Great Catastrophe

The Great Catastrophe is the name given by the Lizardmen to the First Chaos Incursion to the world, which took place between -5600 IC and -4420 IC.

Before the fall
It was during the time of the mysterious Old Ones that the Daemons of Chaos first descended upon the mortal realm. The Old Ones were the architects of the world, able to twist the fabric of space and time to their will, and summon vast energies to be manipulated in the form of devastating magical spells.

The Old Ones were beings of order and near-omnipotence, but it is unknown when they first detected the impending disaster, or if they realised its magnitude. Although they tapped into the energies of the realm beyond their portals, they had always struggled to contain that power - and soon found themselves embattled by the forces of that impossible dimension. Having glimpsed some future portent, it is probable that the races the Old Ones created were intended to fight against the creatures from the Realm of Chaos.

After the Lizardmen, the first of the newly created races was the Elves, and they learned the lore of magic in the lap of the gods themselves. The Dwarfs soon followed, although their magic was insular and intrinsic to their craftsmanship. As the pressures of their cosmic war intensified, the Old Ones created the prolific and adaptable race of Man, and, seemingly in haste, finally the Halflings and the Ogres were risen up from the lesser things that roamed the world.

The coming of Chaos
Disaster came suddenly. Whether due to enemy attacks or structural failure, the Old Ones’ great polar gates, the means by which they traversed the stars, collapsed upon themselves. The eldritch machineries of the gates crashed down upon the world in a burning hail of star-metal. Simultaneously, the poles of the world imploded, opening rifts into the beyond. Chaos spewed forth from the spirit realm. Meteors of congealed magic, a substance known as warpstone, left weirdling contrails that set the skies aflame. The planet shuddered under thunderous impacts, with some meteorites burrowing like animals, gnawing deep into the world’s foundation. A layer of warpstone dust was cast into the air, its mutating properties causing untold atrocities. Across the globe, the seas churned and the forest canopies shook, convulsing with grotesque growth. Where the northern gateway had once been, there now throbbed a second moon, a green satellite made of pure warpstone -- Morrslieb. Many cries were lifted to that sickly orb, as hideously twisted creatures were born, howling in their agony.

As their portals collapsed, the Old Ones disappeared, their fate unknown. Yet the disaster could have been worse, if the Old Ones’ most powerful servants, the Slann, had not staved off complete destruction by sealing much of the rent in reality. So great was the strain of that undertaking that half of their number were slain — their brains melted by the incongruity of Chaos. Despite their sacrifice, the Slann could only shrink the gap; they could neither close it nor stem the tide of magical energy that swept the planet. The Old Ones were gone, and the Lizardmen and the fledgling races were now abandoned before a new and diabolical foe.

The world besieged
In the wake of the clouds of magic came the daemonic legions of the Chaos Gods. They crystallised out of the swirling madness, materialising in numbers beyond count. Each Daemon was a powerful facet of its master, an unnatural being that burned with the urge to destroy. And so the war for the mortal realm was begun. Faced with annihilation, the remaining Slann rallied, mustering armies the sizes of which have never been seen in the world since. The Daemons attacked everywhere, but the Lizardmen bore the brunt of the attack. What followed was a series of terrible wars, titanic clashes that spanned continents, lasted centuries and claimed untold lives. The Saurus met the daemonic tide, able to match their ferocity and return it in kind, but the might of the Lizardmen did not rest solely with its armies. The Slann, atop their pyramid-temples, gathered the rampant magical energies to fuel spells of unprecedented destruction. They gulped in the magic-infused air and belched forth firestorms, unleashed tidal waves, or split the earth asunder to lay waste to the invaders. In the war’s opening stages, the Slann proved more powerful than even the most magically adept of the Daemons. However, as the Chaos energies and unending reinforcements continued to flood into the world, the balance began to shift.

The crumbling of civilisation
As the Chaos energies ebbed stronger, the Slann felt their powers dim, their spells growing harder to control. Even a minute error while manipulating magical forces resulted in horrific mishap — many Slann suffered mind-shredding backlashes or were lost to their own incandescent miscues. While the unconstrained Winds of Magic sapped the Slann, it conversely invigorated the Daemons, for they were born of the unnatural stuff and could readily shape it for their own use. As the magical supremacy shifted, so too did the war.

