Loreposting about Abaddon
Abaddon doesnât get a lot of attention. As a deposed god he doesnât seem relevant to the Guild Wars timeline after Nightfall. But I keep thinking about him because Abaddon is probably the most influential character Tyria ever had.
Letâs just go over where he appears in-game if you start off in GW2. Everyone knows the six human gods. Theyâre in statues, temples, personal shrines everywhere. The base game story makes you detour through a sunken temple dedicated to Abaddon, while the Orrian temples to the other five gods are still intact on the surface. This is not by chance. Itâs also nudging you to notice that there are no Orrian temples to Kormir, because she replaced Abaddon only two centuries ago. This is reflected again later on in Sirenâs Landing on the other side of Orr, where the Five, and Abaddon, each have a personal reliquary, and Abaddonâs is central, connected to all the others, and still intact.
Building on that refresher on human divinity, in Path of Fire you visit the actual place Abaddon was defeated by the other Five gods and pushed into a side dimension to keep him out of the world.
And when you visit the archives of the Durmand Priory, they have an imposing Abaddon statue towering over the stairs. Other than being reflected in three major environments, he doesnât have a role in the plot. BUT.
As Kormir explains to you, the weakness of the human gods is that their excess of power keeps fucking up the world. The Desolation, a map that covers only a part of the sulfur desert, is completely uninhabitable because Abaddon was destroyed there. This happened because Abaddon, who was actually the most powerful of the Six and the leader of the group, wanted humans to share in the gift of magic. He was the god of knowledge, after all. This proved disastrous and the other gods reduced and compartmentalised the magic, and Abaddon went on a whole attempt to overthrow them and become one, single god of all.
The destruction of Abaddonâs temples and relics was intentional. He was wiped from memory. The pantheon was called The Five until Nightfall, wherein the existence of Abaddon was revealed as he tried to drag himself back into the mortal plane. As a god his spheres of power were water and knowledge. Erasing knowledge of him was what made him powerless. (Interestingly, the Prioryâs special collections contains the Scroll of the Five True Gods, an ancient record of what the human gods knew about the Elder Dragons, but one dragon is missing - the water dragon, who like Abaddon, has a damaged and erased history. The six Elder Dragons and six human gods have many respective connections.)
When he lived, Abaddonâs followers were the Margonites, who believed him the only real god and worshipped him exclusively, unlike other humans who revere all the Six together. They were rewarded with transformation into etheral beings with an extremely long lifespan, and were imprisoned in Abaddonâs Realm, the Realm of Torment, when he was forced out of Tyria. As the god of knowledge he had a realm to himself, and when fallen, his sphere inversed. Knowledge became madness, the theme his realm embodies. Temples were sunk, records destroyed, because to remove all knowledge of the god of knowledge made him powerless.
I canât remember where, but itâs implied that by Nightfall comes around a thousand years after his banishment, Abaddon is finally able to claw his way back into Tyria because people are starting to remember him. Thereâs one side quest that sticks out in my memory called The Search for Enlightenment about a scholar stealing scriptures from an Elonian library which leads to a massive raid by Margonites. The scholar was âbabblingâ about a forgotten god. Proximity to knowledge about Abaddon seems to bestow insanity, the connection between Abaddon in his inverted realm and his hold over anyone who knows he exists. Though the Five Gods tried, they didnât erase everything (hell, Trahearne and Sayeh alâ Rajihd give you a guided tour of an Abaddon temple). Over a thousand years, relics popped up and people began to remember The Five was once The Six. As they did his influence returned until he was able to attempt to merge the Realm of Torment with Tyria and become a single, all powerful god in the absence of the others.
But wait how does that make a forgotten god the most influential character in both games?
Guild Wars lore is nothing if not completely linked together. Every single thing has cause and effect, every event is a domino. The story is consistent from Prophecies to this day. So letâs start with the first GW1 chapter, Prophecies.
It all starts at the Citadel of Flame.
