Don’t Open The Door

Today I am going to tell you a story about the dangers of opening doors.

Long ago, when this world began, there were just the high elves. They believed that God had put them upon this world to care for it and maintain it, for God had indeed created this world for a purpose. A great darkness had been sealed away within the skin of this world, in a place the humans would one day call the Black Mountain. It had been given to the high elves to guard this prison and act as caretakers for this world.

And they did.

For spans of time so vast that no human tongue has the vocabulary to describe it, the high elves kept watch over this world, dwelling in great bliss and splendor as they went about their task.

But for some of us, that was not enough.

Those high elves, the proud ones, the ambitious ones, used their spells to examine the Black Mountain, to consider the darkness sealed within as a bored child might pick at a scab. And in time they probed too deeply, and the darkness spoke to them. At first they spurned it. But still it whispered to them, promising them all the secret desires of their hearts if they would be set it free.

And in time the darkness reached out and possessed one of them, and its summoners fell to their knees and worshipped the incarnated darkness as their new god.

The dark elves had been born, and they tried to free their god from its prison.

The high elves made war upon us. For millennia this war waged, laying much of the world waste. Spells beyond the capacity of the human mind to understand shattered the land, and mountains crumbled and deserts froze and forests burned. The high elves had the mastery, and drove their sundered cousins back mile by mile.

Yet the darkness walked among its servants in a body of flesh, and whispered its secrets into our ears. It taught us spells of necromancy, of shaping flesh and bone into weapons of death.

And it taught them the secret of opening doors between the worlds. For there are as many worlds as there are stars in the night skies, and as many kindreds that live upon them. The great wizards of the dark elves opened the doors between the worlds, and brought forth new kindreds to serve them as slaves and soldiers.

The orcs were the first. Strong and fierce and hardy, they made superb slave soldiers for the dark elves, and the wizards brought hundreds of thousands of them through the gates. Then came the beastmen and the manetaurs. They were fiercer, and harder to control, but served well as shock troops. Halflings were weak, too weak for battle, but made fine servants for our more useful slave warriors. The dwarves proved impossible to control, and soon rebelled and sided against us, but they were a rare error. We brought other kindreds through as well, binding them to our service.

And one day, we found the urdmordar.

We had never seen anything like them. They wore the form of spiders, yet wielded mighty dark magic. They disdained the use of tools and weapons, yet had intellects of genius, and dominated lesser creatures with ease. They feasted upon living flesh like any rude predator, but were so cunning and so clever that they remained hidden, and their victims rarely knew their true foes.

What slaves they would make! With their power, we would at last crush the high elves and claim the victory.

And so we opened the door to their world and brought the urdmordar through to ours.

Fools, fools, fools.

For the urdmordar were too powerful to control.

They swarmed through the gate, and devoured the dark elven wizards that sought to bind them. For the dark elves were the rightful masters of this world, mighty in sorcery and wisdom and without peer, but the urdmordar saw them as only one thing.

Food. And, perhaps, as tools.

Within five years the dark elven kingdoms had been enslaved and forced to serve the urdmordar. Our armies of slaves transferred their allegiance readily enough. The high elves briefly rejoiced, thinking they had found an ally, but the hunger of the urdmordar was insatiable.

One by one the high elven kingdoms fell, until only Cathair Solas remained.

And then the urdmordar met a new kindred coming up from the south.

The humans, the exiles of Old Earth, the heirs of Arthur Pendragon. Heedless of the ancient conflicts of their new world, they blundered into the path of the urdmordar.

And the destiny of this world was altered.

-The Warden of Urd Morlemoch

(A preview of FROSTBORN: THE EIGHTFOLD KNIFE, coming next month.)