Teredahar History & Mythology - Spellweavers & Building a Continent

The previous history entry talked about how the Elves had to adapt to using magic without power from their God. After generations of learning about the world they settled upon, explorers charting the world's great ocean found a massive fount of magical energy: a crack in the world itself where power was spilling in from the Void. This place was called the Mana Well. Through studying the power spilling from the mana well the Elves rediscovered cosmic or divine magic, but they did not stop there.

The Spellweavers

What the Elves found at the Mana Well was a window into the Void. The power they learned to tap came directly from the great currents of raw magical energy that flow through it. Beyond just learning to harness that power, researchers at the Mana Well began to learn to  control its flow and shape it. The art of shaping the inflow of cosmic energy became a third kind of magic altogether. Its practitioners named themselves "Spellweavers".

The art of spell-weaving gave rise to many new technologies that helped the Elves thrive. Spellstones imbued with power from the Mana Well were brought back to Tan'Rar to fuel magical artifice the world had never before seen. Shifting the flow of energy could create fierce storms or extend a growing season by months. The power of the Spellweavers allowed the Elves of Tan'Rar to conquer their own continent and threaten the Dragons for supremacy over the world.

The Mother of Invention

After generations of unbridled prosperity and growth, the Elves were faced with a dilemma: their numbers would soon outstrip what the lands of Tan'Rar could produce. Would they face famine or be finally forced to make war upon the Dragons for territory? The grand-master Spellweaver Alderast Concellarii proposed a solution: make new land.

Grand Spellweaver Concellarii proposed using the power of the Mana Well to pull one of the Shards near Prime off its course and cause it to merge with Prime itself, bringing with it land-mass that could be used to fill in part of the great ocean around the Mana Well. The plan was ambitious. Great anchors containing immense spellstones would need to be placed on the ocean floor to help steer, "grab" and old on to the colliding plane and prevent it from crashing into Tan'Rar territory.

It took almost eighty years for the preparations to be complete. When the day finally came, ships were bursting with settlers ready to claim new land. Meanwhile, spellweavers at the Mana Well had been carefully guiding their chosen Shard closer to Prime for years.

The actual event was almost anti-climactic. One minute there was a vast ocean a few hours' sail north of Tan'Rar's continent, the next there were several-hundred square miles of alien landscape to conquer. Over the next several years the spellweavers would pull through more and more land. The newly-created continent was named "Teredahar" which means "glorious discovery" in archaic elvish. With two continents under their control, the leaders of Tan'Rar named their main continent "Loraida", which means "harbour" in the same archaic dialect.

The New World

The Elves weren't the only ones to notice the appearance of an entire continent where once there was ocean. Dragons, early Humans, and even the then-purely-subterranean Dwarvish ancestors raced to claim lands on the new continent before the Elves could. They would find that creatures living on the Shards had also been brought through. Magical beasts plagued the would-be conquers while utterly bewildered Gnomes and Halflings struggled to come to terms with what the Elves had done.

Battles over territory quickly escalated into the first all-out war between Elves and Dragons, one of the things Concellarii sought to prevent. The new land would be fought over by various races many times over the following millennia and to present day.

Next Time

The next article will continue the series of Teredahar locales.