The Fifth Age (1899 - 2501) - The Age of Betrayals This age is marked as an era of compromise and unwise alliances and peacemaking, perhaps born of the exhaustion of the Elven Civil War. For the wizards, the key event is the disappearance of the Archmage early in the Age and their replacement by the Witch, an Icon who stressed working with herb-lore, blood magic, symbology, and nature magic. She had the full support of the Green College and sort of strongarmed the others in the absence of the Archmage. SHe tried striking up an alliance with the High Druid, much to the Empire's unease. In this period the wizards became more welcome in the druidic and elven woods, but far less so, most of them, in the Empire. This was the period where distrust was the rule for any mage whose robe wasn't blue or white. And the Witchfinders REALLY weren't happy for obvious reasons. Eventually one of their agents discovered that the Witch was keeping the Archmagic a prisoner in stasis, and an alliance of rebel wizards, paladins, witchfinders, and various others stormed her home and killed her. They say her body evaporated into light and sank through the floorboards. The Icon of the Witch has never returned, and the Archmage was restored to his post... just in time for the End Times. The Blue helped overthrow the Witch, and the Archmage handed over a substantial amount of lore, but it's not publically known for sure what, along with a lot of gems, jewels, gold and artifacts. These would eventually help the Blue become Lord of Drakkenhall. Perhaps her greatest accomplishment was that she cured many of the worst magical scars on the land left by disasters in the previous ages, particularly scars from the Elven Civil War. She is known to have gained three boons from the Elf Queen, though none know what they are today or they are not telling, for her three great Aids to the Elves. She purified the Spiderwood, turning it back to the Laurelwood. She removed the toxins from the Goldleaf River. And she removed the blight on Shadow Elf babies. She also popularized the notion of how a 7th son of a 7th son would have great magical potential. This does seem to be mostly true in the Thirteenth Age, but it was not true in every age for unknown reasons. Like the Cabalist before her she didn't put enough emphasis on running the show, although she was better at this than the Cabalist was. She probably (?) meant well but did a very poor job of communicating this to most people who didn't share her interests, and turned the Empire as a whole against her specifically and wizards in general. Also by all accounts she was SUPER hedonistic in a very ritualistic tantric mushroom-spiked wine sort of way and that didn't help matters. Some rumormongers claim she was acting on behalf of the Archmage, who was actually 'on vacation' or 'doing a special project', but most historians find this dubious at best. On her death, the Green College abandoned the Colleges of Wizardry, refusing to serve the new Archmage; most defected to the High Druid and their descendants still serve her, giving her capacities which she would otherwise lack. To this day, wizards regard Green as an unlucky color, and many will actually only refer to the former college as the 'Brown College' so as not to have to say 'Green' in relation to wizards. They refuse to wear green. During the fifth age, the Mind Flayers first emerge from the Underdark. The prevailing theory is they must be some species of Shadow Elf, hideously mutated by poison and magic. The Illithid themselves claim to have journoed here from another dimension; all surface scholars dismiss this as them just trying to make themselves sound big and important. For the most part, they are rejected by the dwarves, elves, and the Empire, because they're sinister as fuck and also because the Empire is more than a little bit racist and Mind Flayers look like a squid is fucking someones neck-hole. But they managed to make some inroads among the Wizards, offering lost magical lore and items from the Underdark, as well as tantalizing hints of secret magical stone and water lore." This was of course a giant fucking scam. They're Mind Flayers. They're here to flay some goddamn minds. And the surface world had never seen psionic powers before, ever, at least not to this extent. The upheaval caused by the Witch was the perfect time for them to subvert many Wizards, because the Mind Flayers regard magic is the biggest threat to them and their psionic powers. They also worked some with the Diabolist, but neither faction really talks about that. It all ended in a huge fucking mess, with 'clean' wizards and Witchfinders cutting the infected parts out of the colleges of magic with cleansing, cleansing fire. The Archmage, once he'd returned, put a final stop to things. But the Mind Flayers were just the begginning of terrifying things crawling up from the Underdark... as we'll see in ages to come! The group most successful at developing psionics due to this exposure were the Shadow Elves. They seemed to have a... disturbing... knack for it, in fact. The many uses a drow could have for shadowy mind powers are of course obvious. The Thieves' Guild also sank a lot of effort into it. During the Fourth Age and early Fifth Age, the power of the nobility had grown. The Reality Wars and the failure of the Empire to respond to the Fall of the Elves and Dwarves in any effective way undercut Imperial authority. Bound up in ceremony and ritual intended to keep reality stable, the Emperors were cut off from the people and their concerns. Chichikov III (2467-2486 IY) was assassinated by a noble faction seeking to end the monarchy and institute a new rule by a council of nobles. Lord Hannish Brockmire was the leader of the rebel nobles, and head of the council. He claimed, truthfully, that the King was corrupt but most historians think he was little better. Boris V, the Avenger, was the Emperor's son. He survived the murder of his four elder brothers and three sisters, and traveled the land in disguise, learning the complaints of the people and coming to understand why no one had moved to save his family. And how to win the people back over. The new taxes imposed by the Council to try and clear the nation's debts also helped him build support. Not knowing his identity, as he was disheveled and on the run and in disguise, a kindly