The Second Darkness

This is very late, but I absolutely owe you another post on an aspect of the soon-to-be-released The Lioness of Shara Mountain. The subscriber-exclusive poll has decided. This week, it’s all about The Second Darkness.

Here we go!

The Second Darkness

Overview

The Second Darkness refers to a period of peril and war, when an evil entity known only as the Darkness attempted to overthrow the peoples of the world and conquer land and sea. In this time, men, who were then called Waygar’i (people of the plains), still fought with weapons of stone, wood, and bronze. The more advanced Keshal’i (people of the forest) and Sammonish’i (people of the desert) had only just learnt the art and magic of working iron and steel.

The majority of the fighting took place on the southern continent, but the northern continent did not remain untouched by the conflict.

The Cause of Conflict

No one knows where the entity known as the Darkness hailed from. Indeed, this was the first encounter the Waygar’i had with the entity. However, in Keshal’i and Sammonish’i mythology, this Darkness was the same entity that interrupted the world’s creation, causing conflict between the spirits who sang the world into being. This conflict escalated into war - The First Darkness. Three factions fought - and all lost, plummeting to the earth wreathed in flames, becoming creatures of flesh and bone. This event is called The Great Fall.

Whether or not the Great Fall was indeed the origin of the peoples of the world is up for debate. The Waygar’i had no record nor cultural memory of the event. The Second Darkness was, therefore, their first encounter with the Darkness.

As far as records reach, there does not seem to be a reason for the attacks that began the Second Darkness. It is speculated that life offended the Darkness, and it simply sought to end life altogether. Whether motivated by jealousy, as the Keshal’i and Sammonish’i believed, or some other reason, it is not known.

The Second Darkness and the Northern Continent

The Darkness (entity) may have been behind the Cult of War that spread like fire through the Krysalti Empire, and began the push for dominion over the continent. Krysalti fighters made the crossing across the ocean to fight on behalf of the Dark Horde in the southern continent; the only true living soldiers in that fell host. During this time, the Krysalti halted their expansion northwards, instead holding their acquired territories and establishing footholds for the Cult of War while attention was in the south.

Divided, the peoples of the northern continent did not ally with one another as they did in the southern continent. Instead, they maintained their own territories, and considered themselves blessed that the Krysalti expansion had stalled, trusting, wrongly, that fate would keep their lands free. And they remained free, for some centuries.

Had they not been so insular, perhaps they could have used this opportunity to reclaim lost lands and put a permanent stop to the Cult of War and the Krysalti Empire.

In the southern continent, the peoples of that land allied. The disparate tribes of the Waygar’i came under the banner of the White Bear and the leadership of Stran of the Deep, the Keshal’i kingdoms, save one, put aside their petty squabbles and the Sammonish’i clans joined forces to fight back. The battle lasted months but resulted in victory for the allied south.

The Darkness, they hoped, had been vanquished forever. This was not so. It retreated. To where, it is not known. What is known is that the Krysalti resumed their expansion across the northern continent in the centuries that followed the defeat in the south. This is believed to be the evil influence of the strengthening Darkness as it prepared for another attempt at world conquest (which it launched in a period uninventively known as the Third Darkness).

Incidentally, the ruling class of the Hnura’i Empire in the east of the Northern continent trace their lineage back to Keshal’i warriors from the southern continent who, at the conclusion of the Second Darkness, attempted to follow their king to a hidden refuge somewhere in the north ocean and got lost, landing on the shores of the continent and establishing themselves as rulers there.