Dark Tide Rising

Being an Account of the Army of the Wakeful Dead at Windy Point

by Davilan the Scribe. 75 pages, translated from Draconic.

“...and Shinn, the Mighty, the Sorcerer, looked into the spellpool, and saw the future, as men of power are wont to do. Shinn saw his own fall, saw his army, sorcerers and spellswords alike. The last of the arcane, falling before the might of the divine army of ORB.

“Seeing this, despair came to his heart, and anger, and finally, fear. And it was the bitterness of failure which led him to the dark art, which before he had forsworn...

“...And he went down, down to the Valley of the Magi, the valley where wizards and sorcerers slumbered in their last rest, and called them all by name, where they lay. Each of them, the powerful and arcane of days past, he called by name and bid wake from their eternal sleep, to join him in his cause. And his army, the Army of the Arcane, marched at midnight with 70 centuries of new troops, seven thousand troops which did not speak or sleep and needed not food or rest...

“... And in the end, Shinn, the Mighty, the Sorcerer, was still defeated, and paid for his bitterness with his life and his soul.

But the world paid, too, for the Valley of the Magi, which once was renowned as a place of beauty and gentle power, and the forest for leagues either side, is no more, and in its place lie a wasteland so desolate that I fear nothing with thrive there, evermore..."

(Davilan the Scribe, by the way, was the last of the great wizards, executed for heresy at the end of the Scarlet War. )

And Davilan was right about one thing - nothing has thrived in that wasteland for centuries.