Wessex stood before the roundel drawn into the centre circle, and so the rat could not see what happened to the wall exactly, but he did see something burst through the boy's back as if it were crawling from his flesh itself.
It was, as he best could describe it, a hand. Pure black in colour, and completely indistinguishable in texture, it punched its way through the skin and the bone of the boy mage, clawing outwards as it freed itself from some unknown prison. The very walls of the Keep themselves suddenly stirred, as if in protest against this thing's presence. The braziers lighting the hallway flickered and began to die, their flames sucked towards that black appendage that was soon joined by another through the hole they had fashioned in Wessex.
—Charles Matthias, Winter's First Chill
The Underworld is not part of the Hells; nothing Ba'al could devise would be its equal. Nor is it the Hell spoken of by the Ecclesia — Eli cherishes the souls of even the damned too much to subject them to that place. Nor is it the realm of the Fallen — the Adversary himself would fear its touch.
The Underworld is That Which Can Not Be. It is the endless, primordial Void. It is a hunger that cannot be sated, an Outer Darkness that extinguishes all light it touches. Even the most mundane of objects, once tainted by its power, becomes a source of corruption, decay, and destruction that threatens anyone and everyone with which it comes into contact.
Prehistory: The Tenth
The Elders were nine beings of extraordinary power and alien intelligence who created, or gave birth to, the gods of the now-fallen Pantheon. The Outsiders worship these distant beings, revere them and fear them — but some of the oldest myths say there was another among their number, a Tenth whose name has been forgotten … or, more likely, erased. It is unclear what became of this being, but it is said that it made a home for itself on the fifth rocky planet out from the Sun. Now, of course, there are only four such planets — and a broad ring of scattered asteroids where the fifth once lay…
–9,000 CR: The Fall of Jagoduun
Jagoduun was an Elven city-state that stood on the isthmus between Galendor and Kitchlande1. The southernmost of the Elven kingdoms, Jagoduun came under assault by a newly organized human alliance of wizard-kings, the Council of Nine. The Elves were unprepared for the magical prowess and military ferocity of the "primitive" humans, and soon found themselves besieged.
Yajakali, the son of the Elven king, sought a way to take away the wizards' power. The Council of Nine simultaneously worked on an enormous incantation that would tear down the walls of the city. Both rituals came to fruition on the night of the Winter Solstice, when the barriers between realities were thinnest and the flow of mana into the world was at its peak. It was the largest collection of magical power ever amassed in one place by mortal casters, and neither Yajakali nor the Council of Nine understood the magnitude of the forces they were tapping — or the strain that they were putting on the fabric of reality.
Things did not end well.
Yajakali completed his ritual first, but the Council of Nine had already summoned forth an enormous amount of power. When the Elf-prince ripped it from them, channeling into his ritual implements — a sword, a censer, and a dais — the strain of the working tore a hole between the material world and the Underworld. The land cracked and fell into the sea, and Jagoduun was swallowed up, leaving only a cursed and evil swamp in its place. Far below the surface, however, the hole in reality persisted, slowly sucking magic and life out of the world over the next 10,000 years. The sword, censer, and dais appeared from time to time in various places, guided by some malign intelligence — and whoever they touched fell under the influence of the Thing that guided them.
One of the remainders of this war from the human side was a journal written by Anef the First, Speaker of the Nine Who Fell, which is now in the possession of Rickkter and carefully preserved by him.
December 707 CR: The Fall of Chateau Marzac
The fortress of Chateau Marzac, built on the southernmost tip of the Tournish peninsula (not far from the site of ancient Jagoduun), was long believed to be haunted or cursed. Periodically priests were sent to exorcise the castle, and for a time it seemed to work. In truth, however, anyone who went to Marzac and touched the power that lay there was corrupted by it, falling into service to the Underworld.
The hole between the material world and the Underworld was finally sealed in December 707,2 thanks to the joint efforts of the Sondecki force-mage Charles Matthias, the "Rat of Might"; Qan-af-årael, the Lord of Colors, an Elven wise man; Zhypar Habakkuk, the last of the race of seers known as the Felikaush; and Jessica, a journeyman conjurer whose master, Wessex, had been corrupted and destroyed by the power of the Underworld when the censer fell into his possession.
After the hole was sealed, the ambient mana levels in the world began to rise again. Metamor's current age of peace and prosperity is owed in large part to the fact that the Underworld has lost this channel through which it was so long able to influence the world.
Author's Note
Unbeknownst to nearly all, the Underworld retains an indirect influence on Earth through the Plane of Shadow, which sits in an insulating layer between reality and its antithesis. Ba'al and his children work to keep this influence at bay, a process that takes up a great deal of their time and attention. The corrupting nature of Shadow Magic is due chiefly to influence from the Underworld, not Ba'al's influence.