Second Unmaking

A detailed history of the Second Unmaking

  As told by Akeem of Magicland, professor Emeritus of History   I am told I am the leading expert on the Second Unmaking in the university and that our university is the greatest center of learning in all of Scarterra. If I know more than anyone else, Scarterra's knowledge of the details of the Second Unmaking are very limited indeed.   Millenia ago, a short-sighted elf king wanted to become a god and in his attempt to seize godhood by crafting his own version of the Divine Trophies accidentally creating a giant hole in the Barrier in the process.   When The Barrier was breached, untold numbers of Demons and their undead minions spawned by Turoch’s rage and hunger flooded the mortal plane and attempted to wipe out all mortal life. They nearly succeeded.  

The Basics, What We Know and How We Know It

  We don't know exactly how long the Second Unmaking lasted. Some say it was as brief as ten years and others says it lasted over six hundred years. My best estimate based on the writing of recovered journals is that the Second Unmaking lasted around a century and a half.   According to most surviving Elven accounts, very few babies were born. This was understandable as who wants to raise a child in an apocalyptic hellscape? I calculate that a hundred and fifty years is about the longest the elves could have gone without having children and still be able to recover afterwards. The shorter lived races actually did have children during this time, and given that infants and children are difficult enough to take care of during good times, this seems to be why these races took heavier losses during the Second Unmaking since the minions of the Void do not show restraint towards children. These unfortunate mortals had to scavenge and hide with crying babies slowing them down and giving away their position.   During the Second Age, most elven nations kept their own calendar and there were a great many nations and tribes at the time of the Unmaking, so even if we find some surviving documents with a date on them, it is hard to figure out how it related to the others, so we will probably never know for sure exactly how long the Second Unmaking lasted.   We do not have a a lot of writing from during the Second Unmaking which is understandable. Most elves and other mortals were quite busy trying to ensure their basic survival, so they didn't have time to keep detailed journals.   A lot of writings from before and during the Unmaking were put to the torch, many at the behest of the Demon Lord known as The Vandal (curse its name). Also, some writings were lost after the Unmaking. Our barbarian ancestors were largely illiterate and if they found a cache of ancient Elven books, they would probably see it as little more than a helpful fire starter. Those books and scrolls that weren't destroyed by demon or man were often lost to the ravages of time.   The Chronicles of Levanalth give us a supposedly first hand account of the events of teh Second Unmaking but it is so full of poetic liscense and exageration I don't trust it as a strong historical source.   Most of the lore we have is passed on from oral tradition from generation to generation with all the biases therein. It took three or four elf generations before anyone really started writing these oral stories down and this is my primary source material.   Scholars and bards generally agree on one thing. The Second Unmaking officially began when the first Demon Lord entered Scarterra and ended when the eighth Demon Lord was destroyed.   After the Demon Lords were all slain, the remaining lesser demons became disorganized, but they didn't suddenly die and they certainly didn't stop killing people. The period of The Little Unmaking lasted centuries as brave Scarterrans dealt with the last pockets of Void demons. It is rumored that there are isolated deep dungeons in the wilderness with tiny pockets of Void demons left over from the Unmaking waiting in a state of semi-hibernation for a mortal to come near them.   While the number of demons crossing The Barrier was reduced after the last Demon Lord died, they never stopped crossing entirely, even today.   Some of our "facts" about the Second Unmaking are conclusions drawn from the detailed written accounts of demon slayers in recent times. We have extremely detailed written accounts of demons slain during the so called "Little Unmaking" and beyond. I am assuming the demon grunts of The Little Unmaking were largely the same as the demon grunts during the Second Unmaking, we can extrapolate a lot.  

The Threat of the Faceless

  The Faceless were collectively a greater threat to most mortals than the demons because their numbers were constantly replenishing while the Void demon armies gradually were depleted by attrition.  