On the battlefields, titans made of pure fury smashed into the Saurus cohorts until the land was awash with blood. Plague monsters and beasts of living brass hurtled headlong into cold-blooded colossi, while above, flying reptiles battled batwinged behemoths for control of the skies. Despite mauling their daemonic foes, the Lizardm en were driven back. The Slann drew ever more upon their nexus of power, using its grounding to steady the unstable energies swirling around them. In desperation, they enchanted the jungle, turning their surroundings into a deathtrap full of carnivorous plants, living quicksand pits and teeming swarms of insects whose stings could crack Dragon scale. Rivers were redirected to impede the daemonic advance and volcanoes rose and erupted to slow their hellish progress. Yet still, the fell legions rampaged onwards. The Lizardmen withdrew to their temple-cities, bastions of order amongst a sea of Chaos.

For a time, even the relentless minions of the Dark Gods were checked as the Lizardmen exacted a tremendous toll. Giant reptilian beasts waded into the tumult, crushing paths through the hellish hordes before being lost to sight beneath the writhing masses. Strange devices left by the Old Ones were unleashed, artefacts of power that melted away the opposition by the thousands. Heedless of their losses, the Daemons continued to batter away at the protective barriers conjured by the Slann to protect each temple-city.

Eventually, the Daemons devised a way to breach the wards and Xahutec was the first to fall, its inhabitants slaughtered and its sky-scraping pyramids cast down. It began a chain reaction, weakening the magical barriers erected over each other temple-city in turn. So Huatl, Tlanxla, and Xhotl fell in quick succession. At Xhotl, the Slann Mage-Priests managed to hold out long enough to send warnings to the remaining cities, allowing them to employ suitable counterspells. The Daemons were stymied for a period, yet they were unrelenting. They devised new devilries to defeat each defence, unleashing a plague to overcome Chaqua, levelling Quezotec with the sonic barrage of a billion slaughtered souls in agony, and summoning shadowy tentacles to drag the great triangular temple-city of Zarmuda deep under the sea, where its force dome eventually cracked. After a thousand years of battle, only a handful of temple-cities stood, each a bastion protected by the greatest of the remaining Slann.

The Defence of Itza
At last the way was clear for the Daemons to besiege Itza, the First City and lynchpin of the Lizardmen’s arcane defences. Itza was under the protection of Lord Kroak, first of all Slann spawned upon the world and the mightiest of mages. The energy dome that surrounded Itza crackled with energy, turning Daemons to dust as they railed against it. Yet after years of strain, even Lord Kroak could sustain such mystic walls no longer, and with a final surge, he exploded the barrier outwards, flattening the surrounding jungle. A hundred thousand Daemons were banished in an instant. Nevertheless, the remainder swarmed into Itza.

Of all that long war, no battle was more fiercely fought than the one amongst the streets of Itza. Only an epic stand by Lord Kroak’s army of Temple Guard prevented the Daemons from overrunning the Great Pyramid. For many days and nights, the elite Saurus warriors stood firm on the lofty Bridge of Stars. Using his reservoirs of energy, Lord Kroak prepared his final incantations. As the last of the Temple Guard was cut down, Lord Kroak spouted forth spells that were the preserve of gods, raining fire from the heavens to vaporise the foe. Time stood still as the fabric of the universe strained at the outpour of sheer power. Yet eventually even Lord Kroak succumbed. A dozen Bloodthirsters, protected by the favour of their dark god Khorne, fought through the deluge of spells and reached the top of the pyramid. There, they fell upon Lord Kroak’s form, ripping him apart in a savage instant. So overcharged with arcane energies was Lord Kroak that his spirit fought on, refusing to let even death hinder him. Set free of his flesh, Kroak’s radiant will soared above the ruins, scourging the invaders with a divine light that was like unto a second sun. The First City was saved.

Although Itza was delivered, the war raged on. Across the globe, the younger races also faced the Daemon legions. Despite retreating to their mountain holds, the Dwarfs had been decimated. The Elves of Ulthuan suffered tremendous loss, but in the end, their mages enacted the Great Ritual - a spell that created a vast vortex that drained away swathes of the magic that flooded the world. Deprived of their lifeblood of magical energy, the Daemons disappeared back to their seething realm, yet the world was irrevocably damaged, now transformed into a world saturated with magic and monsters.

The resistance of the Dwarfs and the doom of Grimnir
According to the account in the Great Book of Grudges, the most ancient Dwarf book of lore, the coming of Chaos rent the earth and sky and tore the very mountains apart. Turbulent winds of multicoloured magic clouded the air. The Dwarfs maintain that Grungni warned his people that such a time might come, and he told them to take refuge deep beneath the mountains. There, they sheltered as the Winds of Magic erupted out of the north and scoured the world.

When the tempest passed, it left in its wake a layer of dust that hastened corruption. When the Dwarfs emerged from their underground dwellings, they found the world a very changed place. Mutated beasts and rage-filled monstrosities prowled the mountains, but there was something even worse. During the great storm, Daemons had burst forth from the Realm of Chaos, and now they stalked the lands, seeking to slay all they found. It was not long before the mountain strongholds of the Dwarfs were ferociously assailed.

