Many years ago, beyond even the living memories of the elves, there was a mighty republic. An alliance of races formed along the banks of a great river, with its dominion following the path of the water from the western mountains to the wastes of the east. Prosperous, learned, the republic did not know peace but it did find resilience, absorbing the attacks of jealous neighbours and taming the wild beasts of the land. It laid the mighty roads that we even now follow, built palaces and libraries and temples to the gracious gods.
But there is such folly in the hearts of all mortals. The republic grew stagnant, its leaders insular. The most powerful members of the council quailed at the idea of their own passing, claiming they feared what would happen to the republic without their wisdom. Small people, with small fears writ large with the power they held. They gathered wizards and sorcerers and madmen, scholars and lunatics, draining the coffers of the republic in ceaseless research, and undertook to tame death itself. In their hubris, they sought to pull the Son, god of the Wild Places, from the celestial planes and have Him take their deaths into Himself.
Alas for us all, they succeeded. At least in part, and at such terrible cost. They bound the Son, and spilled His divine blood. The god of the Hunt and the Hunted has died many times, for He is the deer and the hound, but never before had mortal hands defiled His sacred death. The gods waxed wrathful. The Son’s very blood poisoned the river; His flesh became great trees that tore the cities apart, the forest spreading like green and amber fire across the heartlands of the republic; His captors were transformed into mindless beasts, twisted and foul.
The Father, in a cold and quiet fury, denied the erstwhile council the mercy of Death and bound them forevermore to the unholy place that they had created. The Daughter took up arms and went to war, shattering the peace of those towns and villages that escaped annihilation. The Mother, who we know as the kindest of the gods, turned Her face away and withdrew Her gifts; all who shared kinship with the apostatical councilors turned to glass, their makings crumbled into dust, and the magic of the republic became barren and useless.
Of the gods, only the Bastard and the Wanderer did not act in anger. The Bastard out of necessity, for mortals had spun a curse that threatened to consume the world, and They would not see everything undone so carelessly. Even as They grieved, They picked up the tattered and frayed edges of the world and of the Divine Family and began the work of binding and healing.
The Wanderer watched, and listened. He would need this story, but She would not permit it to be told by the guilty. For once, She did not laugh, and the songs He sang were a funereal dirge.
And that is how we know of the fall of the Republic of Glass Beasts. If it had another name before, it is lost to us, we who live amidst the ruins of that ultimate heresy. The Godwood divides what was once whole, and here in the southlands we are hemmed in by the mountains to the west and the great wastes to the east and south. We have rebuilt where we can, learned new magic and ways of being, and the gods once more admit blessings and rituals. Ours is a harsh land. Monsters roam the wild places, ruins teem with secrets and curses, and never again will we know the unity that led to the fall. But with wit and word and the strength of our arms we carve out a place for ourselves, and even prosper.
You have come together to act as guards, scouts or caravaneers under the auspices of a merchant’s guild, bearing goods from the city to a new outpost being built within the outskirts of the Godwood. The caravan is currently paused at the hamlet of Clearcut, having suffered bandit attacks on the road that claimed the lives of three guards and injured several more, and there are rumours of darker things than bandits stalking the paths ahead.