Reisseah

Althea looks over her shoulder as she leans down to continue her work digging for clay. She can’t help but look at the sky overhead, dark and overcast and feel the fear well up in her breast. The Citadel’s stormseer said it would just be a bad storm, not an occurrence of illviðri. He told her the black rain that stole her parents from her would not fall this day but for some reason she couldn’t shake the feeling of trepidation deep inside.

So, she keeps looking to the sky. Hours pass as Althea does her work in the fields with the other women of the Citadel. Thunder sounds overhead causing her to jump a short way into the air. She curses her luck as her friend Siella see her reaction and knows she will have to endure comparisons to Siella’s favorite animal from the stories. Althea doesn’t believe these “rabbits” were anything other than some artist’s fanciful imaginings. Losing herself for a few moments to her own idle ruminations Althea doesn’t notice anything is amiss as the rain begins to fall until it is too late.

The rain is black. Lightning crashes from the sky above, parting the dark grey clouds and revealing the black clouds above, crackling with purple lightning arcing from cloud to cloud until eventually crashing down into the earth. Around her people scream in pain as the black ichor raining down from the illviðri above, the storm of fear, the unnatural hazard that threatens the races of man every day, begins to sear their flesh, scorch their skin and in the worst cases cause rampant change resulting in creating the very terrors that gave the malignant force its name.

Dashing at full speed Althea makes for the keep, Siella in tow. While deadly unlike rain, the black ichor falls much slower giving the two girls a chance. Around them people drop to the ground screaming in pain suffering the corrosive effects of the ichor. Cruel though it may seem Althea was glad they would just die, not under go a change-ultimately death is a kinder mistress.

The two run; they run and run and run. Hope flutters in Althea’s breast as they crested ahead of the falling ichor and still the two continue running. Mere minutes after the illviðri manifested the two come into sight of the gates of the keep only to see the guards beckoning for the girls to rush inside so they could close the gate. During an illviðri storm, the Citadel must close the gate in case anyone caught outside underwent the change.

Out of breath the two girls rush into the gatehouse and the portcullis drops behind them a heartbeat later. Althea smiles, happy to somehow survive the nightmare of the storm only to turn in confusion as Siella’s hand clamps down on her arm. Concerned, she turns to face her friend only to stare in horror as the tell-tale black veins of miasmic corruption spreading from the illviðri’s black ichor grow across the sweet and innocent girl’s face and down her arms. Althea lets out a slow breath knowing she was as good as dead already. In that moment a single tear leaks out from Siella’s eyes as the miasma spreads into her once beautiful eyes turning them black. Althea always was jealous of Siella’s eyes.

A wet ripping sound echoes through the keep’s gatehouse as Siella’s change begins. Moments later the screams of the dying are silent and the fleshy mass of muscle and tendrils that once was a human girl of fourteen shambles out into the streets to begin a massacre.

-Colloquial Telling of the Fall of Citadel Ashfall-

 

Welcome to Reisseah

A once beautiful land of lush forests, rolling grassy hills and plentiful farmland, the land is now a broken wasteland where the Races of Man have been driven underground or into Citadels constructed to shelter entire cities in stone. The appearance of The Miasma and its accompanying Illviðri Hræðsla three hundred and fourty-six years ago marked the end of an age of expansion and growth for the civilized races. Now people live crammed together, always in the shelter of stone, seeking survival rather than expansion. The nations of the last era exist in name. They survive in order to give the people a name to cling to rather than the more formal expectations of government, instead existing far more like the first city-states of the nearly forgotten age.