It was built into the volcano Hrangmer. The charr had been displaced, pushed out of Ascalon by the successful expansion of humankind. 450 years before GW2 the Flame Legion found this volcano and, inside, Titans. You know how Mordremothâs minions are Mordrem, Zhaitanâs minions are Risen, etc? Titans are Abaddon minions, left behind and hidden after his defeat. They change their appearance to suit their environment. In a jungle theyâre vegetative, in mountains theyâre made of ice, in the Realm of Torment theyâre twisted constructs of flesh, in a volcano, theyâre fire. The Flame Legion brings the Titans back to the charr, charr worship them, and in exchange, get immense fire powers. Flame Legion completely takes over charr society and makes it a theistic, misogynist nightmare with the Shamans at the top.
Abaddon has just restructured charr society.
Using their overpowered fire magic indirectly from a human god, charr, ironically, rally against the humans and nuke Ascalon to pieces. The few survivors escape to Kryta. Charr are now pretty much unstoppable and invade all the way to Orr. Vizier Khilbron used a powerful stolen scroll to repel the charr with magic, and it completely destroys Orr, collapsing the island into the ocean.
Abaddon has just wiped out two nations of the humans who used to worship him, with Orr as the final goal - to tear down the resplendent city of the Gods who betrayed him. This is referenced, if you know what youâre looking for, in GW2. You can scale the Vizierâs Tower, where he read the scroll that sank all of Orr, and on the wallâŚ
A mural to the lost god, a testament to power that, a thousand years later, one who was expunged from history had a faithful likeness depicted.
Ascalonâs a burning hole and Orr is underwater. Now what? Those Ascalonian survivors in Kryta find the place is controlled by White Mantle. The White Mantle are committing mass murder via bloodstone sacrifice (bloodstones being the power curb the gods introduced after imbuing humans with magic) in order to halt the prophecy of a Chosen One opening the Door of Komalie. Vizier Khilbron turns up, shaking out some mysteriously wet boots donât worry about that, and leads you against these genocidal cultists. Which, whoops, does lead to the Door of Komalie being opened - and itâs a doorway into Abbadonâs Realm of Torment, out of which Titans power through. This was the apocalypse planned for Kryta. Unlike the first two, this one is thwarted by the player. Kryta lives on. Vizier Khilbron is the final boss and turns out to have been a lich.
Thatâs 3 of the 5 human nations. What about Cantha and Elona?
GW: Factions is the Canthan chapter in which Shiro Tagachi, the emperorâs bodyguard, continually visits a fortune teller until she inflicts such paranoia on his mindset that he believes he needs to kill the emperor in self-defense. His defeat causes the Jade Wind that creates the Jade Sea. As a spirit, Shiro then engulfs Cantha in a plague that warps people into tumorous mutants. The fortune teller turns out to be an Abaddon minion whose task was the eventual destruction of Cantha. This one also is foiled by the player.
GW: Nightfall is the culmination chapter. Abaddon is now powerful enough, well known enough, to breach Tyria and try to come back. His agent is Varesh Ossa, who slowly transforms into a Margonite over the course of the game. The player confronts the breach between planes and finally enters the Realm of Torment, meeting the shades of Abaddonâs servants that came before, the lich form of Vizier Khilbron, and the spirit of Shiro Tagachi, before facing Abaddon himself.
And thatâs the end of it. In Guild Wars magic cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred, so another god ascends in Abaddonâs place. They are once again The Six.
Itâs Abaddon that ruined half the Elonian desert, Abaddon whose sinking of Orr gave Zhaitan the perfect mass grave to necromance, Abaddon who froze the Cantha sea into solid jade, and Abaddon whose final death and eruption of magic started waking Primordus, leading to the norn, dwarf and asuran alliance to stop it in 1078 AEâ introducing the norn and asura to the rest of Tyria, and making the dwarves extinct, cutting their entire raceâs existence short. If it wasnât for Abaddon, the charr wouldnât have been taken over by their magic-toting shaman caste, only to come to their senses and rebel and ostracize the Flame Legion afterward. Hell, the current Flame Legion Imperators STILL style their horns in an homage to Abaddon, and probably donât even remember why! To a human god, gone for over a thousand years, who used their race as pawns in a revenge attempt at wiping out every nation the humans had built!
And even after being thoroughly and completely destroyed, his magic STILL haunts Tyria enough for his statues to punish you for not showing the proper respect.
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