#shunar

The Great War Against the Dead was the worst disaster in modern history (and it is surpassed only by the Godfall when all of history is considered). The cost in human lives, territory, land, and damage to the planet were insurmountable. Historians generally agree that it began as a border conflict between the nation of Shunar and Valdinor’s newly emerging Empire.

Throughout their existence, the nations of Shunar and Valdinor had been at odds with each other, erupting into open warfare after the fall of Azurant. Each nation saw itself as the new world superpower, with Shunar’s navy and control of the Inner Sea pitted against Valdinor’s technology and impressive military might. Both nations possessed stockpiles of Age of Wonders weaponry, and the world held its breath, fearing what would happen if these armories were unleashed.

These fears came to pass in RY 162, when Shunar activated a weapon it could not control. The energies from the weapon killed every living soul exposed to them, firing three times in total. Shunar was wiped out in an instant, along with the nation of Eshaya, and three of the provinces of Western Valdinor. The death toll has been historically estimated at 260 million, but in the modern day, many believe the figure should be much higher. In the modern day, this weapon has come to be called the Deathsong, as those far enough from the epicenter of the blast to have seen it or heard it go off have described it as weaponized music.

The disaster would have been horrific enough on its own, but as the people of the Highlands reeled in the aftermath and tried to make sense of what had happened, the first attacks by the dead began.

At first, these attacks seemed random, but it soon became apparent that every person killed by the weapon had returned as an undead creature, and they swarmed across the borders of the Free States and Valdinor as a wave, hundreds of millions strong.

The military quickly discovered that the souls of those who had died in the weapon’s cataclysm were unable to return to the cycle of reincarnation. Worse, they could inhabit bodies which were not their own, or twist together into horrifying amalgams of partial corpses. To make matters worse, if the vengeful dead were particularly strong-willed, they could manifest as ghosts or other incorporeal undead without any need for a physical corpse to inhabit — meaning that even complete cremation could not end the threat. Several months into the war, the first nightgaunts were encountered, and humanity had its first brush with these intelligent, malevolent undead.

The dead marched inexorably across the continent, whipped into an unholy frenzy and urged on by the nightgaunts, heading for the Holy Mountain. Several attempts were made to evacuate civilians in their path, with only limited success. In the most infamous of these botched evacuation attempts, the Empress, Jes Harra, was killed in a botched artillery strike. Kajar, whose historical relationship with Valdinor had always bordered on hostility, allied with them in a desperate attempt to hold back the tides of the dead.

In the Free States, it did not take long for the citizens there to realize an obvious truth - that no individual nation could hope to stand against the dead. They would fall one by one, subsumed into the undead armies until the southern front collapsed completely and nothing stood between the dead and the slopes of the Holy Mountain. From this knowledge came the Union of St. Othea, at first three, then eight, then twenty-seven tiny nations and disparate city-states who unified into one whole around a military allegiance. Many other states declared temporary allegiance to the new nation of ‘Othea’, whose leadership was located in the city of Sen-Sayah, and what would have been impossible for one became possible for the whole. The border between the deadlands of Eshaya and Free States held, though hundreds of lives were spent each day to hold it.

Then, in RY 165, a miracle, at least, it seemed that way to the people of the time. The Emperor and the White Registry unveiled an unprecedented invention, the first great artifact built since the Age of Wonders, a spirit-catching repository that they called the Soulcatcher. While the magic behind it is not well understood, the Soulcatcher blankets the world in a field of magic that draws any souls who are unable to reincarnate inside. When an undead creature is ‘disrupted’ (usually by being physically destroyed, but occasionally by being turned or exorcised with a ritual or spell), the soul (or souls) animating it cannot flee into a new body, and instead are pulled into the Soulcatcher.

Initially, the purpose behind the Soulcatcher was genuinely humane — it allowed the military to make gains against the undead forces, as well as preserving the traumatized souls of the weapon's victims for future purification and return to the proper cycle of reincarnation. Purification, however, proved more difficult than the Registrars had imagined — those who had been killed by the Deathsong weapon were unable to reincarnate, and no divine or arcane intervention appeared possible. The best the White Registry managed was a host of failed experiments on human souls (which, after great public outcry, the Emperor and Magisterium banned in early RY 167).

Even with this new innovation, which had at last allowed the armies of the Highlands to make a dent in the undead numbers, it quickly became apparent that Valdinor, Kajar, and the Free States could not field soldiers quickly enough to win the War. To this end, the Emperor granted the White Registry leave to create artificial soldiers from the souls captured by the Soulcatcher, clay mined from the Godscar, and a series of secret spells and reagents. These soldiers, called 'Alchemcials' could be created, trained, and sent to the field in a matter of months, their souls absorbed back into the Soulcatcher when they died. The use of Alchemical soldiers proved so effective that they continue to be employed by the Imperial military in the modern day.

It took three more years to push the armies of the dead out of the Highlands. In the winter of RY 168, the war ended in victory by only the most generous definition of ‘victory’. The continent was in ruins, with huge swaths of it unreclaimable and given over to the dead. Millions had been displaced, and plague swept through communities of survivors with starvation on its heels. Valdinor’s military had been massacred, out of every thirty soldiers, twenty-nine had died fighting. The economy was in shambles, and trade between nations ground to a halt. The final death toll is usually accepted at 340 million, but this number is political, controversial and highly contested, considered by most experts to be quite low.

To the shock of much of the continent, Othea did not dissolve after the end of the War. It had been forged for wartime, but its leaders were able to navigate the transition into peace better than anyone had imagined. Experts and intellectuals from across the Free States traveled to Sen-Sayah to advise the Othean leadership, who would, following the war, be chosen in free elections. On the advice of these experts, Othea began funding a barrier of consecrated land that separated the Free States from the deadlands. This project, called the Reclamation, is the largest public works project in history - even considering the Age of Wonders, and it stretches from the Inner Sea to the Southern Sea, holding back the tides of the dead. A wonder for the modern age.

Meanwhile, in the North, faith in the Emperor and Valdinor’s leadership plummeted. Cities erupted into open rebellion, and the Magisterial Director was assassinated by a bomb in RY 170. In RY 171, Survivors from Valdinor’s military refused to serve the Emperor, with bolder men going so far as to point out how convenient the solution of the Soulcatcher was, that there were no Shunari demi-gods (so then who had activated the weapon in the first place?), and that perhaps the Emperor had allowed the disaster to occur, in order to sweep Jes Harra and the other heads of state aside.

Unsatisfied with the Emperor and the Senate's leadership, and (perhaps rightly) furious at the mismanagement of the Imperial Army during the War, discontented officers, the leaders of former Valdinoran states, and key members of the Black and White Registries led a military-backed rebellion (or a coup attempt, depending on an individuals perspective) in RY 172. Their attempt failed, and in retaliation the Emperor purged both the Senate and most of the former royal families, leaving no power in Valdinor other than his own.

The continent troubles were not yet over, for In the East, the Queen of Belar became concerned about the health of her citizens (many of whom suffered from degenerative conditions from mining Godscar clay) as well as with Valdinor's growing military presence and the lack of any checks on the Emperor's powers. At her word, heavy taxes were placed on the sale of godflesh, and the Queen strictly controlled how much could be sold and to whom. The Emperor made a few, half-hearted attempts at negotiation before turning to the still-imprisoned leader of the coup, Hermann Augustus Graf. In exchange for the Godscar, the Emperor offered Graf as much of the Free States as he could conquer. The disgraced officer would be free to do as he pleased, the ruler of a small Empire within an Empire, so long as nothing restricted the export of godflesh and the production of Alchemical soldiers.