The Ignorance of the Demons

  Perhaps due to the Nine's interference or maybe sheer dumb luck, the Void Demons did not seem to understand the threat Silverwood presented to them until the Unmaking was around half over and every surviving enclave of mortals was already well-equipped with Silverwood weapons. Enough to handle the small roving bands of faceless without much risk at least.   Once the remaining Demon Lords figured out what Silverwood could do, they directed their minions to chop down and burn any Silverwood tree they found. That is why Silverwood trees are relatively rare today.   Silverwood was not the only thing Void demons seemed surprisingly ignorant about. Intially Void demons would fly or run at the nearest mortals they sensed without a second thought with roughly the same tunnel vision of a faceless.   They didn't seem to realize that it was the soldiers that were on point while the masses of noncombatant civilians were seeking shelter far away from the main fighting. It was months or years before Void demons seemed to make organized searches for hiding places of noncombatants. It was even longer before Void demons thought to preemptively destroy or disrupt mortals' sources of food, drinkable water, and shelter. Initially, they didn't strip the dead of their valuables. A lot of mortal survivors were able to equip themselves with the weapons and armor of their fallen kin without the Void Demons actively trying to stop this salvage.   What this means that initially the Void Demons tactics were not much sophisticated that "Find the largest population center. Kill as many as they can catch, and turn loose as many faceless as possible. It was only after The Harbinger was destroyed that the remaining Demon Lords actually used anything ressembling military tactics.   We know now that there were eight Demon Lords. Creatures far larger than the largest dragons and possessing great strength, intelligence and mystic power.   I'm not going to debate you on the existance or nonexistance of a ninth Demon Lord. I'll cover what we can consider reliable facts and then we can get to wild speculation later.  

Tactics During the Second Unmaking

  Speaking of evolving tactics, while the storytellers love to talk about grand armies of brave mortals fighting against grand armies of Void demons and their undead minions, large scale confrontations of this sort were fairly rare. Small scale skirmishes were the norm.   Except for the battles intiated by and against the Harbinger that is. Most of the Harbinger's battles involved clashing armies because when the Harbinger was active, most of the kings and queens of the Second Age still had intact governments with conventional armies. Almost every Colassian ruler thought it was a good idea to send an army against the Harbinger at least once despite the fact that the Harbinger beat them all.   The Demon Lord known as the Harbinger was the first Demon Lord to set foot on Scarterra. Being the first means that at least for a while it was the only Demon Lord, but it had thousands, perhaps tens of thousands lesser demons in its army. Some thought the Harbinger was none other than Turoch reborn which explains why the kings and queens were willing to sacrifice their armies to take the Harbinger out.   Before the Harbinger's emergence, Void demons were not wholly unknown by the mortals of the Second Age but they had never been seen in these numbers, or with this level of organization. The Harbinger took its army and flew straight at Disterria. Disterria was the politically powerful nation at that point and was also the largest. Their nation encompassed a large portion of the land of between the World Seam Mountains and what is now called the Demonic Strait. At the time this was known as Central Colassia, because remember what is now East Colassia and West Colassia was once one giant land mass.   Disterria was known to practice large scale slavery and also bullied the smaller nations around them for tribute, much like the dark elves of Kahdisteria who claim to be their descendants.   A lot of the other nations of the time cheered to see Disteria getting a bloody nose. Then they realized that they were getting far worse than a bloody nose and that the Void Demons were attacking everyone. They couldn't just stand by and watch Disteria die.   Disteria was strong enough that their armies and mages could slow the Void Demon horde down a bit. While this happened, elves from the rest of Colassia marshalled their forces and a great many armies marched against the Harbinger only to be beaten one by one because the different nations tried to take on the demons by themselves.   The Colassian nations only knew failure until they were finally able to unite under the leadership of Lensa Vaxidor.   At the time Vaxidor's alliance was preparing to slay the Harbinger, they erroneously believed that the Harbinger was the only Demon Lord that they had to contend with. They didn't know that other Demon Lords were entering from the south pole or rising from the sea. If they had known that they had seven other Demon Lords to fight, they might not have been willing to sacrifice so many elven lives for this one victory.   Though the Harbinger was the first Demon Lords of eight, no Demon Lord to follow every commanded an army as large as the Harbringer's, but they were large enough, especially since a lot of the mortals armies were already broken.   After the Harbinger, the elven nations did not field many large armies either. Within a short period of time, most farms were abandoned or destroyed, so simple logistics made feeding a large army impossible.   The surviving elves (and every other survivng mortal race) usually roamed in bands between 200 and 500 individuals. Too much larger than this and the group would attract Void demons from great distances and tax the local lands ability to find enough food and fresh water for everyone. Too much smaller than this and the group is not strong enough to handle the small roving bands of unaligned demons and faceless.   As for the demons, it was too inefficient to hunt for survivors with giant armies so they mostly split into smaller detachments to hunt mortals over a wider area.   The mortal groups cooperated with other when they could but communication was difficult. The Demon Lord's long distance telepathy gave them a communications edge over the mortals as they coordinated multiple hunting packs to carry out their plans.   Scarterra spans thousands of miles, so communication across the world is not easy, and communication was further hampered because small groups of unaffiliated demons and faceless were roaming everywhere, so lone messengers were extremely vulnerable.   By the time Vaxidor was making progress on getting a pan-Scarterra coalition to fight the Harbinger, more Demon Lords had crossed into the material plane and they also brought armies of lesser Void demons in tow either by bringing reinforcements or rallying nearby unaffiliated demons.  

