[8] Rivel

[Supremacy 3357]

Author/s: Supremacy

REGION 8: Rivel

 

“The city state of Rivel lies on the border between Aegis and the Old Lands of Athera. Founded in the first millenium after the first sealing of Iblees, Rivel was a mageocracy where those unable or inept with magic were an underclass that served the whims of the scholary yet brutal elite known as the Spellcrafters. The Spellcrafters were mostly elven and the underclass of Rivel were mostly human with a few orcs who were treated as little more than pack animals. Rivel was hostile to outsiders, fearing a loss of control over its non-magical underclass if the “propaganda” of the nonmagical civilisations of Aegis was allowed to reach it. It engaged in a minimum of trade with the Aegisians and very few even knew it existed, although a few Aegeans did wander into the Atheran lands. When the Undead War broke out in Aegis in the early 1300s Rivel cut off all contact with the outside world in the hope that they were remote enough to avoid Iblees’s notice in time for them to find a way to defeat him.

 

 

In 1325 the Spellcrafters were approached by Garzardiel, who offered them a way to defeat Iblees: an ancient dwarven device known as The Seal. Garzardiel let them to the Grand Archive of the Forgotten Dwarves under the mountain known to the Spellcrafters as Mount  Thahn. The archive confirmed the existence of the Seal, but failed to specify if it was even completed. The relevant books from the Archive were pillaged and taken to Rivel.

 

The idea that the machine could possibly work was ludicrous to the Circle of Governance, led by Spellcrafter Archon Artorias dismissing it as rambling fiction and a waste of resources they should be spending researching a way to defeat Iblees before the Undead were at their gates. However, those Spellcrafters that had begun to draw on Garzardiel’s aengudaemonic power also found their wills had been bent to Garzardiel’s desires, and their studies of the Archive’s tomes led them to the location of the Hall. The records of their studies and the Hall’s location are still in Rivel to this day.

 

When they found it they discovered it was sealed by the ancient rune magics of the Forgotten Dwarves. Under a manifested Garzardiel’s direction they sought out the keys within a year had the Hall open. Within they discovered a dormant army of soul harvesting constructs (the ones that were possessed and wiped out the last of the Hall’s Forgotten Dwarves) and The Seal itself. Garzadiel deduced that even a thousand  mortal souls could not trap an archdaemon in the pocket dimension the Seal designed. To hold an archdaemon, he needed an archaengul.

 

The Spellcrafters of Rivel that had assisted him were a loose end: the Seal had to return to the state of being completely unknown for his plan to work. By now Garzardiel had complete mental control over the Spellcrafters that followed him. He activated the soul harvesting Construct Army to march on and wipe out Rivel while the minions he had bent to his will were used to reseal the city and distribute the keys amongst the land once more.

 

When the construct horde smashed through the gates of Rivel, the Circle of Governance was helpless to intervene. The underclass was almost entirely wiped out before the Spellcrafters defeated the ancient army. They spread propaganda about this being an attack by nefarious dwarves that they had routed to calm the surviving populace and prevent an uprising.

 

 

When Aegis finally crumbed Rivel was destroyed along with it. The wards of the Spellcrafters protected the city from becoming a blasted husk like the Shards but it was cut off from the world. Realising they would starve and die the Circle of Governance sacrificed the few surviving, traumatised members of the underclass and resorted to lichdom. They remain in the city to this day.

The Spellcrafters that had become minions of Garzardiel remain so and have been his mad cultist minions for about two hundred years. When the Aegis survivors aboard the Perea settled Deus Proditor it was these minions that Garzadiel used to annihilate the populace.”

 

Further Reading