Revision as of 18:58, 6 October 2013

In the distant past, during a time which occult scholars who study the forgotten history of mankind call the late Valdorian and Atlantean Ages, Lemuria was a powerful kingdom. In its cities, magnificent palaces sprawled across vast estates and magically-powered ornithopters soared between sparkling adamantine towers. Beyond its shores, pisciremes prowled the ocean depths protecting its merchant fleets, and at the far reaches of the kingdom, quattropedes patrolled the borders and repelled all invaders. Few could challenge Lemuria’s power — even proud Atlantis found the task of conquering it daunting. Th is was Lemuria’s golden age. Since then the kingdom has been a long time dying.

65,000 TO 36,694 BC: IN A TIME BEFORE HISTORY

The Turakian Age came to an fiery end with the fall of the Undying Lord Takofanes. The epic battle against the immortal evil left the world in ruins — continents torn asunder, seas roiled with unending storms, fires crackling across the heavens — and from this wreckage arose new lands, new forms of life. One of the new races that survived was a reptilian race of shape-changers that in later millennia men would know as the Lemurians.

In the aftermath of these cataclysms, when the turmoil ended and civilization once again flourished, mankind ruled a world he had once had to share with Dwarves, Elves, and Orcs. One of his kingdoms, the Empire of Valdoria, lent its name to the age. Mankind’s dominance and xenophobia during the Valdorian Age forced the Lemurians to conceal themselves. They assumed the shape of men and women and hid among mankind, dwelling in isolation from others of their own species.

But late in the Valdorian Age, one of these ur-Lemurians, the sorcerer Faltrah Lem, made a discovery that would set the future course of his race and lead to the founding of Lemuria.

37,566 BC: THE DISCOVERY OF IGNAETIUM

In a place beyond the edge of civilization, in a tower where cold winds moaned and the stark white ice rose like jagged-peaked mountains, Faltrah Lem worked in his arcane laboratory. He performed a simple preparatory task, hammering and chipping coal into smaller pieces for the brass brazier he used to heat his alchemical fluids. Sparkling on the surface of the broken pieces of coal were slender chips of some crystalline substance. The chips were dull orange, yellow, or blue in color and seemingly unremarkable. He paid these impurities no mind — he had much more important sorcerous matters to consider.

Faltrah Lem scraped the broken coal into his brazier and set it alight. But rather than glowing dimly with a ruddy light, a fire exploded from the brazier and raged in a whooshing pillar, the color of which changed freely and quickly, fl ashing from cool blue to blood red to hot white and back again. In the depths of this fire, Faltrah Lem could see with his sorcerous sight an elemental lurking. It was a brutish, primeval consciousness far less intelligent and cunning than the fire elementals he summoned from the Scorched Lands — and, he quickly realized, one far easier to manipulate toward his own ends.

In the preceding millennia magic had been at lower ebb than in Turakian times (though neither Faltrah Lem nor anyone else realized that). Sorcerers had to rely on other-dimensional beings for their powers. At that moment Faltrah Lem was one of the first to witness the rise of magic in the world — one of the first to receive concrete proof that magic was increasing in power. He gathered a handful of coal and scrutinized the multicolored chips more closely. Somehow lurking in the crystal was the spirit of fire. Faltrah Lem named this new substance ignaetium.

37,523 BC: LEMURIA’S FOUNDING

Faltrah Lem stood at the bow of the ship. With a hand shielding his eyes from the Sun, he studied the long line of mountainous islands that rose just over the horizon. A new magic fueled the bronze hulled ship that plowed through the tranquil blue waters of the Shining Sea. Wheel-like paddles filled the crisp salty air with a rhythmic thumping, and smoke rose from copper stacks that towered above the ship, taller than any masts. Below the copper stacks burned arcane furnaces where ignaetium powered the paddles that propelled the ship. Gathered behind Faltrah Lem were his fellow Lemurians — his sorcerous peers and their bodyguards of able-bodied warriors.

For over forty years Faltrah Lem had studied the properties of ignaetium, and during his studies he had gathered a cabal of other Lemurian sorcerers. Together they explored the possibilities of this new substance, and as they experimented, they debated their future course. Eventually they decided to seize the land from where ignaetium came and establish a kingdom, one that would in turn become an empire when it conquered the world. Th e first step was conquering the sparsely populated archipelago and subjugating the primitive humans who resided there.

