The Powers Beyond

Three powers at the edges of the world. They are not among the five you command in a match, and their names are still being carved. But the war cannot be understood without them.

Beyond the five great factions stand three older, stranger powers. The game does not put them in your hand, but their fingerprints are on every faction's story. The names here are working names, and may yet change.

The Voidwrought, the Things from the Pit

At the base of a single vast mountain there is the Pit, and the Pit does not have a bottom that anyone has found. Down past the deepest delving there is only the void, a threshold the wise suspect, an open door onto somewhere eldritch and unshaped that was never meant to touch this world. And things come up through it.

The Voidwrought are creatures of a strange and sideways intelligence, and nothing they do can be read the way you would read a hungry beast or a scheming king. They are parasites and corrupters, defilers of the green, and in the same breath they are makers. They craft new forms of life, weave the flesh of this world into shapes it has no words for, and seed the dark with children that should not be. Whether they are killing the world or midwifing its next self, no one can say, and it is possible the Voidwrought themselves do not divide the two. They are few, and rare, and their kingdom is inside the mountain. They arrive in ones and threes, at the fractures, wherever a people is broken enough to listen.

The Ironoath, the Deep-Delved

The forge-folk hold that the world's true soul is not the green above but the fire below, the molten heart-blood of the world, the veins of living rune-metal that run through the deep stone. They are miners, smiths, and oath-bound engineers, and their holds descend in endless carved tiers toward that inner flame. To the Ironoath, the world is not a mother or a wound. It is material, sacred and infinite, and to leave it unworked would be the only true blasphemy.

This puts them at war with everything green. Where the Ironoath dig, the land above dies (forests felled for props, rivers fouled, mountains hollowed), and so the Grovewardens hunt them and the Warclans war on them. But the forge-folk are the one trespasser the elves cannot break. They fight from inside a moving fortress of iron, surface from beneath the very roots the wardens defend, and treat every fallen kinsman as a line-item to be avenged on a schedule. They are grim, patient, and unforgiving. And they carry a guilt they will not name aloud: it was Ironoath greed that first delved too near the Pit, Ironoath picks that cracked the ancient seals, Ironoath holds that made the quiet bargains with the things that came up through the dark. The forge-folk tell themselves they have the void well in hand. The void, patient as stone, lets them believe it.

The Nightspun, the Sundered

Long ago the Grovewardens cast out a portion of their own, and the exile took. The Nightspun do not live in the forests that birthed them. They cannot, for the sun itself has turned against them, and its light is a slow agony on skin gone dark as the space between stars. After the casting-out came the things from the Pit, and the exiles were corrupted, and over the long centuries of night they became something the world had never seen before: not fallen elves, but a wholly new people, still becoming.

They are not, whatever the Dominion preaches, simply evil. The Nightspun live in true symbiosis with the parasites and pale worms that crept into them in the dark, creatures of a strange, patient intelligence that evolved alongside the elves until it is no longer clear where the host ends and the guest begins. Their kinship with the great spiders and the corrupted wolves is genuine, a covenant of night-things. But they are scattered and fractious, and no two tribes agree on what the Nightspun are for. To almost everyone they are pariahs, and doors close when their name is spoken. Only three peoples deal with them at all: the Voidwrought who made them, the Arcanists who find them fascinating, and the Graveborn, in whose candlelit cities a Nightspun can, at last, simply live.