The Creation of Eälócë

Before the beginning...

...the celestial dragon-god, Io, bore three children from their sundered corpse, Bahamut, god of metallic dragons, Tiamat, goddess of chromatic dragons, and Chronos, the silent god of time. What remained of Io's Divine Spark became the material spheres, the bedrock of all worlds, which in turn began to harbor life of all kinds.
Bahamut felt that life should be protected and nurtured, while Tiamat sought to dominate it all. Every world had their followers locked in an endless struggle, but the Great Veil kept the gods from directly intervening. The goodly metallic dragons watched over the newly budding civilizations of man while the evil chromatic dragons selfishly sought domination over the lesser creatures around them.
One such world, Eälócë (ael-liss), was particularly loved by the Platinum King and his kin, for Tiamat's influence was weak, her followers and servants were few in number and outlawed, and her kin long ago hunted almost to extinction by the clever humanoids expanding into the wild. Over many thousands of years, the kingdoms of Eälócë warred and traded, rose and fell, but the evil Chromatic Queen had no hold.
Bahamut took pity on the mortals still struggling to live in and share the world together, so he tasked his vassals on Eälócë, eleven ancient metallic dragons, to seek out the most faithful among all the goodly kingdoms and convince them to send settlers to an untouched island far off the western coast. This was to become the new bastion of civilization, built for cooperation and peace among the races, and led and counciled by the dragon vassals.
And so Wyrmland was born, a tiny slice of Eälócë seperated by sea, dotted with eleven great cities that stood as shining beacons, enjoying a golden age for more than a century. The most brilliant minds among the humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, and sometimes halflings, set about creating new ways of doing things, universities for learning magic and science, complex tunnel systems for travel, social and political philosophy, and even enchanted clockwork devices that made life less laborious for all.
Then when the Green Star fell from the heavens, it omnivorously marked a dark turn for the island and it’s people. Half of the dragons initially went to investigate where it fell, yet none returned. This caused a stir of doubt among the people, and motivated anger and grief among the rest of the Council of Wyrms. All of the remaining dragons decided to go after their kin together but they too mysteriously disappeared, leaving the people of Wyrmland alone and without guidance for the first time.
Over the first few years, the forests began to drain of all their color, leaves and grass alike, and dead fauna were spotted ravenously turning on anything living. As small settlements began to experience the blight, they soon learned that anyone who died would rise again to devour their friends and neighbors, creating more dead to rise in turn. This darkness was quickly taking hold of the land, and the scared inhabitants knew it was only a matter of time before the cities would be taken too.
And so they turned on each other in the worst way, with the human majority claiming that they were the race that was truly chosen by Bahamut to settle Wyrmland, and that the 'lesser races' were somehow the cause of the curse upon the land. With the high-priests endorsing this message, non-humans were soon pulled out of their homes by unlawful angry mobs and fighting began breaking out everywhere. As the dead that fell in the streets would rise again as zombies, it soon became clear that a violent cleansing would spell their own disaster, so the humans choose instead to capture and enslave the ‘demi’s.
Thus began Wyrmland’s dark-age. The island was declared quarantined by the old kingdoms and no help would be coming. Great walls were built by dwarven slaves around each city to keep the undead outside, with huge numbers of their kind dying to complete them. Demi-humans became house servants, farming serfs, or slaves of a darker nature, toiling and suffering the dominance of the human citizens. There were occasional uprisings but every time the establishment got better at quashing them, sometimes even conceding some small token of freedom, such as the almost laughable path to becoming a legal demi-citizen.
It’s been almost three hundred years since the Green Star fell to Wyrmland, and the eleven cities are a shadow of their former selves. The only hope the people, of all races, cling to now, is a prophecy foretelling the end of the darkness by a small band of champions. So every decade since, they’ve set up a lottery for volunteer ‘heroes’ that attempt to fulfill the prophecy by venturing into the undead badlands, only to find them meeting the same expected fate as the dragons, team after team.