I am one of the few who still remembers that woeful day, by now. What some desecrated in the darkness of their old city echoed in all the World Below, opening the gates to the evil that drove us from our stone.
Unzari, Moon Satyr and Masciaro Druid
The year was 582 A.E.
After Daggerford’s fall and the subsequent edification of Haven, only memories remained of the splendor of the First Men, and so they were led to seek the secrets of their ancestors in the depth of the earth.
The expedition towards Daggerford filled the men of Haven with the desire to dig up the ruins. Under the stone and minerals, overlooked by a vault of blue lights, they reached what seemed to be a temple. They spent months cherishing the collapsed walls of their buried city of old, digging up the houses full or riches made of shiny stone and marquetry. They were driven by a thought, according to which the most precious of discoveries was hidden where the Sages had long ruled, experimented and studied. In the place where Ezreal El wrote down the history of Faerun.
Quiman was a wealthy merchant and wielded great power in Haven. For a few years, he had been literally buying his seat amongst the Sages, taxing the public to fund his obsessive research. He longed above everything to take his place amongst legends, as Ezreal El had done, so as to have power and fame to extend his influence on all the Sword Coast.
At first, great enthusiasm marked the exploration into the cold darkness of Daggerford, as Quiman’s workers were astonished by the grand buildings of old. The general feeling, however, quickly deteriorated as a wrongness settled in the stomachs of the men. As they descended, rocks grew colder and fleeting shadows wandered just out of sight. Some said the place was cursed, forcing Quiman to punish harshly those who abandoned their posts. His reason began to quiver, and his eloquence turned authoritarian, as he slowly forgot what sunlight was, perverter by unholiness imbued in the silence.
After long months passed without any light, draining what enthusiasm or sense of purpose they once had, the leader of the expedition began to imagine that some dark spirit had become part of that place, and that it was bent on frustrating the spirit of men. When they reached the temple, that thought did nothing but foster his curiosity, assuring him he was finally standing before the power Ezreal El had one wielded in his mortal glory. Quiman went through the luxurious nave of the lost of temple, alone with the shadows to be sure he would be the first to attain the source of evil that had been calling to him. The sound of his footsteps broke the glutted silence that had permeated those colonnades for centuries, centuries, keeping their secrets secure.
Once before the thrones of the Sages, the darkness began to reverberate and the whispers guiding his steps became poignant and frenzied, as a soul disturbing hum. Icy air took him by the hand tot he pivotal point of the Great Council circle and its seven thrones. Quiman heard a low, ghastly voice, declaring itself as Ezreal El and instructing the man on how to join him in Enfearun, with the promise of untapped power waiting to be unleashed at his command. Yearning for power and deranged by evil, he followed every step of the instruction, carving his own flesh with foul symbols, until finally taking his own life with the knife used to carve.
“Death is the door.” said a sinister echo coming from nothingness, as Quiman fell lifelessly to the group, without knowing he had torn apart the fabric of reality in that place where the veil had been marred and made thin in the First Age.
When the few other men folk brave enough to descend came looking for their leader, they saw the disfigured corpse of the old merchant bled dry. As they shivered in horror before that macabre scenery, the dim light of their torches suddenly fizzled, and darkness engulfed them.
From darkness, a shape made of tattered flesh and rags emerged, with symbols engraved on what remained of its skin.
A roar made the walls tremble and a low and guttural cry, almost a gurgle, came from the deep and rippled across all of Faerun. An icy, unnatural wind was cast loose from the corpse of Quiman, tearing him in a thousand pieces, and countless spectral voices howled form the very stones of the temple.
It was Ezreal El, of what remained of his corpse, corrupted by the entities ruling over that realm where it had resided for so long. Now a simulacrum of a thousand dark echoes making their way into the World. He stretched his slender arms towards the bystanders and uttered vile words, giving life to the darkness of the underworld.
That day, the dead came back from the grave. Ghosts possessed the bodies of the innocent and unknowable beings emerged from the darkness, as the world witnessed the sun disappear in a cloud of burnt ashes and despair, casting Faerun into a Night Eternal, beginning the end of the world. Few escaped the horror of Daggerford to spread the news about the return of the Archmaester, or what he had become. In the meantime, both the World Below and the World Above were filled with scenes of massacre, horror, and hopeless escape, as mortals faced an unbelievable evil. Ezreal El, in his past, had been a prophet for the Three Truths. No one had suspected he would have been the source of the Forth.