The Death Toll

  If Void Demons encountered helpless mortals, they would rely on their life draining touch to slay the mortal. Supposedly this consigns a mortal's soul to oblivion.   If a Void Demon encounter a mortal fighting back, they would use their life draining touch and their claws and their magic to fight. No option was spared.   Only very late during the Unmaking did demons use weapons, and it seems that never manufactured weapons, the only weapons they used were scavenged from defeated foes and they mostly only used the best weapons available forgoing common weapons in favor of their claws.   As alluded to before, just from sheer numbers, the faceless slain at least as many mortals as the demons themselves did. As the surviving mortals were more practiced at slaying faceless the Void Demon necromancers started copying mortal necromancer tactics and created skeletons and zombies and the stronger variants of these undead. For the most part, these undead soldiers were not especially effective but corpses were an almost inexhaustible resource for the demon hordes so it cost them little to nothing to field hordes of arrow catchers in this manner.   As the Unmaking progressed, the Demon Lords created new shock troops, the most famous of which are the lycanthropes. These new creatures did not mount a death toll in terms of raw numbers, but they were significant in that they were not created for mass slaughter of noncombatants (that's what the faceless are for), but they were created as the elite soldiers to fight elite battle-hardened heroic mortals.   Beyond all these direct deaths, one must not forget that The Barrier does not just keep out demons, it keeps out the cold. Not only were winters harsher and longer during the Second Unmaking but most farms were destroyed or abandoned. Most mortals had to make due living in tents, if they were lucky enough even to have tents. Food was scarce and the weather cold. Cold people require more food than warm people and hungry people have less resistance to cold. A lot of mortals died from hunger or exposure. Once the Demon Lords decided to target food supplies, this only got worse.   Many mortals turned to cannibalism. Some cannibals joined the Infernalists but most cannibals fought against the Void just like most other mortals did. Often, their non-cannibal brethren willingly turned a blind eye to their allies' eating habits not wanting to turn strong fighters away. It was only during the the Little Unmaking that the elves and goblins started trying to root out their ogre problem. Though I suppose to be technical, an "ogre" is a term referring to a human addicted to cannibalism. Elves had "skopen" and goblins had "bug bears" to deal with.   A lot of mortals committed suicide. Better to lose your life to your own hand than to lose your soul to a demon was a common thought. Other mortals who were injured or infirmed so as not to slow down and burden their loved ones. Others killed themselves to avoid a slow death of starvation. Not every death like this was a noble suicide. Some mortals killed their kin and countrymen. Sometimes this mercy killing was for honorable reasons, sometimes not.   It is hard to take a census form ancient dead people, but I would estimate that 30% of the deaths at this time were from hunger and cold. About 30% of the casualties were from faceless and about 30% of the casualites were inficted directly by demons. That leaves about 10% would fall in a miscellaneous category.   Conventional wisdom holds that nine out of ten mortals perished during the Unmaking though some believe it was as high as nineteen out of twenty or as low as seven out of ten.   Some times the numbers are skewed because death tolls were pretty high during the Little Unmaking which followed and sometimes casualties get mixed up between the Second Unmaking and The Little Unmaking. Again, no was taking a detailed census of the living or the dead at this time so we will probably never know for sure.   Regardless, of the specific death toll, Second Age civilization lay in ruins and this encouraged the Nine to create humans to repopulate the face of Scarterra.   Confusing the issue is that we don't know how many elves there were at the end of the Second Age. Some believe the total world population of elves was as low as twenty million or as high as a sixty million. Accurate population estimates of the other mortal races are even harder to pin down.   Historical records indicate there were at least thirty separate elven nations at the height of the Second Age but the only nation that could claim to still be a nation at the end of the Unmaking was the Island of Lunatus which is now the capital of the Elven Empire.  

What did the Nine do?

