Long Winter

The Long Winter is the name given to the current era through which the world is suffering; it is not a literal winter, though the nights are longer and colder, but more a general state of barrenness. It is harder to grow food in the ravaged soil, children are being born weaker and less often, and plagues that once struck every ten generations now rip through the countryside with alarming frequency.

Some call it the death throes of the world. This may be more accurate than they think.

Things began when the world ended. In 937 RY, a series of aggressive maneuvers between the four relur nations and Sethzelorahn came to a head in a violent exchange of magical assaults; as each party knew they could not win against the unified forces of the others, they instead aimed for the pyrrhic victory that is mutually assured destruction.

They succeeded.

Vast swaths of land which once were the territories of the relurimQlithoth, Rekkuris, Anishma, and Sen Yasharen—are now nothing more than craters, or poisonous wasteland, or realms of glass and madness. The destruction of the great undersea city of Sethzelorahn created countless tidal waves that ruined many of Moorva's islands; one known simply as the Great Wave hit Liidhaga itself, and the city has yet to recover.

Magic, never well-liked before the disaster, is now openly reviled by most of the surviving civilizations. Those few scholars who have studied it claim that magic is now somehow broken, rendered less than it once was, with corruption riddling the remains. Even mysticism-embracing locales such as Loa Saray still treat magic with great wariness.

The Long Winter's effects are more subtle these days, being more a creeping feeling of loss and despair than a storm of spellfire; the great beasts hiding in the wild places and the sickness creeping through the cities are a constant reminder of the state of the world. It is something that is coped with, raged against, cursed, and mourned.

It is unlikely that any will survive to see a spring.

History

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