A Rhyonis World History

Want to know what existed before Rhyonis? Click here for The Realm of Power: A Time Before Time!

Long before the time of adventure and exploration of Rhyonis, five beings of great personal power, escaped the remnants of a dying realm to create one of their very own.

Malirica, a mage capable of bending and weaving realities with dominion over time created the blueprint for the budding realm. They took on the insurmountable task of laying out all the events that would ever befall its inhabitants on Their Fixed Moment Timeline.

Lady Siesmet, the kindest and wisest of the Creation Gods, saw over Rhyonis’ creation with motherly devotion. Her care for the land would see it bloom and prosper with foliage and life. Their new realm would be home to beings of all manner; all of which would bud and emerge from The First Son, a massive emerald oak tree named Rhyonis.

Kyah, a capable, roguish rider of wind and waves spread His arms and sweat fell from the heavens to create rivers and oceans that ensured that Siesmet’s children were given life-preserving water. This was happenstance as He simply soared and paid little mind to the happenings of the realm itself.

When His waters ran dry, or Siesmet’s children could no longer sustain themselves, the Grey Lady, Alaxendaria, would collect their souls in Her Soul Pouch. Once this Pouch contained more than it was capable of, She would shepherd them from Rhyonis to the Grey Lit Path. Along the Path, souls are left to wander, reliving their lives in the various shades of grey that painted them.

Lastly, watching over all of them and the realm as a whole, is St. Nihaan. The warmth of His love, a fierce devotion to His family and Their creation, shines as Balasar, the Blazing Beacon, locked in the sky above. Nihaan’s light casts out evil and reveals the truth that lies within all, but burns for those that would serve Him.

As the Creation Gods laid out their plans and watched their world form and evolve under their assistance, darkness and unrest were not far behind. The first creatures emerged from Rhyonis deep within The Life Glade; His roots parting to allow the dragons to fly from their confines, magnificently gliding across the entire world, free and unabashed. The dragons, who inherited the Gift of Sentience from the Creation Gods as they took their first steps, feasted in vast quantities on the reserves of Life Essence and lingering deific power blanketing the new realm.

The First Beings were almost all-powerful, rivaling the power of the Creation Gods themselves and warping the world around them. This was far from the intention of the small Pantheon of Rhyonis, so before they allowed more beings to call the land home, limitations were put on those that would be known as The First People.

In the dragon's wake walked the elves, and then the gnomes and halflings, and dwarves and humans walked out lastly, being those of The First People to travel furthest from the Life Glade on the continent that would come to be known as Ish-Gahn. Each race to come from Rhyonis was a new lifeform with various traits and abilities; experiments by the gods to fill the land with beings of entertaining, but not devastating power.

For whatever physical or magical prowess The First People were granted, they were not blessed with the Gift of Sentience as the Dragons, who had proven far too chaotic for the liking of the Creation Gods.

For decades, The First People just resided where they found land to call their own, no Sentience driving them to expansion or development, surviving on base instinct alone. The rapidly expanding minds of the dragons began to observe the lumps of clay that wandered the land beneath them. It was not long before there was a great divergence in the way of thought on how to mold and cast The First People.

Rhyonis did not play host to peace talks or debates for long, and these entities took to violent bloodshed that left nothing untouched by devastation. Dragons of metallic scales fought valiantly to teach and protect The First People, upholding the teachings that the realm was all of theirs to share and explore and experience together; where dragons were to be the guides for those who follow in their footsteps. Conversely, the chromatic-scaled dragons sought to enslave the beings that they viewed as lowly servants meant to worship and serve the means of the mighty.

The War of Draconic Divergence lasted nearly a millennia and was ignited by a single spark of compassion. A silver wyrm matron, mother to countless of her own children, saw the primitive races squabbling mindlessly in the dirt, adult and child alike void of thought beyond instinctive survival. Finally, tired of seeing the people she knew could flourish and make the world something great struggle to even communicate, Angehlah flew over those within the Life Glade as they slept and whispered, “Life is yours for the taking.”