Standing amidships, Faltrah Lem gathered his sorcerous cabal around him. First they raised the spirits of the water, and roaring waves crashed on the rocky beaches of the islands, sweeping away the huts of the inhabitants. Th en the sorcerers raised the spirits of the wind, and howling gales blew before them, heralding their coming. Finally the ship made landfall and Lemurian warriors poured over the side.

In seven days they conquered the archipelago, rounding up the natives to work as slaves in the ignaetium mines. On the eighth day Faltrah Lem crowned himself king and named his new kingdom Lemuria.

37,018 BC: THE NEW GODS

The Priest-King Faltrah Lem lay on his death bed, his new priesthood attending him. He instructed the priests on the proper rites to perform over his body when he was dead.

In recent decades Faltrah Lem had left the study of the arcane to his fellow sorcerers and turned his attention to the study of the gods. Lemurians had spent millennia isolated from each other, lurking among humanity, and they held few beliefs in common. But they all still believed in their old gods — ancient monstrous beings of inchoate evil called the Rastrinfhar, meaning in their ancient tongue “The Bleak Ones.”

Faltrah Lem wished to create a cult of worship around himself, but these ancient deities failed to serve his purpose. Th e Bleak Ones were grim gods who cared nothing for mortals and their desires. They laid rightful claim to the Lemurians because the spark for the Lemurians’ life had come from their divine essence — the cold fire that served as the stuff for a Lemurian’s soul that had seeped down from the heavens in the days when the world convulsed in the aftermath of the Turakian Age — but the only reward the Bleak Ones gave for faithful service was oblivion after death.

Faltrah Lem gave his new kingdom new gods to worship. He gave his people gods of smoke and fire, crystal and lightning. He made these new gods the bringers of gifts to the Lemurians, the source of ignaetium and the more recently discovered mystical substances of corusqua, crystallos, and fulminor. Faltrah Lem made himself the most holy of the gods’ servants, crowning himself the Priest-King and ensuring that future generations would venerate his memory and worship him and his descendants as nearly divine.

The new gods were false — pure fabrications created by Faltrah Lem — and he swore his new priesthood to secrecy. Faltrah Lem taught his priests how to draw voices from the fires of ignaetium and to pull ghostly faces from the smoke of fulminor, and how to make these phantasms speak the words of the so-called divine. In short, he showed them how to deceive the faithful. Faltrah Lem’s peers, those sorcerers who had helped him study ignaetium and first conquer the islands, knew these gods as fabrications — but none of them were willing to challenge the Priest-King, for he was the discoverer of ignaetium and founder of the kingdom — and among the warriors and other Lemurians newly come to the kingdom to join with their kin, the new gods found fervent worshippers.

Finally Faltrah Lem died, once again repeating his instructions about his funerary arrangements to the priesthood, his last breath a rattling wheeze. The priests did as they were told. They embalmed the priest-king’s body with arcane fluids, distillations of corusqua and ignaetium dissolved in solution, and let the mingled smoke of fulminor and burning cedar dry the body’s skin to leathery toughness while preserving its appearance. The next day they led the procession to the newly constructed mausoleum, a ziggurat of gleaming brass that would serve future generations as a shrine where they could venerate the first Priest-King’s memory... and then the ancient, cast-off gods of the Lemurians let their curse fall upon the one who denied their claim on Lemuria and its nobility.

As the solemn procession wended its way from palace to mausoleum, the sky above Lemuria opened up. From out of the unnatural rent in the heavens reached a dark mass of clawed hands and barbed tentacles. They seized Faltrah Lem’s body and took it elsewhere, the sky closing behind them.

The Lemurians fell to their knees and trembled with fear. The message was clear — though the new gods might receive the Lemurians’ worship and prayers, the Bleak Ones still claimed the souls of departed Lemurians as their own.

So began the Lemurians’ obsession with immortality.

36,854 BC: A SPELL GONE AWRY

Andrith the Golden stood on a balcony overlooking the Plaza of Crystal Leaves, where crystallos was cultivated in the shapes of trees whose leaves tinkled quietly in the breeze. Assembled before him in the Plaza was the nobility of Lemuria; arrayed behind him on the balcony was the priesthood with Andrith’s father, the Priest-King Tyrann Lem, son of Faltrah Lem, in the place of honor. Andrith gave the sign for the slaves to feed the furnaces newly erected in subterranean chambers under the Plaza, and a brass horn called the slaves to their work. Arcane energies puff ed from the stacks that rose at the edges of the Plaza, and like a heavy fog gathered in the Plaza, engulfing the assembly.

