Necromancy: The First Era - Prologue: To the reader

Idle reader:

Today, technology has infiltrated every single aspect of our daily lives in Úrim, and I fear most of the things I may divulge here may be taken as quackery. Almost 2,000 cycles have passed since Úrim saw the last mage over its surface. I know that in many places this text will be taken as a joke; as a game, maybe, or as the results of an academic maddened by his experiments and studies. Unfortunately, I also know that there are people out there that will take it deadly serious, and that these people will try to sink this recollection of events once again and pretend that none of this ever happened. And I will say to them: Ignorance is never the savior of any people. Those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it. It is my duty as a Great Brother of the Academy to provide you with this book, that clearly opposes with the official version of the facts.

There was a time in which the magic that we know now, a mockery from circuses and theaters, dominated the hills in times of the dwarven king Skallargrim Einarsson Runnenseele, fallen in the Great War. This magic traversed the spine of the first three Eras. The last giants, born at the end of the Third Era, and now extinct, witnessed the last days of the Pyromancers of the South. The orcs remember proudly the myths of the Legions, but highly doubt the power of the Electromancy. And they are not to blame. Though the legends of old is filled to the brim with tales of magic and we know great monuments of the past, people today do not believe such tremendous powers to have ever existed.

For over 40 cycles I have scourged the libraries of Iunu-Ra and Shurub’Gul, the most reliable ones and second only to the burnt library of Jotunheim, in which thousands upon thousands of writings were lost. I did so searching for data that might forgive what has been written here. I have gathered here, broadly, the legends and the myths of the people of Úrim. they have been treated with the corresponding seriousness.

Several local rumors have been dismissed for being too fantasious or for the inability to verify them, as is almost always the case of myths, but they are added anyways for I firmly believe that they might hold a dose of truth. In a particular note, there are exaggerations with the fall of Lemuria but only in myth did we preserve any semblance of truth about this event. Any other registry about the giants, their customs and traditions were lost with the fall of Úruk with the arrival of the Destroyers in the Third Era. The rediscovery of a fragment of the Elegy of Water in the ruins of this same city of Lemuria, which was thought as inexistent until 1740, has helped my colleagues to reconstruct the last days of the orcs of Muul-Kuth during the First Era and the worldview of the atlanteans.

I fear I have not been completely factual in the redaction of this general history of events of the planet we know as Úrim. In some chapters I might have added more relevance to certain events that what they might have had in the continents’ past and some others, therefore, are minimized. A number of my peers have helped me to reduce the margin of error along the text, even without any knowledge of what the final intention of this work was. Several others even tried to determ me and spoke of the possible consequences of it; consequences that would not only affect me or the Third Session of the Academy, but all of the races of Úrim. I beg all of them for their pardon, for I know that I have betrayed more than one. I hope that those that know me will understand in time that the vital impulse of truth moved me to this, to spreading the true course of events long before the Censor - an event that, I am sure, most of my brothers are unaware of. In the other hand, it is undeniable, that the discovery of the ruins of Lemuria, the Ætherforge and similar events within our very same Era will speak louder and clearer if set within the proper context.

As said earlier, I have taken part with a lot of standpoints, and several others were discarded along the way. Some people, like the dwarves, hold a special place within my heart and I fear this has had some influence, though I hope minimal, in how I present the facts to the reader. I rescued part of the poem The loss of Bael-Ungor that survived within the bibliotheques of the giants. This old dwarven chant sings the exile of the sons of Ivaldir from deep within the kingdom of stone. The parts I could not rescue I had to mend with the songs heard in the taverns of Úrim. If it is faithful or not to the works of the dwarven skald Radsvinn Ivaldsson, we may never know. The original orthography has been updated, but the rest remains unaltered. Several verses have gone missing with the centuries and only a fragmentary version remains. Only the wind knows what was truly written.

May my hand never tire

of carving the loss that you suffer;

may no one who sings
your story a thousand times remain proud;

but rather, that those who,

upon seeing you do not feel burdened,
be cursed with a thousand deaths and tears.

Alone they stand, and mute your hammers.

Alone, too, your forges.

Naked, without a cuirass,

your quivers with tears loaded;

we left your halls behind

and with them we unearth our ills.

Bael-Ungor, may your father Odin

[…] our, that […] same

[…] in darkness fits;

in your earth, no […] gorge;

[…]

Let them grieve for you as we do.

May the orcs grieve for you

as children do for their mothers;

may their eyes devour your walls;
may their songs be pierced

by the silence imposed upon you,

with [...] that I am a witness of.

That the men, at night,

may not find a fire within your forges

that does not craft your runes of might;

[… ambers] outpour,

like the silent stars[…]the moons,

your [light] upon your back;

their heat upon your onyx garland.

May every single giant cry the name

of Bael-Ungor; may they never forget;

that their weeping rollers

[sing your glory; may]the mighty song

that they erect for you[never be] cut silent;

May they weep and grieve with us.

May the forest elves

put to silence their great oak-trees

when this hymn of yours their branches break;

may your regret, Bael-Ungor, reach

the fluor they use to craft their meals;

may they learn to mourn our clans this way.

May your towers never lose

their silver and their gold, oh city lost!

Never may their shine be erased.

Many dwarves their lives left at your gates;
Now we are lost,

and we are a net, and salt, and sea and oars.

I publish this, knowing that the only thing I can hope for is death, and though I do not fear whatever destiny may befall upon me, for I have lived more than any of my contemporaries, I do worry for the books preserved in many of the bibliotheques of Úrim. They might try to destroy material that survived until the end of the Third Era. Fortunately, by the time this work is published, many of them will not be in the chambers of Toledo, nor within the halls of Shurub’Gul; nor guarded anymore among the mountains that the dwarves sheltered.

I speak here of the past of Úrim that several Courts and Sessions of the Academy had agreed it was best to forget and, as a true member of the Academy, I had to start from the beginning: what is a cycle, the name of the months, the geography and what is known, up to this point, about magic and the giants. Many of the names that had fled from the memory have returned to warn us once again: We must not tinker with forces unknown. The actual state of Antikythera and the rest of the regions of Muspel, Utgard, Vinland and the lands of Thule have me pushed me to this. In any case, time will tell if I was mistaken or not.

I hope that the Guardians may help Úrim to save itself from the path of self-destruction it has traversed from the last decade on. My wish, after all, is that this text warns us all. I am an old, tired man. Throughout my life I have seen how, once again, the stability of the planet has been fractured.I will die without any hopes of seeing peace, but with a burning longing for it. I know that the future prosperity will be founded upon my corpse and the corpses of coming generations. In this work my life, my passion and my transit on earth have been bound together. And with this, I hope that Kósmon might grant you health and peace. And may he never forget me. VALE.

Baltasar al-Sarrás, cycle 105

Third Session of the Academy, Toledo

Redacted on Granada

Cycle 1857, Fourth Era


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