  Forgive me if my words are harsh. I'm not a priest or theoligan but I'm not intending to be disrepectful.   One question people ask me is "If Turoch sought vengeance against the Nine, why did the army of the Voids attack the mortal plane?" The implication to this question, is why did mortals take the brunt for what was at it's heart, a grudge against the Nine   Well for one thing, I'm not sure the Void is conscious. I believe it is more instinctual, more akin to a beast than a man. It doesn't plan, but it does hunger and it reacts to stimuli.   There are scholars who speculate that the Void is intelligent and it does want to destroy the Nine, but the Void cannot reach the Nine until the entire mortal plane is destroyed. In this sense all mortals are arrow catchers standing between the Void and the Nine.   An even wilder theory is that the Void targeted mortals rather than the gods to make the Nine suffer psychologically watching that which they care about suffer and die. This might make Mera and Zarthus suffer but I doubt it moves Maylar or Phidas much.   Whether they acted out of self defense or they genuinely cared about mortalkind, the Nine did act. Some people like to credit Korus for creating the original Silverwood trees, but the Nine's spirits (including Korus' spirits) claim that all the Nine contributed to this end. They didn't create the first Silverwood trees wholecloth, but transformed a massive number of connifer trees into Silverwood trees.   Each of the Nine has a small cache of legendary magical items that they give only to the worthiest heroes (though keep in mind that Maylar's idea of a "worthy hero" is very different from Mera's idea of a "worthy hero").   Normally worthy heroes have to pass a series of quests to be given these items and the items divine creator reclaims the magic item back after the hero or heroine's death. During the Second Unmaking, the Nine were less picky and gave their best weapons, armor and tools of healing to the most heroic mortals they could find skipping the need for time consuming quests of worthiness.   A few of these items were destroyed or stolen by the Demon Lords but most of them were recovered and then immediately bequeathed to new heroes as the old ones died.   the Nine also opened the flood gates on mortal divine magic. The number of theurgists and possibly favored souls increased as the Nine opted for quantity over quality so more mortal survivors had access to the divine magic they needed to survive.   The wood elves claim that Korus created the first pegasi during the Second Unmaking and this back historical records because there are no surviing mention of flying horses during the Second Age. The Pegasi were created to give the wood elve's ancestor the maneuverability to better fight flying demons.   Conditions of rampant cold and a shortage of food are normally a breeding ground for disease. Death by disease was surprisingly rare during the Second Unmaking, even infection. Some credit this to Mera's infusing the world with her healing power. Others state that this was Maylar forcibly holding disease back. I am inclined to believe both.   It is said that during the harshest winters, Khemra infused her own essence into the sun to make it stronger and partially alleviate the cold.   Lycanthropes and others in disguise have their falsehoods revealed by the full moon. This is said to be Zarthus' doing.   As food on the surface of Scarterra became increasingly scarce, new life stones were discovered underground. Different people credit this to different deities.   All the Nine did their best to help mortals fight the hordes in their own way. Most of the Nine seemed to play favorites and prioritized protecting their followers and personal creations over the general populations. I like gnomes, but I doubt they would have survived without Mera's direct help. They cannot cover ground as fast as other races with their short legs and mobiity was key to survival during the Second Unmaking.   Greymoria was arguably showed the most blatant favoritism. The dark elves claim their ancestors pledged their eternal servitude to Greymoria in return for her divine protection and the Mother of Magic kept her end of the deal enacting a lot of magical miracles on behalf of her new chosen people and leaving the rest of Scarterra to twist in the wind, though some of the Children claim that Greymoria helped the general population by empowering warlocks among many populations and giving them magic to fight demons.   Khemra was the least prone to play favorites. Khemra seemed to focus on helping the greatest possible number of mortals, regardless of her feelings for said mortals.   In the Third Age, Khemra is the only one of the Nine not to have a so-called vanity race but during the Second Age she had the khnumar. The knumar were a goat-like people who looked like bigger and stronger satyrs, but unlike satyrs they had personal discipline and were generally monoagomous. We only know about the knumar because the knumar were highly literate and they were able to seal away a great many of their works in a vault before they were wiped out.   One thing that was conspicuously absent was fighting spirits. Even spirit summoning spells usually failed. Some believe the Void Demons were disrupting summoning magic with their presence but I believe the Nine chose to shut this avenue of magic off. The very act of summoning a spirit from the Aetherial Realm into the mortal plane opens a tempory doorway that a Void Demon could sneak through. If Void demons could sneak into the Aetherial Realm they could theoretically attack the Nine directly or at the very least destroy many helpless souls of the honored dead.   Some theolgians speculate that a spirit that is slain by conventional weapons can be ressurected an infinite number of times but a spirit that is slain by Void energies is lost forever. Others say that if a spirit is slain by Void energies, it actually wounds the god or goddess who created the spirit.   Whatever the reasoning behind this, spirits of the Nine provided healing and food to mortal survivors but it was rare to see spirits battling demons directly. When the spirits did fight it was using hit and run attacks in very small skirmishes, more often than not with a clear numerical advantage over the demons.   The major exception was the battle that destroyed the The Annihilator where spirits formed a small and army and died bravely fighting beside the beleagured mortals.   elves   No one took a census, but I estimate that at the end of the Second Unmaking there around a million elves scattered about Scarterra after the Ravager was finally destroyed. For reference, as of the most recent census reports, we believe there are approximately four million elves in Scarterra right now.   About half of the surviving elves were concentrated in the lands we now call Codenya, Lunatus and Kahdisterria forming the basis of the wood elves, grey elves, and dark elves respectively. The rest roamed other parts of Scarterra in scattered bands.   During the Red Era of the Third Age, all of the smaller surviving elven groups disappeared. Most of them eventually petitioned to join one of the three new elven nations and the elven nations were happy to take in some new blood. Some of the smaller elven tribes died out fighting humans or other mortals and a few tribes intermarried with humans until their descendants became full humans with only the barest traces of elven cosmetic features.   As the dominant race during the Second Age, elves fought against the forces of every Demon Lord and were instrumental in all eight Demon Lords' deaths apart from the Annihilator and possibly the Successor where they played a bit role at best.     dragons   Of course the dragons survived the First Unmaking and now they were facing a new Unmaking not of their creation.   Then as now, some dragons feel brotherhood with and compassion for the so called lesser mortals, some view us as little more than servants and play things and many dragons view as little more than annoyances to avoid.   Early in the Second Unmaking, dragons were instrumental in slaying many demons but in late in the Unmaking, dragon involvement in the fighting was minimal.   The Demon Lords made a point to target the dragons specifically if they were causing trouble but generally left dragons alone if all they did was fly away. Once the dragons figured out this pattern, most dragons lost any sense of kinship they had with the elves and other mortals and opted to look out for themselves.   Most but not all. A lot of individual dragons had alliances with tribes of kobolds. dragons are long lived creatures and they have a great sense of the importance of history. To their credit, they understood just how vile the Vandal was and they were the core of the resistance against The Vandal's depredations.   Even a single older dragon is a force to be reckoned with. At least one or two dragons were either credibly confirmed or speculated to be involved in the death of every Demon Lord.   There is a legend that is often repeated but I cannot find compelling evidence to confirm or deny it that the Demon Lords had some kind of special magic or psionic attack specficially designed to both cause a dragon crippling pain and to rob dragons of their sense of balance and direction while flying causing them to fall like stones.   While many dragons fled and hid and other dragons killed scores of demons, there are few if any accounts of dragons trying to fight a Demon Lord head on, and no accounts of a dragon winning such a fight.  

