Editing Acrozatarim/Gazetteer (section)

=The Drakkath Gazetteer=

Being a guide to the realm of the former Drakkath Empire, and surrounding lands.

Several centuries ago, the Younger Gods and the people of the world were victorious in the Dawn War, casting down the Elder Gods and scattering their armies of servitors.  Victory had come at a great cost, however.  Gods, spirits and men alike had perished in great number, and continent-spanning wounds from the war had wrought immense destruction.

It is still not known, even to the wisest and most clever of scholars, just how many years the Dawn Era spanned - indeed, some have hypothesised that time itself was still mutable and uncertain in the earliest stages of the Elder Gods' reign - but over that era, several great powers rose and fell in the Drakkath area, such as the Umbrals.  The Drakkath Empire itself was the last and greatest of polities to rise in this part of the world, forged under the stewardship of a line of Emperors and Empresses who claimed right of rule through infusion with elemental energies, supposedly a gift from the Great Elementals themselves.  The Empire's reach stretched far beyond the central Drakkath region, its aristocracy reaped the luxurious rewards of their vast realm, and its armies numbered in the hundreds of thousands.  Even in the shadow of the Elder Gods themselves, the Empire was one of the greatest powers in the world.

By the closure of the Dawn War, the Empire had fallen and the lands it once claimed had been wracked with disasters, both natural and arcane.  The Imperial Family were dead, the great cities ruined, and wild servitors and monsters roamed the land.  The shattered provinces and satraps regressed into autonomy as men and women struggled to retain any semblance of the civilisation that had once ruled the Drakkath; farther holdings happily tore free of the threadbare Imperial reins to reestablish their own independence.  Warlords and opportunists rose and fell.  So much was lost - incredible works of art, vast edifices of magic, storehouses of ancient knowledge and heirlooms of the people themselves.  The victors of the Dawn War wept to know that Drakkath, glorious Drakkath, with its great bejewelled throne, its towers that reached the clouds, its insightful cloisters of monk-diviners secluded in their glittering sphere-fortresses... all lost.  All ruined.  All gone.  The passing of an Empire.

Some would say, of course, that this was truthfully no bad thing.  After all, the Empire rose under the auspices of the Elder Gods; their workings were vital to its operation, their corrupting influence threaded through its very being.  When the Dawn War erupted, did not the Empire falter and flinch?  Did not its rulers at first dissemble?  Did they not answer many of the Elders' demands in those early decades of strife?  That which came of the former age had to be torn down so that a new era, one born on the back of mankind's own efforts, might rise true and untainted.  More than that, of course, for all its glories the Empire is said to have spawned horrors too.  The Panopticon Fortress that stared into peoples' minds to root out treachery, slaying suspects where they stood - and which was infamously misused under corrupt Overseer-Ministers.  The vast slave-mines that tore the elemental treasures of the earth forth to gild the Imperial residences.  The harnessing of furious elementals just to salve the pride of the Imperial Family, who of course claimed right of rulership over such elemental beasts themselves due to the Great Elementals' gifted infusions.  The welcoming of a myriad of some of Hashrukk's most heinous servitor-spawn, just because they were useful tools in keeping the lower orders in line.  The sacrifice of the entire city of Kunlai to the waters to appease fell Shauku, thereby guaranteeing the rest of the Empire great bounties from the cold southernmost waters in return for thousands of lives.

For all its light and all its darkness, though, the Empire was a great force and one that has shaped the landscape even today.  Indeed, understanding claims to the Imperial mantle and the inheritance of the Drakkath Empire are key to understanding Drakkath regional politics.  Many of the nations that have grown up from the shattered Empire's corpse seek such title and claim; and through such a unifying concept, conflict between them is born.

Today, the Drakkath remains a divided land.  Several of the nations that have risen in the past centuries can be identified as roughly mapping to old Imperial provinces or divisions; others are entirely new, rooted in religious or political movements that have emerged since the Dawn War.  However, much of the Drakkath remains a wild and dangerous land, with national claims over farther-flung regions being tenuous at best.  Scars from the Dawn War still wound the land, and servitors are known to gather and lair in the great expanses beyond the grasp of civilisation.

Whoever would seek to reunify the old Empire and restore its past glories has a very great task ahead of them.