The Crossing

Venathel sits at a crossroads, a meeting place between all the many planes of existence that make up our reality. Planar travel is an everyday occurrence, performed by all from royalty to the lowliest peasant, so commonplace that one can purchase a round trip train ticket from here to the plane of fire on a whim(though the cost of said ticket is steep). We were not always so attuned to the planar energies around us, however; to get to this point took hundreds of years of study and experimentation. In the beginning, all we could manage was to transport the mind through consumption of Blinkroot, but this was a small step toward much greater achievement. Early in our experimentation, however, we learned the hard way the dangers of planar travel when we opened the gate to Fey.

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A World Reborn from Ash

At first the feyfolk were innocent enough, friendly folk, mischievous at their worst. We lived in harmony for over two-hundred years before they turned, attacking us for no reason we could fathom. In our retaliation, we began a war that would destroy the world as we knew it. For years we fought, and for years we lost, until finally we managed to close the gates to Fey, severing the feyfolk from the energy that gave them life in our plane. At the closing of the gates a storm of ash swept across the land, wiping entire cities from the world and taking the people of those cities with them. Those who survived were left with nothing to do but rebuild the world they lost.

It would be years before some of the survivors would notice changes, both psychological and physiological, leaving some with minds twisted with visions of another world and others with twisted bodies, deformed suggestions of mythological beings, such as the garden gnomes, gnomes corrupted by fey energy and left with skin that more resembles ceramics than flesh and a pointed skull that is often mistaken for a hat by the uneducated observer.

Now, A World in Waiting

It has been over seven-hundred years since the closing of the fey gates, but we have not destroyed them. Instead, they stand as a reminder of where our hubris might take us, of the consequences of tampering with things we don't understand. The world remains twisted by fey energies, which leak into Venathel from places unknown. To in any way interact with Fey is a most heinous crime, punished without mercy or tolerance by The Lawperson's Guild. Despite this there are those who, for their own misguided reasons, seek to bargain with the feyfolk. The fates whisper of coming change, change of a magnitude that hasn't been seen in over seven-hundred years. I tell you this not so you may stop this change, but so you might be prepared when it comes--to help it along, or to help the world survive a second storm.