Her words, infused with magic, pierced their minds and permeated it with vivid dreams and thoughts of reason. Quickly thereafter, the elves expanded and began to worship the silver dragon Angehlah, as a god. This, however, did not sit well with the chromatic dragons who sought to enslave all of The First People.

It was with those few words, “Life is yours for the taking,” that the realm would suffer untold loss, but bloom into a diverse society across several masses of land. The First People would then come to call their homes names of their own choosing; Ish- Gahn, home of the elves, Qarte, the halflings taking the main continent, and the gnomes settling on the archipelago to its north. The humans quickly claimed Theurgius in the harsh frozen north, forcing the dwarves to retreat underground into the massive subterranean expanse known as the Underdark.

Fighting two wars, one physical with the opposing dragons, one philosophical with the enlightening of the darkened minds of The First People, Angehlah grew tired of conflict. In an effort to end the devastation ravaging the world, she, alongside her children, unleashed a massive torrent of frozen energy to eradicate an entire war zone, scarring the face of Ish-Gahn permanently. In the process of ending the war, she ascended to godhood, having the following of The First People and the truly mighty act of power displayed. This would tether Her existence to the very fabric of reality, binding Her to the Fixed Moment Timeline as Angehlah, Goddess of Sentience, first of the Ascended Gods.

Her Gift of Sentience allowed The First People to prosper and develop well beyond the original scope of the Creation Gods and, for better or worse, more beings of great power would perform wondrous acts and rise to Her rank. These ascensions expanded the Pantheon of Rhyonis and would see a great many amendments be written into the Fixed Moment Timeline, completely out of Malirica's influence.

As Rhyonis ushered in an age of enlightenment, dangers from other planes stalked closer. The humans, the most versatile and resilient of The First People, caught the attention of extraplanar entities from other realms. These beings would seek to use Rhyonis as a foothold to expand their influence from their home of the Trinity Plane. Innocuously enough at first, the celestials and fiends seeped into the budding minds dotting Theurgius’ landscape, twisting them to align with the whims of higher powers.

Conflict sprung up like weeds as small-scale debates between opposed ways of thinking, fostered by demons in half the population and angels the other half, escalated into utter carnage. Tensions grew the more blood flowed and another god emerged directly from the Life Glade; bloodlust and malice taking physical form as an entity known as Gierloh.

The God of War tore His way from Rhyonis’ roots, mutilating the Glade permanently as He moved northward towards the encroaching genocide. In a matter of days, Gierloh traveled thousands of miles to bear witness to the battles growing near their climax. It was at this point that a series of natural disasters rocked the realm and dread began to sweep over the surviving wyrms that still watched over The First People.

Gierloh's Emergence would rock the realm of Rhyonis, nearly tearing it asunder. His mere presence caused the foundation of Rhyonis to fracture, setting off a catastrophic eruption beneath the waves of the Continental Sea as an oceanic volcano range viciously began spewing an endless flow of lava into it. These eruptions would continue, unchecked, beneath the surface for millennia.

No one, not even the gods that created the realm, could foresee that even darker times were looming just on its horizon. For as much light and goodness Rhyonis contained, those factors proved to just be one side of a coin that was bound to flip and show the dark potential that lie just beneath the surface. It was only a matter of time before an encroaching atrocity would show its face of the coin.

During The War of Claiming, the humans of Thuergius came to face near extinction. Celestials seduced humans and bred children empowered by divine blood known as the aasimar. These beings were enchanting beautiful, striking and arrestingly so. Able to weave light and channel healing energy through their touch, the aasimar were meant to act as a protective force for their human ancestry. The angelic parents that provided their blood for these children acted in defense of the realm and the entities that lived here, believing if they allowed the fiends, demons and devils, to gain a foothold within Rhyonis, it would give them all the leverage they needed to overtake the young realm, and their homeland.

