Darklands» Irra

The world.

The word “irrá” (accent on the second syllable) is ancient Celdic, and means “earth”. Irra is thus the common name, throughout the continent, for the world on which the Celdic Empire, Asvidere, Rem, etc., lie.

Races

Dwarves

One might hear it said sometimes, that “dwarves do not forget”. A stereotype, that; though no less true than most such things. It should be more accurate, however, to say this: that the dwarves need never learn a thing twice.

Of all the humanoid civilizations on Irra, that of the dwarves is by far the oldest. Long before the rise of the most ancient human empires, before the awakening of the elves, in the time when the gnomes were still half-living and half-myth, when halflings had only begun to band together into wandering tribes, and the goblins and their kin were little more than feral savages, and none had ever heard the name of ‘orc’, the dwarves attained to sentience, and began to build their cities out of earth and stone and fire. And though they lived long lives, and lived slowly, and made no hurry to advance, the dwarves had this to boast of: that no discovery, no achievement, no new solution to the challenges the world might offer, that was discovered by the dwarven people, was ever lost or forgotten. Whatever they built, the dwarves built for all time.

They were a lawful people, the dwarves; aligned with Order, in a way that reached deep into their bones. Thus—the dwarves would say—they were made, shaped out of stone by Moradin, the Soul-Forger, at the dawn of time. So it may be; and there is much to be said for the stability of stone. It is immovable without titanic effort; it changes but slowly, or may be carved with purpose, and retains its shape; it is not blown about by shifting winds. But there are downsides, as well; and “immovable” can be just another way of saying “stagnant”. Then, too, there are the feuds that last for generations, and endless wars—such as the bloody time of clan violence that wracked the Oresh people, before they chose a Thane to rule them—that call to mind the image of a boulder rolling down a mountain slope, crushing all in its path as it hurtles toward the cliff’s edge.

The defining event in the modern history of the dwarves is planetary unification, which took place just under four centuries ago, as a response to the strategic threat posed by the drow.¹ Stoneheart itself was under siege. The leaders of every dwarven nation-state, without exception—large and small, irrelevant and mighty—were called together. The talks were brief; there was little to say, only an offer to be made, and answers given. Thus it was, and thus they were—all in assent. The agreement reached was simple:

Thenceforth all dwarves would bow to the King-at-Stoneheart. From the other rulers he would collect no taxes, and take no hand in running their affairs; but when he called, they swore that they would come. Thenceforth, a strike against any nation of the dwarves was to be felt by all of them. Thenceforth, against all enemies, the dwarves were one.

The drow were vanquished not long after that. What was built, yet stands: for four centuries no dwarven city-state or principality has warred against another. Certainly there is mistrust, and rivalries, and competition; old ways die hard. But there is no bloodshed; and as for external enemies, none have risen, in four hundred years, that have not been defeated—and far more easily than those who spurred the dwarves to join together.

Elves

It is a strange thing, to think of elven civilization as young. Yet for all their hauteur, even elves do not deny that when they awoke into the world, the dwarven cities had, by then, stood for millennia; even the first human empires had formed already.

They were not savage primitives, before then. Civilization, to the elves, means something very different than it does to humans or to dwarves or halflings. It is not an advance, not an achievement, not progress. It is a temporary and reluctant awakening, from the Dream-Which-Is-Truth, into the harsh and squalid “waking” world.

It is impossible to convey, to those of other races, the state in which the elves existed before their awakening.² Time flowed around them, but touched them not. They did not die, were never born; they learned nothing; they were. Yet they were not spirits, or gods; they were creatures of flesh, as they are now. They knew a great deal. They spoke; they sang; they fought. They lived.

And then they woke. It is usually said that the reason for the awakening was the threat of death—the destruction of the forests, the taming of the deserts—in short: the work of humans. It is a plausible enough account, and well-supported by the histories that can be found. Defense against such threats requires empires, armies, weapons; and these require resources; and in this is the work of civilization. Soon enough there is politics; crime; trade; education; alliances; death; birth; farming; rituals; laws; and pain.

The elves resent it all, resent it bitterly. It poisons their souls. The first of the awakened, long ago, were filled with anguished memory of what they had given up. Their children only knew the Dream from stories, which their parents told with tears in their eyes, their faces masks of pain. Today, most elves can only feel a nameless void, the shape of which they cannot know. The Dream is the name they give to that which would fill this void, and make them whole.

Elves long for the time when the need for civilization is no more, when they can abandon all the trappings of existing within time, and return to the Dream. And it is the great fear of the elven race, that this may no longer be possible—that too much time has passed, too much has been forgotten; that they have become too much like other races; that they are, now, forever mortal. Great swaths of elven art, their songs, their stories, are about this fear; it occupies, in their collective consciousness, a place akin to that which, in the stories humans tell, is filled by love, or death.

Orcs

Eight hundred years ago, the Celdic Empire was going through a golden age. The Empire was expanding, conquering new lands at a rapid pace. Indeed “conquer” was hardly the word for it, as not a few of its weaker neighbors surrendered without a fight, while others were crushed so quickly that there was barely a noticeable difference between resistance and immediate surrender. The Empire offered favorable terms; its rule was not oppressive; and most of the newly-vassal tribes and kingdoms gained much more from annexation than they lost in tribute paid.

