Lore of Caeldor
When ash buried the southern farms, the people of Caeldor made for Aurelgate. The city had a ward strong enough to shelter them. Who stood on which side of its gate still matters in the Goldmarch, in the caverns below, and on the road to Maw’s Rest.
Lore cinematic · 33 seconds
The Ashfall
The lamps in Aurelgate once burned without oil. Dwarven miners cut lanternstone beneath the Heartmount, and High Elves set wards into the pale crystal. The brightest stone came from the deepest tunnels. Miners working those seams could hear it whisper.
When their picks broke into the Heartvein, the Maw woke. The mountain burst. As the Deep Holds collapsed, Keeper Harrod Deepseal stayed behind with his seal-wrights. Their ring of carved stones quieted the hunger beneath the mountain. Where the Heartmount had stood, they left a crater called the Abyss.
Gatefall
Among the refugees on Aurelgate’s bridge were people with black veins and a red light behind their eyes. Archwarden Sylthariel raised the ward against the corruption. The golden gate shut. Some of the knights ordered to hold the bridge laid down their oaths and walked into the ash.
The ward-stone split. Sylthariel kept one half inside the city. Her sister Nyssara carried the other into the caverns, where the Spiderkin showed the refugees how to survive. After an underground river drowned their first city, Lowhaven, the survivors carved Veyl’Khar into the stalactites. There, Dark Elves, Greenskins, and Spiderkin swore the Deep Law of the Umbral Dominion.
The Border Wars
When sunlight returned to the Goldmarch, Aurelgate reopened its gate. The Aurel rulers set aside their crowns, and the Dawnward Concord took shape. To the Concord, those who had gone below were deserters. Families in Nethervale remembered who had left them on the bridge. Raids at the Crossroads grew into open war.
Hunger brought merchants across the border. They carried grain down from the Goldmarch and silk back up from Nethervale. Their Free Merchants’ League brokered the Crossroads Truce. Out on the crater rim, the descendants of the oath-breaking knights and the families who stayed above built a town of their own. The Ashborn call it Maw’s Rest.
The Second Opening
The game begins as the outer seals give way. Demons climb the slopes. Soul shards, the crystallized souls of people lost in the Ashfall, rise from the depths and rain down. Along the rim, the living begin to show the same black veins the refugees carried to Aurelgate.
All three factions are recruiting. So is the Hungering, a cult that believes the Maw should be fed. In Wren Coalhand’s story, the first sign that the crater is stirring reaches an ordinary wheat field. It comes up on the end of her shovel.
Character cinematic
In Thornfield, Wren’s shovel turns up a shard that burns white. Keeping it costs her a home. Her road leads to a stew stall in Maw’s Rest and a merchant with an eye in a jar.
Meet Wren, Mugrot, and Ilsa →Channel stories
Wren was digging in the wheat fields of Thornfield when her shovel struck a shard that burned white. Ser Aurelan Vey asked her to hand it over. She refused. By morning, the Ledger had marked her palm, and a Concord farmhand was on the road to Maw’s Rest.
On a lava-lit street, a Greenskin named Mugrot keeps a pot of stew going. He is Wren’s one friend here. When she turns the shard in her hand, its light leans toward the crater.
Nine-Eyes Ilsa is a Spiderkin merchant at the Nethervale border. She wears reading glasses over the lowest pair of her eight eyes. She keeps the ninth in a jar. It can show you your future, though it only shows the bad parts.