Return to Earth Eternal Official Lore
36 | THE RISE AND FALL OF MAN
Thousands of years passed, and Man’s might seemed to have no limit. His technological magics dwarfed that of any force previously known on Earth, and all races, from Vampire to Yeti, Shroomie to Dragon, were on the verge of elimination. Man had spread across the Earth, filling nearly every corner of it, and had even learned to travel beyond it. The roots of the Earth itself shuddered beneath the damage Man inflicted but still Mankind took more, for it was in his nature.
Though we do not truly understand what the culture of Man was like, fragments of his writings have survived. We know that by the end, many Men considered even the existence of the other thinking creatures of the Earth to be nothing more than children’s stories. Vampires? Dragons? Talking Beasts? To most Men, these were likely nothing more than myth, but we know that not all Men were as blind to the wider world that exists beyond the view of those who do not wish to look. One scrap that has survived was written by a Man (with the decidedly odd name ‘Henry Beston’) who seemed to sense the presence of the Outcasts in the world, or perhaps the shadow of a memory of the Beasts, for he wrote:
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
Who knows what the world would be had Man been led by those such as Henry Beston, who choose to live with open eyes? We only know what is, not what might have been.
How could a race destroy itself? What would cause behavior on a mass scale that any sensible Beast would deem insane? Were the suicidal urges of Mankind an inevitable result of the corruption of the Dog Soldiers by Gaia’s curse as punishment for breaking the Covenant? Speculation, again, but that is the best that is on offer.
What we know is that Man launched a series of cataclysmic wars on himself over the course of forty or fifty years that culminated in the total destruction of his civilization and his near‐complete extinction. His cities burned and the air was poisoned, and those of the race of Man who survived found themselves in a world bereft of the technological marvels that had sustained their lives. Without these, the survivors of the Cataclysm, as we now know the war that ended Man’s dominion, were barely able to scratch a living from the ruined Earth. Many of these survivors quickly died of poisoning from the war, disease, and famine.
Aftermath
Worse still for Man was the fact that some of the races who had been driven into hiding thousands of years before, at the beginning of the Age of Man, were resistant to the invisible poison that seemed to permeate the air in many places now. None were invulnerable to it but some, such as the Undead, the Vampires, and the People of the Skull, were resistant to it.
The Undead boiled up from the deep places of the UnderRealm and boiled out of the Earth, attacking Man and anyone else they came across, for Abidan sensed that the destruction of Man left the world without a dominant power. He aimed to succeed where Salamanzar, his creator, had failed.
The Vajs of the Vampire Broods struck out from their hiding places in the Carpathians to assert their power and combat that of the Undead, their ancient, hated enemy, while the People of the Skull chose a new Khan and began to build their empire anew from their homeland under the Ural Mountains.
Man was not yet extinct, but he was a pitiful and ruined people now. His numbers, decimated by the Cataclysm, dwindled further now, from the poisons lingering in the atmosphere and from the predations of hostile beings – the Bloodkin, the Undead, the People of the Skull, and more.
The Earthmother
Gaia, the Earthmother, watched events on Earth with dismay. So much destruction. So much suffering. Was it Her fault? Did Her Beasts and the other denizens of Earth pay the price for Her direct interference? Were the Creator and the Demiurge so capricious as to arrange this as Gaia’s punishment? Even the Earthmother could not know.
She was certain, however, that She could not permit Her domain to fall into utter darkness and give the Earth over to the hand of Djall. No matter what else, this must not happen. She could not believe that this could be the will of the Creator, and She would not let evil utterly take the world when for the first time since the Age of Man began there was hope.
The Earthmother then made a decision that was perhaps inevitable. The Beasts could not remain in the Groves forever. They had dwelt there since the Migration, living their lives among the forests and valleys of the Groves. Time passed much more slowly there than on Earth and from the point of view of the Beasts there, only four hundred years had passed since the Migration, compared to the approximately four thousand years that had passed on Earth. As a result, much that might have been lost was not, and the Beasts retained much of their knowledge of both arcane and Druidic magic, as well as a great deal of their battle skill, though of course they had no opportunity to use their skills in anything more dangerous than friendly spars.
Hope
Within this surviving core of the descendants of the Migration, Gaia saw the light that could prevent the world from a long fall into the dark. She would return them to Earth, as She had always planned when the time was right, and there they would oppose the forces ultimately loyal to Lord Djall. The Beasts had long known that they or their descendants would leave the Groves someday and they yearned to return to the Earth to reclaim it for Beastdom.
Unlike the dread forces currently prowling the Earth however, the Beasts had no particular resistance to the lingering poison that permeated the atmosphere. Even the strange and ancient Amanita were forced to avoid areas too heavily affected by the Cataclysm. In particular, the ruined cities of Mankind remained so deadly that they did not venture anywhere within sight of them.