Kriilla+Darkhand

=The Legend of Kriilla Darkhand=

//[written by Thomas Lee Moore of Aundair, as a long letter to his lover Jaesa, a bard from New Cyre.]//

My Dearest Jaesa,

You told me how much you enjoy a good story, and wondered whether we'd ever know what really happened to cause the devastation we've seen, the illusion afflicting our night sky, and all the rest going back to my first arrival in New Cyre just three months past.

As we leave the Seven Caves mountain near the Darguun-Breland border -- injured and exhausted, having suffered loss and experienced victory -- I think I at last have a story for you.

Forty thousand years ago, invaders from another plane attcked the Giants on Xen'drik. One way the Giants responded was by devising elaborate magical devices, called //eldritch machines//, to focus and unleash devastating, epic power on the invaders. In the end there were no winners. The plane we know as Dal Quor, the realm of Dreams, is forever separate from Eberron. The lands of Xen'drik were torn apart and altered -- jungles became deserts, mountains rose to obliterate lakes, peninsulas became islands and rivers opened themselves to the sea. The Giant civilizations collapsed into savagery, their mighty //eldritch machines// lost to the changing landscape.

Actually, I suppose the Elves came out all right, winning their freedom from cruel Giant overlords. But I digress.

Millennia passed, and eventually our continent, Khorvaire, saw the rise of the Empire of Dhakaan. With discipline and magic, Hobgoblins, Goblins and Bugbears together dominated the other races -- Gnomes in the forests, Halflings in the desert, Lizardfolk in the jungles, Orcs in the swamps, Dwarves under the northeastern mountains, Gnolls in the southern steppes, and so on -- and built mighty cities and monuments to their power. Mostly on the backs of slave labor, the unspoken key to their economic power.

Perhaps the Dhakaani were too successful, too prosperous, too organized. No matter, the histories state that about 11,000 years ago, when Xoriat -- the Plane of Madness, or the Far Realm -- was coterminous with Eberron, bizarre creatures came through to our world. They weren't an army, and the Dhakaani Empire barely noticed when they left as mysteriously as they'd appeared. But these creatures, the Daelkyr, had taken captives for study and learned much of our world. They would return in due course, with armies of aberrations and schemes to alter our reality to be as bizarre and insane as their own.

Three more times did Xoriat become coterminous with Eberron, and each time new horrors were unleashed. The Goblinoids of Dhakaan fought back, devising new magics, crafting new weapons and trying new tactics. But each time the Empire was weakened, losing territory to the invaders -- the Shadow Marches, the Lhazaar Archipelago, the metropolis where Sharn sits today -- and a sense of impending doom fell over the Empire. After the fourth Incursion, more than 8,000 years ago, many felt the invaders could have wiped out all of Dhakaan and that the only check on the Daelkyr were their own inscrutable motives. Worse was the knowledge that the "orbit" of Xoriat around Eberron was shrinking, the years between one coterminous period and the next decreasing by about ten percent each time -- a spiraling regression that would inevitably lead to the two planes MERGING. Madness would become our Reality, forever.

In the years before the looming Fifth Incursion, a clan of Artificers and inventors, the Dark Hands (//Draar'mac//) rose to prominence. Details are sketchy, but somehow they engineered the rise of a new ruling family, the Ku'un Dynasty, that was open to radical reforms of Dhakaani society. The Ku'un Emperors (Geshlaa the father and Sulaaco the son) gave sweeping authority to the //Draar'mac// to implement their plans, crushing dissent with a compelling argument that these changes were needed to stop the Daelkyr.

About this time, maybe -6600 YK, was born a most remarkable Goblin. Kriilla Darkhand may have been the greatest //Dashoor// (Artificer) of the late Empire. Despite being a female in a patriarchal society and a Goblin in an Empire led by Hobgoblins, Kriilla rose to a position second only to the Emperor himself through some combination of genius, magical skill, determination and luck. Among her early successes was the forging of a mighty //byeshk// tower shield for her Emperor's chief bodyguard, named //Muut// ("Duty") as an homage to the original "Shield of Nobles" lost in an earlier Incursion.

The //Draar'mac// had settled on one goal to try and face the coming Incursion: Finding something on the southern continent Xen'drik that might be used against the Daelkyr. For millennia the Dhakaani had avoided Xen'drik, with its savage Giants and sinister Drow tribes like the Sulatar and Umbragen. Under Kriilla's influence, the first Ku'un Emperor, Geshlaa, issued a call for expeditions to Xen'drik, funded by the Empire. Dozens of Dhakaani groups, many of them little more than bandits and pirates given official sanction, made the dangerous journey across the Thunder Sea, establishing settlements and base camps along the coast before sending bands inland to search for whatever they might find. The death toll must have been tremendous, but the Dhakaani forces did succeed in suppressing the native populations and mapping large areas of northern Xen'drik.

Finally, Kriilla herself arrived with what would in any other era be described as an army. Where other expeditions had failed to bring back Giant-era artifacts (when they came back at all), Kriilla's found exactly what she had hoped to find: An intact //eldritch machine//. Kriilla's teams carefully disassembled the gigantic device and hauled it back to Khorvaire across hundreds of miles of hostile terrain, withstanding Drow attacks at every turn, and then over another thousand miles of Sahuagin-infested oceans. Such as achievement should live on in legends and song...the fact that they don't is something I can only speculate on, later in this narrative.