All for One and One For All?

  I have talked about how the Second Unmaking impacted different peoples and different places, but with a common enemy the likes of which never seen before, was there a sense of pan-Scarterran unity?   Since the Void demons were trying to slay everything and everyone, it made snese that everything and everyone was your friend. A lot of stories talk about how mortals from different races and backgrounds wisely put aside their differences to battle the demon hordes in a sense of brotherhood never before or sense.   But there is a joke in East Colassia that if you encounter a hungry lion, you don't have to be faster than a lion, you just have to be faster than one of your friends. This can apply to all sorts of threats, but it's use may be limited in this case as Void demons, unlike lions or most other predators, are never sated by one or two boides, and your dead friends may come back again as undead.   So did mortals band together in a grand sense of soldiarity or did mortals all decide to look out for number one?   The answer is both and neither.   Millions of mortals made life or death decisions on their own and they rarely made decisions in concert, but you can see patterns by basic survival needs. In general when the demons were close, every mortal strong enough to carry a weapon was your friend.   When the demons were far away, the greatest threat to your survival is starvation. That means every mortal not in your immediate family (whoever you called family) is a competitor for scarce food or other resources. It was hardly unheard of for mortals to fight mortals, especially if they were from groups that were rivals before the outbreak of the Unmaking.   The presence of Infernalists among mortal population or even if the mere possibility of them was often enough to undermine intergroup unity before it could start.