peasant family, whose daughter fell in love with him and went on to become the future queen (nicknamed 'the beggar queen' by those not so kind), breaking the line of marriage to nobility that historically held up the bloodline. But after his misadventures, the king was also in no mood to put up with the complaints of nobles. This also happened to score him a little positive reputation amongst the commoners. it began a slight populist turn for the nobility. The peasants weren't his main forces in his comeback, however..... The Great Gold Wyrm saw in prophetic dreams that the human kingdom would fall under the nobles, and that such a fall would be, in the greater scheme of things, Tremendously Bad, and thus he sent aid to the King On The Run. It is also rumored that the Prince of Shadows also had a hand in aiding the King (at what price, who knows?), and helping shape the First Order, but these are often dismissed as the ramblings of the paranoid noble conspiracy theorists. The Chromatic Dragons in this era declared themselves allies of the Imperial Council and 'helped' fight against the Emperor's return, by which I mean 'plundered a lot of stuff'. The Red stole the original Imperial Crown and still wears it to the endless aggravation of the Empire. Even the creation of Drakkenhall didn't get the crown back. The current crown was made in the Sixth Age and is potent but not on a level with the stolen crown. At times, the Red has tried to claim the Imperial throne but never succeeded. The Blue was mostly pre-occupied with investigating the Mind Flayers and trying to steal their secrets with mixed success. The Black stole some of the Great Gold Wyrm's hoard while he was busy helping the Empire; this led to a showdown in which they all beat the snot out of each other and the Four (not Three yet) had to withdraw to their shame, but the Great Gold Wyrm missed the final battle, though his dragon allies helped the return of the Emperor's son. Many consider this defeat was a major factor in the Green eventually coming under the control of the Elf Queen, as he never entirely recovered his confidence. Upon his ascension, the Emperor rightly feared future rebellions, and the first Order of the Hidden Hand, a small group answering only to the king and his council given the task of guarding the king from threats from be they foreign or domestic, with the permission to do anything required to accomplish that goal. Icons of Note The Aesthete: A noble of Glitterhagen somehow transformed himself into an Icon and used his power to seek pleasure. He had a famous battle with the Witch when he tried to seduce her; his defeat led to him being trapped by her until her own death. His effort to seduce the High Druid ended in him being ritually sacrificed by her, and his death is thought to have helped bring down the wrath of the sea. The Bard: The Bard proclaimed she had come to initiate an age of 'Rock and Roll'. This did not come to pass, and halfway through the age, she announced she was going to seek audiences who appreciated her and took off eastward on a flying ship, never to be seen again. She wielded a strange metal lute which could shoot flames out of the end of it; she was a Tiefling. While her plans... whatever they were... failed, the institution of Bards as they are known now come from her disciples; previous 'bards' just did music, song, acting and juggling. And dance. Now they had magic. The Witch allowed this to happen, among the reasons many Wizards became discontent with her. The Witch: Described in the Main Text. Emperors of Note Mikhail VII (2218-2231 IY): The Witch gifted an earlier Emperor with a locked box and told him that as long as he did not open it, prosperity would spread across the land. Egged on by his lover, he opened it to try to assert himself after being dominated by his advisors (due to his laziness) and he was sucked into the box. The Witch, disappointed, then took the box back. Chichikov II (2346-2351 IY): He put too much trust in Mind Flayers and ended by having his brain eaten by a mysterious flying brain with tentacles and a beak, a creature now called a 'Grell'. Boris V, the Avenger (2496-1333 IY): His reign straddles the Fifth and Sixth Age. He was never expected to inherit and spent his time with his lovers and his friends, enjoying irresponsible wealth and power. The murder of his father, Chichikov III (2467-2486 IY) and his siblings forced him on the road and made him grow up. He married Svetlana, a beautiful peasant woman, and his life with her enabled him to finally understand the past mistakes of the Emperors. Her wise advice helped him defeat the rebels and restore himself to the throne in 2496; the next part of his reign was marked, however, by crisis and disaster as the age ended in an attack by wild things. But in the early Sixth Age, he finally got things back into order. How Did The Age End? The slackening of the wards during the tenure of the Witch, combined with the schemes of the Illithid, result in a giant seismic incident. The inland sea has tsunamis scour its shores, tremors collapse buildings, loss of life is huge. With civic order already weakened by the Imperial power struggle, all authority and order in the Empire collapses. The High Druid, already angry over the death of the Witch, leads hordes of barbarians in to reclaim land for the wilds and dance on the ashes. The Emperor grimly circles the wagons around the capital city and waits for dawn. Who saves the Empire from destruction? General Lead reappeared and led a guerilla war in which, to the surprise of all, the Halflings took the lead. Barbarians found themselves cut off from food, ambushed, set on fire as they slept, poisoned, and in one notorious case, devoured by the Stone Thief for no clear reason. General Lead and the High Druid fought each other to the death and neither walked away from it. The High Druid's head hung from the front gate of the Imperial Palace for the length of the Sixth Age; the next High Druid went southwest and is rumored to have been involved with some sort of giant fungal forest she created to cleanse a land ruined by the tapping of life force to fuel magic. This would not be the last of General Lead, either; it was this age which gave him the reputation for appearing when most needed to save the common folk.
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