Everyone in the Plaza of Crystal Leaves stood in hushed anticipation. Could this young sorcerer truly extend their lifespan — truly put off the Bleak Ones’ punishment, if not forever, then at least for several centuries, long enough to discover the secrets of immortality?

The Bleak Ones’ seizure of Faltrah Lem’s mummifi ed body had sent ripples of fear through the Lemurian nobility. Unlike the subjugated humans who served them, each Lemurian owed the debt of his soul to the ancient gods, and what punishment awaited them after death for forsaking the Bleak Ones was unknown. Did their souls simply disappear into oblivion as those of deceased Lemurians had for countless millennia? Or were they punished for the blasphemy of their new gods? Because the afterlife was so uncertain, the Lemurians obsessed over the secrets of immortality.

The first sorcerer to have any notable success was Faltrah Lem’s grandson, Andrith the Golden, but his arcane workings had an unintended side effect. By his father’s decree, Andrith performed a ritual over the gathered Lemurian nobles. He made no false promises. He only guaranteed his spell would extend the life of the Lemurians so they could number their years in centuries rather than decades and put off the punishment of the Bleak Ones for a short while longer. Andrith called it the first step to immortality. What he didn’t say, and didn’t know, was that the spell would strip the Lemurians of their shape-changing ability.

Over a century ago Faltrah Lem had decreed that the Lemurians must remain in human form. Soon after Lemuria’s founding rumors spread through the realms of man about a new kingdom possessing war machines that were nigh-unstoppable. Faltrah Lem believed if mankind also learned an inhuman race ruled Lemuria, the kingdom’s neighbors would unite against his people. Despite their power the Lemurians were few and a united mankind would prove too grave a threat for the young kingdom to overcome, so the Lemurians hid their true nature, as they always had, by masquerading as men and women. To the eyes of outsiders, Lemuria was simply one more human kingdom struggling for dominance in a war-torn and chaotic world. And thanks to Andrith’s spell, they would remain in human form forever more.

Andrith completed his ritual. For his success later generations revered his name as one of Lemuria’s greatest sorcerers. For his failure his own father crucified him on one of the trees in the Plaza of Crystal Leaves. The Priest-King ordered Andrith’s bones left on the tree to be engulfed into its trunk, so later generations could peer into the transparent crystal and see Andrith’s body preserved in the tree’s depths.

36,742 BC: WAR WITH THE EMPYREANS

Despite centuries of sorcerous study, immortality eluded the Lemurians. But in their mad, desperate quest they discovered a race that seemed to know the answer to the riddle of immortality. These undying men and women were the Empyreans, cousins of humanity gifted with eternal life by the experiments of the mysterious Progenitors. The Lemurians were determined to have the secret of immortality from the Empyreans and declared war on them. They pursued the war with a will, but despite their magical might, the Lemurians were still mortal and the Empyreans far beyond mortal ken.

36,694 BC: “DELIVER OUR FOES”

A sorcerer whose name would later be expunged from the histories of the kingdom invented a weapon to bring low the Empyreans. It possessed power enough to boil the oceans, to bring the Moon down from the sky, to sink continents — all this and more the sorcerer promised the Priest-King. He gave it a simple name: Mandragalore. The word was a prayer to the Bleak Ones, those forsaken gods of the ancient Lemurians. In the old tongue it meant: “Deliver our foes.”

Perhaps the gods heard the prayer and decided to punish their scornful worshippers. Perhaps the sorcerer made some small but crucial error in his calculations and schematics. Perhaps the hated Empyreans learned of the Mandragalore and somehow sabotaged it. Or perhaps no mortal could safely wield the power of such a terrible weapon. For when it was at last turned on the Empyreans, when the Lemurians gathered to celebrate their imminent victory, energy exploded from the Mandragalore. A rippling wave of coruscating power leveled the capital city and outlying areas; the resulting shock waves cracked the island as if it had been struck by a titanic hammer flung from the heavens.

Lemuria, broken and burning, sank beneath the waves.