Eventually, however, the Empire’s armies came upon a country they could not swallow up so easily. The usual terms were offered, but the natives of this land—which was called Noan—refused. They were a proud people, these Noanites, filled with nationalistic pride; and in ethnicity and culture they were much unlike the people of Celdanna. Noan was not large, but it was strong; it had a warrior tradition. And the Noanites were willing to fight for their independence; they did not fear war, and they hated the thought of bowing to a foreign ruler, for they saw themselves as one people, united.

In a different time, this might’ve been enough. Under a weaker Emperor; or in a time of internal strife within Celdanna; or in a period when the Empire was at war with other, more powerful enemies—given such conditions, the Noanites could’ve held firm. But Noan was faced with the Empire of the Most Holy Dawn at the peak of its greatness; and soon enough, defeat loomed imminent.

Yet the people of Noan did not accept what seemed inevitable; and so they turned to desperate measures. The Noanite priests, weaving dark rituals, made contact with a being from beyond the veil, a mighty entity they called the “god of rage” (they knew its name, of course—they had to, for the ritual to work—but it meant nothing to them). This god spoke to them, and offered them that which they wished; and the Noanites made with it a pact, whose terms were this: all of Noan’s warriors, all the soldiers of the Noanite army, would pledge their souls to this “god of rage”; and in exchange, he would make them invincible in battle, avatars of wrath and martial fury; and they would spill the blood of their enemies in his name, and his would be the glory, and theirs would be the victory.

The Noanite warriors entered the pact willingly; they understood the deal they were agreeing to. They knew that an eternity of service to something terrible awaited them after their deaths; but they made this sacrifice, knowing that they were preserving their people against assimilation and the end of their way of life.

Or… they had thought they understood. In the moment when the pact was sealed, the “god of rage” consumed the souls of all the warriors of Noan, ripping them from their bodies in an instant. The priests knew at once what had happened, but they were perplexed, even more than horrified; for they had considered the possibility of such treachery, and had dismissed it. What should it benefit this god, to take the warriors’ souls at once? Without souls, their bodies would fall dead; how, then, could the soldiers fight and slaughter in his name? At best, their corpses might be raised in undead form, but this god with whom they’d made the pact hadn’t the power to create undead of any real strength, not in such numbers; and a legion of shambling zombies or brittle skeletons would be child’s play for the Empire to defeat. Noan would fall; the god would be forgotten, having thus gained nothing in betrayal.

What the priests did not expect was that the soldiers’ empty shells would be, at once, before their bodies even had the chance to fall, filled once again—filled with the spirits of their master’s favored children. For the “god of rage” with whom the Noanites had bargained had been no one else but Gruumsh, known across the multiverse as the patron god of orcs; and having torn away the souls of the foolish humans who had made this pact, he now filled their bodies with the spirits of ten thousand orcish warriors—those who had died in glorious battle, and, in the afterlife, had followed him to war for untold ages.

The very first thing that the transpossessed warriors did was to massacre the stunned and panicking priests. Then they went out into the streets, into the villages and towns, the farms, the markets; and they killed without mercy or discrimination. They did not stop to plunder; they seemed to need no rest. They slaughtered children, women, elders—who could not understand why, and what was happening; but died too quickly to ponder it for long. And a transformation overtook the warriors, as they killed their way through the inhabited places of Noan. An orc spirit cannot long remain within a human body, without causing madness, and then death; but with every life the former soldiers took, with every drop of blood they spilled, they gained the semblance of the orcs that the possessing souls once were. By the time that they ran out of their own countrymen to kill, and all that remained of the Noanite people were a few scattered bands of refugees, fleeing from the unimaginable horror that gripped their homeland—by then, those who had been warriors of Noan, were no longer even slightly human. Thus, when the armies of Celdanna moved across the border, to begin their invasion of Noanite lands, they met, not the enemy army they expected—but a horde, composed of the greatest orcish champions out of the histories of a hundred worlds.

That is how the orcs first came to Irra.

The war that followed was the bloodiest and most savage conflict in the Empire’s history. It ended with a Celdic victory—after a fashion. The losses were unimaginable. The war claimed half of all Celdanna’s men of fighting age. The orcish horde was scattered; but the Empire’s period of expansion, too, was broken—and there would never be another like it.³ The golden age had ended, replaced with a period of slow recovery and, in parts of the Empire, even hardship.

As for the orcs—the horde had crashed into the Empire of Celdanna, and had broken. Many of the greatest heroes, the most charismatic leaders, of the orcs, were dead—their second deaths having been as glorious, no doubt, as their first; and their souls now returned into their god’s embrace. Those who survived splintered into warbands. There was nothing for them in the land of Noan—the Noanite people were all but exterminated, the villages and towns burned, the farmland scorched and trampled. There was nothing to raid, nothing to plunder. So the orcs looked outward; and to the southwest, on the far side of Noan from the Imperial border, they saw the lush and pristine rainforests, and the rich and fertile grasslands, that were then home to the elves…

The elven lands would look quite different, by the time the elves would manage, finally, to drive out the orcs. The elves, too, would change—would grow more warlike, more efficient… more human. And the orcs—they would be fruitful, and would multiply, and meanwhile splinter even more, scattering across the continent and beyond. Eventually they would be known as perpetual scavengers—raiders, bandits, occupying the edges of civilization. They would perpetually dream, but never come close to succeeding, in recapturing that moment of bloody, glorious, exalted slaughter with which they came into this world.