Editing Scion History (section)

=== The Sundering ===

The war that shattered a people did not begin with blades. It began with questions, and with magic that was never meant to be known.

In the Age of Awakening, a strange new force stirred beyond the borders of the Shining Cities. It was magic, but not as the Forsworn had come to understand it. It shifted with each invocation, refused structure, and seemed to mock the very laws of essence. To the Forsworn, who had long mastered the elemental powers of the world, this chaos was both a puzzle and a temptation.

They sent their finest scholars and magi to study it. Drawn ever deeper into its mysteries, they found the magic did not yield to inquiry. Yet the longer they remained, the more they changed. Slowly, and then all at once. Their forms twisted. Their minds bent beneath unseen pressure. Their features, once marble-like and serene, became warped. Their once-radiant voices echoed with something hollow. These were the first of the Scorned, Forsworn transformed by magic into something other.

The changes did not stop with them. The Dworn who had laboured in these distant camps were also touched by the unknown. Some grew smaller and sharper, with wiry limbs and clever fingers. Others swelled with strength and lost clarity, becoming hulking warriors of fire and fury. Together, these transformed descendants would eventually become the Orukar, an unintended people born from magic misunderstood.

Back in the Shining Cities, the Forsworn debated. Word of these transformations reached them slowly, wrapped in fear and confusion. Some called them abominations, a danger to all creation. Others, recalling ancient kinship, called for mercy. No final consensus was reached, but eventually it was decided that something must be done, and the Scions were sent.

Two armies left the Shining Cities to confront this new threat.

The first moved in secret, quiet, grieving, hopeful. They sought to find their twisted kin and determine if anything could be salvaged. When they arrived, they found the Scorned changed beyond recognition. Their skin was marred. Their voices strange. And yet, they remembered. They mourned what they had lost. The Scions who witnessed this did not strike. They watched. They wept.

The second army arrived later. Their orders were clear. They came not to speak, but to cleanse. Cloaked in divine law, they descended without warning. They saw only a contagion and moved to cut it out. Marching beneath banners of fire and law, they descended with fury. They did not ask questions. They did not offer peace. They struck without warning, intending to end what they saw as an abomination.

But they had misjudged the strength of those they came to kill.

The Scorned had allies. The Orukar had grown and multiplied in the shadows, hardened by exile and survival. Armed with crude weapons and simple armour, they possessed a determination no scholar could extinguish. The land itself bore the scars of their presence. What the Scions expected to be a purge became a battlefield. What they expected to be an execution became a war.

Watching from afar, the first army made its choice. They raised shields against their own kin. They fought to protect the Scorned and to give the Orukar time to flee. In doing so, they broke the only law the Scions held sacred. They turned against their destiny.

The battle ended, but the war did not.

When the dust settled, the battlefield was silent. The Scions who had shown mercy had struck down their own kin. Their names were ash. Their oaths shattered. They had defied their destiny to protect those their people now called monsters.

They fled into shadow, unable to return, and thus they became the Forsaken.

Branded as traitors, they vanished into the wilds. Their story was rewritten as treachery. Their mercy twisted into betrayal. They swore new oaths: to protect each other, to never beg forgiveness, and to never strike second.

The Scorned, wounded and few, withdrew into secrecy. They left the Orukar to forge their own destiny. Freed from the conflict that had created them, the Orukar spread across Carcer, establishing tribes and settlements throughout its hills, forests, mountains, and plains.

In the Shining Cities, silence reigned. No record of the battle. No mention of the mercy. Only a verdict: the Scorned were to be feared, the Orukar were an error beyond redemption, and the Forsaken were a warning. The magic that started it all became a whisper that still echoes in forbidden halls, too dangerous to name.

The Sundering was not a war. It was a wound.

One people, divided. One choice, never forgiven.

And the world has never been the same.