ELVEN CIVIL WAR
In the elder days, before the world was sundered, before stone bled and the sky cracked with fire, the elves stood as the guardians of all life. Tall, eternal, unmatched in wisdom and craft, they were venerated across the realms. In the green vastness of Arvella they made their homes, cities of silver light and living wood, woven into the arms of colossal trees where dawn itself seemed to linger, and every leaf shone with the blessing of their magic.
They were shepherds of a younger world. Humans, fragile and short-lived, were protected and taught. Dwarves, proud and secretive, were guided when their delvings strayed too close to things best left undisturbed. The elves bore these duties gladly, their unity an unshakable shield. For centuries, there was peace.
But even in paradise, shadows creep.
The rift that would birth the Torn began, as many do, not with war, but with heartache and tragedy.
Two cities, two families. In the south, Yolgarath the elven capital the emerald jewel, ruled by King Eldrin Haralva, a lord of patience and quiet strength. To the north, Kalforan, stronghold of the adventurous, ruled by Queen Lyria Larathin, whose hunger for knowledge and power burned as fiercely as any flame. For generations the Haralva and Larathin lines had lived in harmony. Until the day of the hunt.
Prince Aelion Haralva, brave, beloved, and reckless with the untested fire of youth and betrothed to a daughter of Queen Lyria, princess Valeya Aelion chased his quarry too far into the shadowed forest north of Kalforan. There, a beast unlike any known before fell upon him. It was a thing of scale and claw, a lizard out of nightmare, twisted by the foul magics that had long festered in forgotten places. It tore into the young elf, rending flesh and bone until only a ruin of the noble prince remained.
Desperate to save him, the Larathins acted. Shard-magic was their answer, after the light shards failed they turned in desperation to powerful, forbidden, and tainted shards. They bound him not with the gentle light of the green shards, but with the whispering venom of the darker stones unearthed in their northern caves. Against all hope, they succeeded.
Aelion rose from his bed. His wounds were sealed.
His body lived.
But the prince was gone.
What stood in his place was something else. His once-bright eyes burned black with malice, his noble form twisted into cruel angles. The healing had become corruption. Where once there had been kindness, only hatred remained, festering like poison in his blood.
He proved his damnation soon enough.
On a journey through the forests of his forefathers, Aelion’s madness took him. He loosed packs of beasts upon his own kin, tearing flesh from bone, laughing as his father’s children drowned in blood. When at last Eldrin Haralva himself stood against him, Aelion fled north shrieking curses, his howls echoing through the darkened boughs like the cry of some newly-born demon.
The Haralva mourned, but grief swiftly hardened into fury. The blame fell upon the Larathins, their reckless tampering with forbidden magic, their ambition that had twisted the beloved prince into a monster.
The seed was planted.
Blood demanded blood.
What began as a feud soon festered into war.
The Haralva, their grief transmuted into righteous fury, marched against Kalforan. Justice, they called it, a cleansing of elvenkind, a punishment for the Larathins who had dared to defile their prince with forbidden shards. The forests that once rang with music and laughter now howled with war-cries as brother turned upon brother, cousin upon cousin. The trees themselves seemed to weep, their roots drinking deeply of blood.
The Larathins would not yield.
Desperate to hold their throne, they sank deeper into shadow. The shards they once studied in secrecy now became their only weapon. With each battle lost, they pressed further into forbidden arts, corrupting their once-brilliant magics, twisting them with the venom of the Soulvien stones. Their soldiers grew crueler, their spells darker, their very forms beginning to warp under the weight of what they invoked.
The war scorched the forest from beneath its own canopy. Fires burned for years. Rivers ran red. Songs were silenced, replaced with screams.
And still, it was not enough.
In their final hour, as Yolgarath spears closed upon Kalforan’s gates, Queen Lyria and her mages chose madness over defeat. They gathered in the great shard vault beneath the city, where veins of a giant black crystal pulsed like a malignant heart. There, in a chamber lit by writhing shadows, they carved a ritual to summon power no hands were meant to touch. They reached beyond the boundaries of the world, clawing at something vast, ancient, and ravenous.
And something answered.
It did not come gently.
The ground split with a roar that drowned all sound. Kalforan screamed once, then vanished into the ground, city, walls, temples, towers, all torn from existence in an instant. The land itself recoiled, wrenching open, tearing wide, splitting farther and farther until an abyss yawned where once the proud northern forest had stood.
The Torn was born.
The chasm vomited darkness and fire. Waves of raw, uncontrolled dark magic boiled across the land, shattering mountains, toppling lakes as though they were no more than bowls overturned by a careless hand. The air became a storm of light and shadow, ripping apart villages, melting stone, twisting every living thing caught in its path. Forests blackened in an instant, their trees warped into skeletal husks. Beasts screamed as their bodies stretched, broke, and reformed into hideous mockeries of what they had once been.
The Haralva shielded what they could. With wards and light-shards they wrapped Yolgarath in a shimmering dome, holding back the storm even as the wards cracked and bled under the strain. The city endured, but thousands beyond its borders were erased, humans, dwarves, elves alike, gone in the storm of creation and ruin.
And from the abyss, a heat rose. Not the warmth of fire, but the oppressive breath of a wound that would never heal.
The survivors of Kalforan did not weep. They fled north, into the frost-bitten mountains, where the dark shards whispered louder than ever. Their bodies were already tainted, their bloodlines fouled by the ritual that had broken the world. They abandoned their old names and embraced what they had become. Frost elves. Kalfori. A people of pallid flesh and burning hate, their veins running thick with shadow.
In caverns beneath the ice they carved their new empire. Cities of black crystal and screaming stone, lit by Netherflame. They forged allies among the twisted, enslaving the Vraki, boar-faced abominations bred from the warps of the Torn itself. They bred monsters, fed captives to beasts, and drowned their agony in blood-feasts and shard drugs until cruelty itself became their culture. The Kalfori ruled the wastes with terror and atrocity, but even in their dominion they were not satisfied. They loathed the cold, hated the dark. Their eyes turned ever south, to the lands stolen from them, and they vowed those lands would one day burn.
In the south, the scars lingered.
The Torn’s birth warped everything. The Rift Plains, once fertile grasslands and forests, became broken wastes where Clattermaws skulked and Gorgulths howled at the moon. Wolves the size of horses stalked the forests, their venomous fangs dripping with the magic that birthed them. To the west and east, mountain ranges heaved skyward in agony, jagged teeth of stone marking the land’s recoil.
The Harilva endured, though changed. Their numbers broken, their hearts scarred, they turned inward. Harilvi, they came to be called, reclusive forest wardens, their once open hand now a closed fist. They guarded their sacred groves with fanatical zeal, mistrusting all who approached, their voices fading into whispers and myth beyond their borders.
And so the world was divided.
To the north, the Kalfori, thriving in shadow and ice, breeding monsters and worshipping shards of hate. To the south, the Harilvi, guardians of what little green remained, suspicious, dwindling, yet resolute. Between them lay the Torn, endless, insatiable, a scar that no time, no prayer, no power has ever healed.
But scars are not the end.
They are the reminder.
The Kalfori remember what was stolen. And in the depths of their blackened cities, they dream of the day they will return to claim it.