Conversely, the demons, and later, but not by much, devils, brutalized and took their mates by force, or mental manipulation. This resulted in the production of fiendish offspring known as the tieflings. The demons of the Trinity Plane had no ambition other than carnage. They tore through the fabric of reality, reveling in chaos as they slaughtered, pilaged, and violated whatever sense of lingering peace the Thuergians had.

Devils, on the other hand, wormed their way into the hearts and minds of the humans, promising power, protection, or other rewards for their unholy consummation. Their spawn, these tieflings, were an afterthought of the demons, usually wrought by some vile dark act, but unquestionably intentional on the part of the devils. Their conniving schemes, layered and complex, sought to fight back against the celestials with their children and saw the War of Claiming as an amusing game of chess with the humans as their breakable pawns.

War raged on between the extraplanar beings and their children while the rest of the world sat by in stunned horror of the atrocities cast across Thuergius like tumbling dice. Despite this, opposing the oppressive ugliness plaguing the realm, a singular aasimar woman, gifted with beauty comparable to something truly divine, drew the eye of Gierloh, awash in a lustful frenzy and ecstatic in the devastation around Him. He did not harm her though, in fact, with just a single look, this woman brought the bloodiest battle of The War of Claiming to an end. Just as Gierloh beheaded an angel commander and demon warlord with a single blow, the woman looked up from her hiding place buried in rubble, sunlight glinting off of her golden eyes and holding the God of War, fast in His place.

He approached slowly, dripping in iridescent ichor, locked in her unfleeting gaze, lifted the tons of debris from her form, and bent to her whim. She took Him there, as the blood from the creatures painted their bodies and filled them both. God and mortal alike locked in a cosmic, coiling communion that would see this woman, Alluriel, The Mistress, rise to godhood Herself after being impregnated by the God of War’s seed.

The Mistress was far more than just a seductive face. Her power and innate magical ability were potent before Her ascension, nigh unparalleled afterward. Shortly thereafter, as Her offspring grew inside Her womb, so too did the plots and schemes within Her mind. In a matter of weeks, The Mistress had bound Gierloh with chains imbued with countless runes and curses and sealed with Her divine blood. The chains would siphon His power as He was stored in a subterranean prison She created for Him, all the while He was powerless to resist.

With Her pregnancy drawing to a close, and Her followers, covens of wytches through the land that took their magical prowess from the chains sealing Gierloh and sapping His power, The Mistress sought refuge to give birth to the child that would end the world. Far to the north of Theurgius, the labor was violent, devastating, and all-consuming. After it was over, all that remained of The Mistress was a hollow vessel holding on to the screaming black-skinned child squirming in Her arms.

“Tyrianous,” was all She could muster before a wave of carnal impulse overtook Her. Her eyes closed softly like petals falling to the ground, and without Her volition, She pulled the infant to Her lips and bit into his neck, sucking all the blood from it until the screaming dulled to a faint, hollow whisper.

Fangs grew from between Her lips and the pulsing energy began to feel like waves of ecstasy. She sighed with a laugh and brought the child to Her breast where it too began to suckle, nibble, and drew blood with fangs of his own.

His power so mighty, and rage unparalleled, Gierloh retained a modicum of His ability, bound and drained as He was. Most of this energy went towards a final curse over His new son through His blood that was congealing in the still heart of the baby Tyrianous. This curse, hindered the infant, and his mother, in several ways. Most notable among these, for all the raw power that the pair had, their flesh was seared by sunlight and running water, trapping them within the confines of that scarred land that was Theurgius.

Among their other minor limitations, they also could not enter an area, land, or domicile, claimed by another entity without first being granted access. This last portion, however, proved to be of little concern for the two most compelling creatures of the realm who stalked through Theurgius, covertly under cover of night, waiting for their moments to strike.

