Much like the Nepheli beneath the Sea, it is said the Gruul have lived hidden deep under Aesor’s surface for an unknown number of decades or even centuries. Through the final decades of the First Age, the Buried Wars would gain momentum. The Blazing Hand Volkrans savagely waged their war, and Gruul took many more losses per battle, but their ranks were replenished quickly. The Gruul would carry their dead away, back to the hive to be reborn. There was no learning curve, these new drones would know what to do from the onset. Their Queen waged this war remotely, from deep within the unborn path, resupplying the warfront with a constant production of soldiers. The Blazing Hand began to mutilate and over do their savagery in battle, attempting to halt these rejuvenations or resurrections. Dominance within the war began to tilt away from the Blazing Hand. A new age began, the Rage of Fates.
The year is 802, beneath Aesors surface lies a subterranean layer known as the Unborn Path. Home to the Gruul Empire, a vast hive of intelligent, bipedal, insectoid people. Their warfront with the Blazing Hand subsided suddenly, and they fell back en masse to defend the Motherland. For a time the Volkrans believed they’d won since the Gruul had surrendered some significant ground and resources. Content with this success, the tribes took a well-deserved rest and settled into their newly gained territory. This occupation would not last a decade.
The Gruul collapse began nearly instantaneously when an unknown darkness infected their capital and grew uncontrollably for seven years. Morphing and recreating the Gruul people into twisted abominations of themselves, corroded and stained by the shadow. Forced to sacrifice the Volkran Warfront, the Gruul fought a different kind of war, against the shadows themselves, a corruption known as the Goa. With the heavy, unrecoverable loss of both their lives and their homelands, the Gruul were able to fight back the corrupted creatures born from this darkness. In that last year the Goa fell back into the depths from which they emerged, back into the Gruul’s conquered and fortified motherland. Having kept the shadow contained within the Unborn path the Gruul, unbeknownst to the other races, averted a global catastrophe.
Above the Gruul motherland, on the surface, lies the Arkey nation of Aztheon. Whether Aztheon truly knew of the Goa or not, there was no intervention until after the Goa were pushed back. Naturally they’d be the first to investigate the troubles below them. Their College of the Shattered Light sent its brightest and most elite minds to the surviving Gruul vestiges in a gesture of goodwill. The Gruul welcomed the offer of help, their lands having been usurped by the shadowy Goa to their west.
The Arkey needed to understand the threat to properly assess how their marcry could be of use. Their envoy traveled to the edges of safe Gruul territory. Using a ritual of Divinery and Chronery, their investigations began.
***
Encircling a pool of their own design, the collegiates filled it with a mercurial fluid made through harnessing their marcry. A myst rose from the pool, within it a vision of the past coalesced.
Scenery depicting the heart of the Gruul motherland came into focus. A pair of Gruul imperial guards in heavy armor could be seen patrolling the cavernside on their path back toward the Imperial Hive’s palace. The cave walls emitted a dim yellow-green luminescence radiating from large crystal clusters protruding from the rocky walls. The Gruul citizenry moved about their daily routines, utilizing their underground bugs of burden, excavating, and serving the hive.
“Focus novitiates! We must also hear what is happening!” a wizened Arkey encouraged.
Bubbling sounds and the pressured whistles of the wormworks began to accompany the visual reflection, the murmurings and chittering of the Gruul people then too joined the scene. The image rose above the pool revealing the dimensions and topography of the environment. As though clouds crept overhead, a shadow climbed up over the mounds and peaks of the palace from its rear, growing darker and more substantive as it did. A stillness came over the Gruul people, they turned towards the Old One’s palace in unison, several fell to a knee in slow anguish. The guards sprinted toward the palace while many other citizens remained dazed. The voice they’d known since birth, the mind of their queen, had suddenly gone silent. Those Gruul who’d fallen, collapsed fully to the ground crying out in a high pitched chorus of suffering and pain.
“Follow the soldiers,” the wizened Arkey said.
The view tightened above and behind the running guards, others of their ilk boldly charged forward with them. The shadow completely enshrouded the whole grand structure before disappearing, absorbed through every orifice of the structure. The screams and cries of their weaker brethren grew all around, from both behind and ahead. The palace doors stood closed as the guards boldly echoed their own chittering battlecry to drown out the anguish, a sound of unity and of desperate rage. The doors crash open out from within, gurgling screams could be heard. An inky black globulous mass filled and squeezed its way through the grand doorway. A handful of guards halted their stride as the mass broke through the mounded walls framing the doorway. Tendrils of dripping inkiness spilled to the ground revealing Gruul trapped and smothered by the oily blackness, their mouths open with soundless screams. Desperately they flailed and clawed, their bodies wrenching as they shouldn’t, folding and breaking their forms into the clingy black goo. The first wave of guards lunged inward with lances, some at the trapped Gruul in attempts to free or send them from this life, others directly at the thickening ooze, which continued to leak from the palace.
The lances all found their mark, but to no avail. The weapons got caught by the ink, only those who let go were spared a few extra seconds. Sharp thin quills sprang out from the mass impaling the first and second wave of attackers. Panicked, some guards futilely fought and struggled, only to entrap themselves further. From the center mass of the growing bulk, a mound emerges. A pair of monstrous abominations made of Gruul flesh, stained and held together with shiny black liquid, shaped into the form of something horrifically wrong. With speed and efficiency the monsters slaughtered those poor souls entrapped yet still fighting. Remaining forces fell back as more sadistically new monsters are shaped into existence to join the invasion.
“That’s enough.” The group exhaled as one, some sweating, all fatigued. The scrying was nightmarish, a difficult and haunting reality to observe.
The Arkey nation of Aztheon could and would not ignore what the Gruul had done in holding back such a perversion. These Goa had retreated back beneath their own homelands though,and therefore intervention, guidance, and leadership were negotiated between the nations that day.
By the Grace of Kalzamaath, Goa remained isolated deep within the once Gruul motherland.
With new allies in place, the Gruul were able to refocus their energies towards reclaiming their territory and mines from the Volkrans to the South. The Buried Wars re-catalyzed.
