighting continued until all but the barest thread of civilization was destroyed. A very few nations in far-flung corners of the world managed to avoid the conflict, but only by entering an isolation so profound that they are still nearly unknown today. Places like Kzatireczy where every outsider is an enemy, or Shouzhen, where magic is prohibited and even a simple cantrip is grounds for a public, and terribly brutal, execution. By the end of that long time of war everyone had completely forgotten about the people of Drakhul'Knarr, and the survivors were most pleased to keep it that way. Everyone thought them lost forever, but The Source has a tendency to surprise it's creations. A prophecy was uttered in that hidden refuge, and at the end of the Traitor's War, just as the Great Ward of the Lachendon Empire was about to arise, a delegation of Dragonborn and Aasimar from their hidden retreat appeared with a thunderclap just outside the wardline. To all present they spoke as one in a single booming voice.
"Foolish children! You celebrate today, not the accomplishment of a great work, but the creation of the greatest tool The Corruption ever devised. This is not a protection, nor is it a balm. Harken now to the words of prophecy. Millennia will come, and memory will fade, but in days beyond counting, when the times and half again are past, the price of this terrible work will come to light, and a choice will be made. If then your descendants prove wise, this horror will be dissolved and the innocent set free. If, however, your descendants prove as foolish as you, then the unweaving will be the destruction of all and may The Source have mercy on your dust."
As these words thundered through the millions gathered there, the final words of the great ritual were uttered and the ward arose; forever sealing the people of the empire away from the outside world. The delegation of the Drakhul'Knarr who had taken such risk to appear and speak their prophecy turned and walked away to the West, slowly fading from sight. Since that day there have been occasional sightings of Dragonborn or Aasimar, always rare and always in remote places. The Drakhul'Knarr still exist somewhere, watching over this world from their hidden refuge, waiting to see if the descendants of those who sought their destruction have finally learned wisdom, or if the world itself will pay for their foolishness with destruction.
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