The Summoning War had become a waking nightmare. Algrim's summoners, bound by rigid contracts and ritual precision, unleashed horrors upon the Imperium, overwhelming legions of orcish soldiers and war machines with controlled monstrosities. Meanwhile, Imperial shamans and artificers retaliated in kind, calling forth aberrations, eldritch nightmares, and alien monstrosities upon the northern nations, creatures that neither army nor spellcaster could fully comprehend—let alone contain.
Battlefields became graveyards of unnatural things, places where reality itself strained under the weight of unchecked magic. War was no longer waged with steel and strategy alone but with forces beyond mortal reckoning.
Ciaranol took no part in Algrim's campaign. The guilt of what they had wrought weighed upon him like an iron chain, dragging him deeper into despair. He devoted himself to undoing what had been done, seeking a way to silence the Worldgates forever. But knowledge, once unleashed, could not be recalled. The arcane mechanisms of the gates, once understood only by him, had been scattered to scholars, warlocks, and reckless sorcerers alike. Their secrets were no longer his alone to guard. He had doomed Encara.
The effects of the war spread far beyond the Imperium and the Midlands. Inevitably, summoned beasts escaped—some into the sea, others into the White Waste that linked the western and eastern continents, and still others into distant lands whose people had never even heard of the war before they found their villages razed by creatures that should not exist.
With the war teetering on the edge of total annihilation, Algrim knew his time was running out. His summoners, once confident, were now desperate. The cycle of summoning and counter-summoning had spiraled beyond control, each new creature called into battle requiring something even worse to destroy it. He needed something absolute—a force that could end the conflict in a single, decisive act.
Algrim delved deeper into infernal knowledge than any Rauchstav gnome before him. He scoured forgotten contracts, extracted debts from devils, and bargained with abyssal creatures whose wisdom stretched to the limits of the Planescape. But even among such beings, there were whispers of something older. Something before time, beyond the planes, outside existence.
And so, Algrim found what he sought.
Not a creature to summon, but a force to harness.
It did not dwell on some far-flung plane, nor did it exist in the Hells or the Abyss. It resided in the space between, in the liminal void that separates realities, a place untouched by gods or fate.
He approached Ciaranol alone, revealing what he had learned. The two argued—violently. For the first time, Ciaranol nearly struck Algrim down.
But Algrim had been prepared for his doubt. With a scrying spell, he showed Ciaranol the truth.
The war had spread like a cancer. The lands of Yost and Ainor were overrun. What the Imperium did not claim had been infested by interplanar creatures, warping the landscape with virulence that Encara's nature could not defend against. Entire regions had been turned into alien ecosystems, beyond reclaiming. Even if the war ended today, the damage might already be irreversible.
Algrim's voice was calm, but his eyes burned with something deeper than ambition. Conviction.
"We can stop it. Together. One final spell. One final strike. With your magic to bind it, we can wield this force. We can erase the Imperium from the world and put an end to this madness."
Ciaranol hesitated. His soul recoiled.
But his guilt did not.
He had set this all in motion, awakened the first Worldgate. This was his sin to bear. Perhaps one final sacrifice could put things right.
He agreed.
It took weeks to prepare. Rituals were refined. Protective spells were inscribed with abyssal precision. More Worldgates than ever before were opened at once. Their pillars of stone and silver hummed with raw, unnatural resonance.
Then, they called forth the un-thing.
Legends say that on that day, every true cleric in Encara heard the wailing of their deity. The very planes shuddered as the walls between realities were torn asunder.
It came through.
It had no shape. No form. No presence in any way that mortal minds could comprehend. The binding spells held it in place, kept it tethered to the gates so that it could be wielded as a weapon.
But nothing could protect Algrim and Ciaranol from the horror of witnessing it.
Their minds bent beneath its weight. Time itself seemed to break in its presence. There was only its endless, unceasing hunger. It did not kill. It did not destroy. It unmade.
For an hour, it moved through the Imperium.
Nine-tenths of the Imperial forces were gone. Not dead. Gone.
Where once there had been soldiers, war engines, citadels—there was nothing.
The earth itself had been devoured. Mountains dissolved into void. Hills became desolate plains. The world was left scarred, missing pieces of its very existence.
Then, Algrim banished it.
The spell snapped shut. The Worldgates fell silent.
And the world went quiet.
A silence so complete that those who survived would speak of it for the rest of their days—a stillness that stretched across all of Encara. Not peace. Not victory.
Just shock.
And loss.
Ciaranol never woke up. He was carried, unconscious, to the remains of the Yldanian Royal Academy—a ruined collection of hovels and shacks, little more than a memorial to knowledge lost. He lay in the healing wards, neither dead nor truly alive. A man who had touched the abyss and would never return.
Algrim was broken. Not in body, but in mind. The Rauchstav gnomes took him back into their care, knowing all too well the dangers of delving too deep into knowledge better left alone. They honored him for ending the war, but they did not celebrate him. To the Rauchstav, there was no greater folly than believing oneself capable of controlling the uncontrollable.
And the peace they had bought?
It had cost everything.
The Yldanian royal family, still held hostage within the Imperium's lands, had been erased—devoured alongside their captors. The new king, ruler of a kingdom in ruins, declared a week of mourning, but there was nothing left to mourn.
The leaders of Yost and Ainor returned to their shattered homelands to find them unrecognizable. Regions had been rewritten by alien forces, no longer fit for mortal habitation.
The Imperium was no more. What few thousand survivors remained fled south, their once-mighty empire reduced to nothing but whispers of dread.
And those who had witnessed the un-thing firsthand?
They would never be the same.
Some turned inward, silent and unresponsive, their minds too fractured to function. Others became fanatic, building secret cults around the memory of what they had seen, worshipping the abyss in the hopes of understanding it.
For a time, there was peace, or something like it. An absence of war, at least. It was the peace of devastation—a hush that came not from safety, but from the incomprehensible horror of what had been unleashed, and from too little left to make much noise.
The world was broken.
And from beyond the worldgates, that terrible power Algrim and Ciaranol had summoned dreamed of the remembered taste of Encara. As it did, it became restless, and eager.
And hungry.