Tension throughout the world faded as the animosity Gierloh induced waned without His presence. Violence melted away into a brief calm that lasted for several decades before erupting in an event that would make the conflicts that marred the face of Rhyonis' history look like mild debates.

As The Mistress recovered Her strength and fostered a bloodlust in Her child, Tyrianous, the pairing began to form their own race of beings from the remaining humanoids on Theurgius. This created an entire army of undead leeches to feed on the remnants of The War of Claiming and serve their means to bloody ends; the vampires.

It wasn’t long before The Mistress grew bored of the games and kept Herself safe within the walls of an ominous castle, locked in the northwestern corner of Theurgius. Tyrianous had constructed Lust’s Landing for Her around the skeletal cyprus tree he was born under with the hands of countless compelled slaves. They, upon completion of the massive fortress, lined up and waited to be feasted on by their tyrannical rulers.

While Tyrianous drove out all those that would take up the land they saw as their own, aasimar, tiefling, and human alike all faced yet another genocide. The vampires flew across the land and ravaged what remained by night, every night, only allowing the living a respite when Balasar shone over the land. This grew from a minor annoyance to a splinter in the mind of The Mistress that She tirelessly began plotting to extract, one way or another.

The disgusting display of power and disruptive acts of evil by The Mistress and Tyrianous enraged the Creation Gods, particularly Malirica who had laid out the Fixed Moment Timeline specifically to keep order. Yet, The Mistress was completely altering the course the future was supposed to take with Her all-powerful compulsion and manipulation.

In an effort to quell the rise of the vampires and rebalance the world, Malirica began a powerful and costly ritual to stop the flow of time. The Ritual of Chronostasis would permanently bind the light of Balasar over Theurgius to eradicate the scourge. Unfortunately, The Mistress’ could see through the plans of the other gods and never allowed Herself to be less than three steps ahead of every one of them.

Without even a sound or drop of light, The Mistress infiltrated Malirica’s chambers within Their pocket dimension and struck Them down, disrupting the Ritual of Chronostasis and destroying the Diety of Time, but not without a great cost to Herself.

The chamber in which the ritual was performed was a rift in time where no harm could escape to befall the physical realm. Inside, however, a dynamic and reality-warping clash of gods shook the core of existence. Their magical prowess and drive to save Their creation was inevitably Their downfall. A secret She held near to Her heart, The Mistress’ greatest power was the ability to manipulate emotion. So, the more Malirica fought with exuberance and vigor and passion, The Mistress, the Goddess of Lust, had all that much more control over Them.

They, being all of Malirica’s personas across all realities, shed off emotion and memory, fragmenting Themselves into infintesimle strands across the Timeline as fragments of Dusk and Dawn. This afforded Them a hope of fighting against the Mistress. But in the end, it was for naught and The Mistress struck a decisive blow that destroyed Malirica. The pocket dimension imploded, expelling the two remaining pieces of Their essence through to Rhyonis, but in times and realities that are unknown to this day.

Malirica’s death caused a massive power vacuum and the world was turned inside out. Calamitous waves of magic battered the realm in shockwaves that would become known as Sentience Shockwaves. These Shockwaves, in addition to fracturing the Timeline in countless independent threads, tethered together by Malirica’s Fixed Moments, also created countless extradimensional spaces through Rhyonis where time functioned in unpredictable ways.

The full scope of the Shockwaves is still a mystery, but certain mages have begun to understand them in deeper detail. It has been uncovered that the Shockwaves also pull people from alternate timelines and can throw them into another one in the blink of an eye. They're even capable of pulling full consciousnesses and placing it in magical items or other vessels. These vessels, being other mortal bodies, do not always align with the same gender or race of a previous body, nor in the same space or time.