The Daemons quickly found out that the Dwarfs were far from defenceless. Ancient tales tell how Grungni taught his people to inscribe magical runes onto their weapons and armour - allowing them to stand against the creatures of Chaos that assaulted them. Valaya used her protections to ward off the dark magic of their enemies, dampening their dread powers. It was Grimnir, equipped with two mighty axes and armour harder than the mountains themselves, who launched the counter-attack. With their blazing warrior god at the fore, the Dwarfs clove a path up and down the mountain range, killing so many of their foe that, for a time, the World's Edge Mountains were clear of Daemons. Grimnir himself pressed the attack, pursuing his enemy with a relentless fury that dimmed only when the last foe was slain.

It was at this point that the Dwarfs first made contact with the Elves. A fleet of Elven warships, captained by Caledor Dragontamer, had been blown off course after a sea battle with a Chaos fleet. Caledor was a great mage, and he searched the coasts of the Old World, hoping to find clues to the source of the Chaos that was destroying the world. Instead, Caledor encountered a Dwarf army led by Grimnir himself, for they had pursued the remnants of a Daemon army and sought to slay the last of them.

It was a pivotal moment in history, as one of the greatest and most subtle High Elf mages of all time met the brutal and mighty incarnate warrior god of the Dwarfs. What Grimnir made of the tall and haughty Elf mage is not recorded, nor is what Caledor thought of the tattooed Dwarf warlord. Both realised that they were not enemies, and the matter was settled when a force of Beastmen attacked. After a hastily agreed alliance, the foe was shattered by the combined might of Grimnir’s axes and Caledor’s spells.

From Caledor, the Dwarfs learned of the great Phoenix King Aenarion and his struggle to free the distant island of Ulthuan from the grip of Chaos. From Grimnir, Caledor learned of the storm that burst from the north that had preceded the Daemons. The wise mage concluded that a Chaos gate had opened in the utmost north, a doorway between their world and the unimaginable Realm of Chaos. With this information, and their newly formed alliance, Caledor departed, in all likelihood already formulating the plan that would lead to the creation of a mighty vortex to suck the unleashed Chaos power out of the world. Upon Caledor’s departure, Grimnir presented him with a runic amulet of sovereign protective power. In return, Caledor gifted the Dwarf with the Crystal of Fire, an artefact that is kept, to this day, in the Great Vault of Karaz-a-Karak.

The respite won by Grimnir and his armies was hard-won, but its duration was brief. Even as Grimnir headed back to the mountains, the skies grew ominous. Once more, the tide of Chaos rolled over the lands, the Daemon legions and their untold horrors destroying everything in their path. This time, the Daemons attacked in such great numbers that the heroism of Grimnir was not enough, and the Dwarfs were pressed backwards. Unable to hold their ground, the Dwarfs were eventually forced to retreat inside their strongholds. One by one, their mountain fortresses were besieged.

Although they fought valiantly against the tide of Chaos, several holds fell to the unholy onslaught. Having heard Caledor’s theory of a Chaos gate, Grimnir decided to take action. Ignoring advice, he resolved to trek north and close the gate himself. Grungni told him he would surely die, but Grimnir snarled that it was worth the risk. The great warrior god ritually shaved his head, save for a single defiant crest. He gave one of his axes to his eldest son, Morgrim, and departed for the north. A party of Dwarfs, led by Morgrim, accompanied Grimnir to the edge of the wastes that lay to the north, fighting off many dangers just to reach this region. There, they at last turned back, watching in awe as Grimnir pressed onwards, his form dwindling into the shimmering haze of that poisoned land.

Grimnir was never seen again, and no one knows what befell this most valiant of Dwarfs. Perhaps he was, at last, pulled down by an army of monsters. One tale affirms he fought his way to the mouth of the Chaos gate and held it against an army of Daemons even as Caledor completed his spell on Ulthuan. Perhaps an even stranger and more terrible doom overtook him? Of Grimnir’s fate, the Dwarfs do not speak, saying only that he fell in darkness long ago.

In the end, Caledor’s spell drained the rampant magic from the lands, an act that banished the Daemons to the shadowy corners of the world. In an instant, the armies of unnatural creatures that surrounded each stronghold disappeared, and the Dwarfs emerged into the dawning of a whole new era.

The Dwarf gods were gone; Grungni, Valaya and the lesser deities had disappeared. It is popularly believed that they returned to the mountains’ heart, going back from whence they came to emerge again some day when their people most need them. In the World's Edge Mountains, the Dwarfs prospered greatly, but of their kin in the north or from the Mountains of Mourn, they had no word.