Revolution in the Shadowlands
From Duels Content
Shadow Phyrra
Following the victory of the Shadow in Phyrra, the city's new masters, led by the former commander of the Elemental Allies, Embergeist, now the leader of the Cult of the Shadow Elements, settled in for an orgy of violence and depravity that seemed set to change the face of the City of Gates forever.
Numerous beasts of the Shadow Realm were welcomed into the city. The depravity of the inhabitants of the Shadowlands is notorious. The following is excerpted from the diary of Edgar Crawls, the undead necromancer and the founder of the Tomb Town undead refuge.
"Every day, more abominations pour in.Though the cult of Shadow Elements run Phyrra now, they have been granting entry to all manner of vile Shadow creatures. While I realize the irony of a living corpse calling anything ‘vile’ or ‘abomination’, these creatures are indeed those things. Add to that list ‘cruel’, ‘vain’, ‘psychotic’, ‘paranoid and ‘creepily-obsessed-with-building-things-from-still-living-body-parts’. Sure, the architecture here in Tomb Town has been known to employ a few bones, but we at least have the decency to take them from the already-dead.This is how bad it has become. I am referring to myself as ‘decent’.Of all our new Shadow visitors, the Shadow Beasts are some of the worst. These rancorous brutes have taken to the Arena, displaying merciless savagery unlike I have seen from even the orcs.An Orc might disembowl you, but most of them won’t wear the still-steaming results."
Soon a new hybrid race, the Shadowkin grew from the vile influence of the Shadow Realm and its servants upon those inhabitants of Phyrra who fought for the Shadow in the war. Again the diary of Edgar Crawls provides a first-hand account of the transformation:
"I saw the transformation today. It was horrifying.In my afterlife, I have borne witness to many terrible and repulsive things. Just this morning, I saw my neighbor Ugon consumed an entire live hog, starting with its face. I am no stranger to the grotesque (in truth, I am most certainly considered a grotesque by some), but seeing this woman change was beyond even my capacity to accept the unsettling.She had fought with the Shadow Army against the Orzayans. This was apparent as, while she was collared like everyone else, she was free to walk about.She stopped, eyes suddenly going wide. The skin neck her neck, where the collar’s foul ochre touched, had turned a dark, gangrenous red. She tried to gasp, but emitted a wet, grinding sound, even as the skin of her upper lip stretched of its own accord and slithered beneath her chin, sealing her mouth shut. She fell to her knees. On impact, her hair fell like dead pine needles and thick, inky bruises flowed like rivers below her quickly paling skin.As barbed, chitinous spines erupted from her bare skull in tiny fountains of foul-smelling blood, the skin covering her former mouth hardened and cracked, up to the end of her jawline, forming a jagged maw that spewed forth the sort of hair-raising cackle only madness can arouse.This is how the Shadow repays its followers."
To these two new races was soon added a third, the Oni. They are an Ogre tribe from the Talas mountains. These intellectually-challenged folk had discovered a portal or rift into the Shadow Realm and grew to worship its twisted and depraved inhabitants as gods. Through this rift, they were enabled to pass into the city of Phyrra which was magically quarentined from the mainland. They, like other allies of the Shadow, promptly grew vile and twisted.
The Revolution
With the aid of resistance elements in Phyrra's duelist population, Edgar Crawls was able to locate the Oni's tunnel out of the city, into the Shadow Realm, and to the Oni's homeland on the mainland. There they planted beacons which enabled teleportation between the mainland and the city, as well as neutralized the Shadow's influence on the hall of gates. With the aid of the master-smith and professional traveler, Voldur Weyland (creator of the patented Enchanted Slot process) the resistance was able to send a signal via the gates to the Aenok, beings of pure light and avatars of Order. These beings came to Phyrra and cleansed the city of the Shadow with amazing, in indeed anticlimactic, ease.
The Coming of the Daemons
No sooner than the celebrations had begun, a new threat emerged. Daemons, a race representing the antithesis of the Aenok in every way, appeared in Phyrra in response to the presence of the Aenok. These creatures had apparently followed the Aenok from world to world looking for sources of food, booze, and entertainment of the most violent and degrading sorts. The following are extracts from various sources, and illustrate the nature and history of these two races.
"". . . Yahavh suggested that the Creators pool their vast power and create a world. On this world, they would fashion the paragons of their ideology, two races created to embody the tenants of their belief. So it came to be that the Creators constructed Maram. Our world, and the world of our enemies. On Maram's Eastern half, Yahavh created us. The Aenok. Paragons of Law, Justice, Responsibility and Ordered Society. While, on the other, the Daemon wallowed in their own crapulence, burrowing deep below the Maram's surface and breeding like rats, unable to see past their own narcissism. Seeking only pleasure, they eventually became bored and began seeking grotesque, exotic pleasures. At first, we approached the Daemon in peace. We offered them a simple, magnanimous choice: Repent. Reject your wickedness and be absorbed into the glorious light of our collective. Or be exterminated. Slaves to their own ugly nature, the Daemon rejected our offer of peaceful assimilation. War had come." -Fate Manifested - The History of the Aenok - Parts 3 and 4
From the perspective of the Daemons:
". . .They put up a good fight, but when we get to fighting, we like can't be stopped. So, we keep fighting an' the Aenok keep ripping up the planet's surface to build their war machines and cities and whatnot. So suddenly, things look pretty grim on old Maram. Then the Aenok go and drop a big bomb on us. Good thing, the bomb makes these like gates. We got out before the planet went boom. Now, we're just wandering. Looking for new places. Settle down for a while, wait until we used the place up, move on somewhere else. Not bad really." -An Oral History of the Daemon - Part 5 and 6
The inhabitants of Phyrra were presented with a choice between two extremes: Join the Aenok in a fight for Order of the purest the most rigid sort, embodying total abstinence from all pleasure and unquestioning obedience, or side with the Daemons and their creed of complete and utter freedom from all forms of morality. The Aenok and their allies (mostly from the more "civilized" races (Humans, Elves, Elementals, and Khan) took for their base the clean spires of the Noble District, and the Daemons and their allies (including disaffected elements from all races as well as the undead of Tomb Town) took to the caverns beneath the city.
Battle waged for weeks. The Aenok (led mostly by elements of the Order of the Burning Monk) and their greatest warriors Howie Feltersnatch, Lasciva, kikiloco (the only non Monk in the Aenok leadership), Yigh, and SinMan, eventually emerged triumphant over the forces of the Daemons led by Danica Maupoissant, The Muffin, Johnny Homicide, shrek, and Drederick.
At the surrender of the Daemonic Accolytes, the lord of the Daemons, Osram, drew on the might and life of his remaining supporters to magically transform himself into a colossal version of himself. He was brought down by a single intrepid duelist, his gigantic corpse raining destruction down upon the city...
NOTE: Coinciding with these events was a devastating and totally unexpected invasion of Norag Orcs... The invasion is ongoing and the outcome hangs in the balance.
