The Shattered Legacy
Long before the sands of Verkath drank blood instead of rain, the world thrived under the stewardship of the Oathbound, a guild of scholars and mystics who revered it as Veil-Thread a sacred force. The Thread, a shimmering energy that seeped from fissures in the earth, was not born of chaos but of balance. The Oathbound wove it into the land, coaxing life from barren soil and healing wounds of both flesh and spirit. Their leader, Ilthara, was a visionary who believed the Thread connected all living things—a tapestry of souls. To preserve her people's wisdom, she forged a pendant from a shard of the first fissure, embedding it with symbols that bound memory to matter. It was meant to be a beacon for future generations.
But her apprentice, Kyrion, saw a different purpose. He craved dominion, not harmony. In a night of fire and betrayal, he slaughtered Ilthara and seized the pendant, believing it would magnify his power. Instead, it rebelled. The Thread, corrupted by his ambition, erupted in a cataclysm that split the earth and birthed the Hollowed—twisted beings of insatiable hunger. The land itself recoiled: rivers boiled into ash, forests petrified into stone, and the skies wept acid.
The survivors of this apocalypse forged the Bloodmarked Houses, warlords who scavenged Ilthara's remnants. They discovered Voidsteel, a metal that could harness Thread without decay, and used it to build impregnable fortresses and weapons that devoured flesh. To consolidate power, they penned the Ashen Accord, a decree that outlawed Thread-wielding by anyone outside their lineages. Those without House sigils—driftlings—were cast into the wastes, where they battled slavers, sandstorms, and the Hollowed's eternal thirst.
Over centuries, the Bloodmarked rewrote history, erasing Ilthara's name and branding the Oathbound as heretics. The pendant vanished, slipping through time and worlds until it surfaced in a realm without magic, passed down through generations of a family who forgot its purpose.
But Verkath never forgot. The earth still bled Thread, the Hollowed still hungered, and whispers of the Hollow King—a driftling who'd embraced the Thread's corruption to defy the Houses—coiled through the dunes like poison. He promised power to the desperate, transforming them into monstrous Hollowed Primes, soldiers in his shadow army.
And deep in the wastes, the pendant waited.