That said, simply having an //eldritch machine// is nothing. Kriilla's true genius was that she eventually divined its purpose, learned how to activate it -- and then CHANGED that purpose to suit the needs of Dhakaan against Xoriat as opposed to the Giants' ancient fight against Dal Quor. Under her command, the //machine// was taken to the most sacred spot in the Empire, the First Cave at the top of Seven Caves mountain, the tallest peak still under Dhakaani control, and reassembled. The Giants intended their //machine// to open a rift to a different outer plane -- Shavarath, the Endless Battle -- and call an army of Demons or Devils to wage war on the Quori. At best, a brute force solution that would have replaced one planar threat with another. Kriilla's innovation was to fine tune the //machine// so that it would only open a controlled gate to Shavarath, which would only summon the souls of Hobgoblins and Bugbears who had died heroically in battle, inducing or commanding them to possess thousands of //Dekanter'Dar// ("feral people," basically Hobgoblin mutants with great physical prowess but weak minds) -- forcebred under Kriilla's direction using Daelkyr breeding creches in a most blasphemous manner (creches located within and beneath the mountain) -- that could be controlled and ordered to fight the invaders.

Control was to be channeled through a new weapon, a glaive-like spear called Guurgaal, made of //byeshk// metal and bronzewood, which in the hands of the Emperor (by this time it was Sulaaco Ku'un, son of Geshlaa) would make the combined forces unstoppable. A sort of locking mechanism -- a Goblin-made console that would accept Guurgaal as a "key" -- was bolted to the // eldritch machine //. Timing was critical: The // machine // had to be activated when the moons of Eberron were in an exact alignment, with the other planes at particular points in their "orbits" of our world.

Unfortunately, the right time would be almost simultaneous with the date Xoriat became coterminous with Eberron. There would be no second chance.

At the appointed time, Emperor Sulaaco Ku'un stood before the // eldritch machine //, nearly 200 feet tall and erected on a giant floating rock in the in the vast entry chamber of the First Cave, with Guurgaal in his hands and Kriilla Darkhand at his side. He plunged Guurgaal into the locking mechanism...and nothing happened. Something, perhaps the tiniest of details among the hundreds of things that had to go exactly right, failed. No gate opened, no army of spirits came through. Sulaaco had to go fight the hordes of Xoriat with just the unmodified //Dekanter'Dar//, the regular armies of Dhakaan...and Guurgaal, which was still an artifact-level weapon. His death was the stuff of legend, and the site where he fell was later marked by a white stone obelisk, from which stones were used earlier this year by the unfortunate Murnie family to build a farm cottage.

The Fifth Incursion was a disaster for Dhakaan, even though by all accounts it was smaller and weaker than the ones before. Aside from the failure of the //eldritch machine//, it is possible that the loss of thousands of able-bodied warriors, mages and leaders in Xen'drik depleted Dhakaani forces when they were needed to fight The Three and their minions. In its aftermath, even as the Gatekeepers began working their magic thousands of miles away, there was great unrest in the Empire. The Ku'un Dynasty was overthrown, and the //Draar'mac//, whose blasphemies and excesses had been tolerated when they had the Emperor's support and a chance of success, were blamed for this latest defeat. All of Kriilla's kin were tracked down and slaughtered, their very name expunged from the oral histories of the //duur'kala//. The Seven Caves were shunned, left to be overrun by the descendants of the feral //Dekanter'Dar// within, with flights of hostile Wyverns patrolling the exterior and feasting on any who left the Caves.

But Kriilla herself survived. It seems she never left the First Cave and the //eldritch machine// she had recovered and rebuilt. Facing death of old age, yet burning with the desire to fix what had gone wrong, and someday use the //machine// to bring back Dhakaan, she wielded artifice to become a unique type of Lich. She then placed her sarcophagus inside the //eldritch machine// and went into hibernation for more than 75 centuries. She awoke about a year ago, with no servitors, no clan -- just a massive treasure hoard of Ku'un Dynasty coins, her own driving ambition, and one Barghest called Diizina (and likely the powerful Imp Druziel, now that I think about it). How she accomplished so much in so little time, without ever tipping her hand as the driving force behind such players as Warlord Kogaa, Mariin Dhakaan, Kostas Knyarri, Tyvon the Cannith excoriate and the Sharn-based company NZZN, is amazing. In her worldview, slavery as practiced by the later Empire was not just an economic necessity, but also moral and just. To her, the rise of Lhesh Haruuc, with his wish to join the nations of Khorvaire and abolish slavery, must have been an abomination. I've talked with Choraan and he agrees that Kogaa certainly joined her for that reason, even before she tapped him to be the puppet "Emperor" in her "New Dhakaan." Diizina and Druziel, as natives of Shavarath, probably wanted to corrupt the //machine// or return it to its original function, opening a permanent rift to Shavarath to allow a horde of Devils to invade and conquer Khorvaire. They came ever so close.

//**NOTE:**//"Krilla Darkhand" first appeared in the D&D 3.5 sourcebook //Libris Mortis// as a sample Lich. An 11th level female Goblin Adept (NPC class), Krilla was literally called "...the weakest lich in existence." I planned to use her as a Boss monster, the secret leader of the revived "Dark Hands" clan, that the Party could fight and kill. But as time went on, she became more important to the underlying story arc, and I completely reworked her into something different -- a mighty Artificer of the late Dhakaani Empire, a prodigy of extraordinary will, insight and perseverance who nevertheless failed to save her people or her Emperor, and chose lichdom and temporal stasis in hopes that someday she might be able to try again.

Original "Mourning in Khorvaire" material and specific House Rules -- © 2007-2017 Herb Helzer. All Rights Reserved. "Eberron," "Dungeons & Dragons," "d20 system," etc. -- ©1995-2017 Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All Rights Reserved.