The Crusades Against the Beasts

The peoples of the Fivefold Fleets did not arrive to an empty land. Kworgalya already had masters — older, stranger, and monstrous — and the long struggle to wrest the continent from them is remembered as the Crusades Against the Beasts.

The Native Powers

The lands beyond the new settlements belonged to the Beasts: sapient monstrous races, native to Kworgale, that had ruled its wilds since before the angels ever crossed the dark. Some were little more than savage hordes; others raised their own savage kingdoms and bred champions and demigods of terrible power. To the children of Vadesh they were both a mortal danger and a theological scandal — for what were these creatures, who had never been made by any god the Elekoi knew?

Two Crusades

Twice in the long Age of the Elders, the scattered peoples set aside their quarrels and marched as one. In two great pan-Elekoi crusades, human, elf, and dwarf fought side by side, and — most remarkably — the Elder gods themselves took the field, lending their power to mortal armies in a way that would never come again. These were the proudest wars the world has ever known, the high-water mark of the alliance between gods and their children.

The crusades pushed the Beasts to the margins of the world, into the deep wilds and the ruins, where their remnants endure to this day. But the cost was a continent steeped in blood and grievance — and the unity that the wars demanded would not last. The gods who had marched together against the Beasts would, in the end, turn against one another, in the catastrophe that ended their age: the Conflagration.