Much confusion has rocked the land as these Rhyonins have become a much more common occurrence. Using Rhyonian Common, a powerful language tied into the Gift of Sentience that all beings with Sentience would understand, families and individuals are referred to as they identify. Fathers being Rhyonis, named for the Tree of Life and the realm itself, mothers Rhyonisa, their children, nonbinary, or collectively, being Rhyos, sons Rhyons, daughters Rhyonas, and those that would be affected by these Sentience Shockwaves, Rhyonins.

In the calamitous aftermath of the disruption of the Ritual of Chronostasis, Theurgius was locked into eternal night, giving the vampires free reign over the land, much to the joy of The Mistress and Her children. The Mistress Herself was rocketed into Theurgius' shore and, as She bled into the waters, the sky darkened. She looked upon it, ensanguining Her sheen pupilless irises as She pointed her broken arms skyward, laughing while the waters battered and burned Her godly flesh.

Truciluna, the moon that Malirica had intended to block with the Ritual of Chronostasis, was transformed into a blood-red shadow of its former self, while what remained of Malirica’s pocket dimension, Miracle, was shunted into Rhyonis. Today, it orbits the Material Plane as a comet that can be seen hovering in the sky from almost anywhere on the surface of the realm.

Nearly five centuries after this, a specific brass dragon by the name of Vyscrurxia took a small clutch of humans who had not yet been turned by The War of Claiming, or the vampires, and escaped to a different plane through a portal that appeared as a vortex in the middle of The Continental Sea. Exchanging places with Vyscruxia and their clutch, emerged a massive dragon turtle, Shoule, the size of a small continent. She was home to tribes of lizard and turtle humanoids that worshipped Her as a Goddess and Shoule become yet another addition to the Rhyonian Pantheon as the second Emerged God of Rhyonis.

This departure from Rhyonis by the will of Vyscruxia was fostered by a need for survival. They knew The Mistress had already altered the course Rhyonis was meant to take and, with a broken heart, they fled the land they called home, leaving behind countless to face the greatest threat the realm has ever known. It wasn’t long after this that many of the remaining dragons, both chromatic and metallic, sacrificed themselves in an event known as the Quelling of the Spires, that The Fire Worn Spires would finally rest.

The land, now infused with massive amounts of draconic magic, expediently cooled and formed a sustainable landscape over an untold number of scattered islands referred to as The Lost Lands. This, inevitably, created the largest landmass in all of Rhyonis; Arhan-Zoul. This being Rhyonian Common for The Land of New Beginnings, become a terrestrial beacon of hope in a world smothered by darkness. Countless people would seek to call this land home and escape this darkness from all across Rhyonis. Arhan-Zoul was finally settled, miraculously, by a human, an unlikely dandelion puff that managed to be blown across the sea to take root in The Land of New Beginnings as its leader, The Mantle.

Eventually, dust settled in the wake of Malirica’s destruction and the world fell relatively silent for the first time in thousands of years, and so it remained for another several thousand. Time continued to flow, though tenuously and occasionally disrupted by lingering Shockwaves, nevertheless, it flowed. The First People continued to flourish and expand and welcome more and more into the realm of Rhyonis as The Life Glade produced new races and creatures to inhabit the land. However, an unwavering, thickening layer of tension choked Rhyonis like ash.

Theurgius was still scarred, hiding in the castle of night that The Ritual of Chronostasis constructed around its border. It was within those walls of sunless skies that Tyrianous continued to grow in power. The Mistress was grievously wounded, put into a slumber after Her attack on Malirica and Tyrianous worked, albeit covertly, tirelessly towards Her return.

Gathering the living from across the world, stealing them through the Underdark to within Theurgius’ shoreline, the vampires feasted and grew in number, unchecked by their prey as they moved implacably. The realm now faces total eradication as vampires have grown bolder in their attacks on the surface, taking whole families with reckless abandon. Leadership has quelled what they could, but as the entirety of the realm works to subdue an enemy as ephemeral as smoke, hope fades.

Want to keep reading? Click here for Session Two: The Creation Gods!

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