Chaldea

In ages past, a nation that would come to be known as Chaldea (lit: Children of Eanna), established itself along the fertile banks of the river Eanna. Obscure, half-forgotten, legends tell of a tribe of hungry and dying nomads arriving on the river banks and, with their last breaths, praying to the river to carry their hungry souls to the halls of the dead. The goddess and namesake of the river were moved by these humble prayers, not for help in this life but a simple plea for aid to pass to the next. She looked down upon this lonely tribe so bereft of hope and future and gathered them into her embrace. She called her son down from the sky, a young and mighty dragon, and bade him spill a drop of his blood onto the banks of her river. The wise lord of beasts then pricked his great wrist with a claw and let a drop of blood fall onto the river banks. Eanna looked upon the falling drop and murmured a river blessing of life and fertility upon it. As the drop splashed upon the sandy ground, ripples of power and pure life spread out in growing circles. Before the humble tribes, awe-struck eyes lush and verdant vegetation began to burst out of the ground with each passing ripple of energy.

"Through the blood of my beloved son, you are now all my children," spoke the goddess, "live and know contentment for my waters will bring you only life, never death." With tear-filled eyes full of love and devotion the tribe swore to raise a nation in Eanna's honor and from that moment on named themselves the Children of Eanna." Today, all that remains of these ancient and blessed peoples are moss-grown ruins, mighty, silent monuments, and whispered rumors..

The beginnings.

In those early days, as the tribe of the Chaldean peoples grew and prospered, one young hunter-warrior stood out among the throng. The young leader known as Ashantos seemed blessed by Eanna. Through guile, charm, and some intimidation, he quickly united all the small and numerous city-states of the Eannic delta. With absolutely no bloodshed, (or so it is told) the young Ashantos was crowned king of all Chaldea. As the nation’s prosperity grew so did her wealth become a glint in the eyes of the neighboring barbarian princelings. Very soon the outlying villages and hamlets of Chaldea became targets of consistent raids and their storehouses and granaries plundered. The new barbarian kingdom of Vargash to the west was a particularly troublesome thorn in Chaldea's borders, often sending raids deep into their neighbor's territory. The Chaldean armies responded with a series of quick, efficient, and brutally successful military campaigns against the Vargashi barbarian nation, ending both threat and kingdom in one swift stroke.

As Chaldea’s borders grew, Ashantos found himself needing to quickly deal with a large number of assimilated tribes that could grow potentially bitter and resentful towards their new empire. He, therefore, decreed several policies that would shape the future of Chaldea. He ordered cities to be built in the barbarian lands with the conquered barbarian tribes invited to live in them. The citizens of these new cities would be taught how to farm, make tools, and work the land. They were also invited to swear allegiance to Eanna, those that would be given full rights as citizens of the Empire; few refused this invitation.

As these early years passed, the city of Ashana, the king's home city, became known as the Chaldean capital. Her sprawling streets and avenues lay near the present-day location of Sanguine.

Growth.

As the wealth and fame of Chaldea grew, many tribes and settlements joined the empire voluntarily, in order to share in its wealth and technology. Ashana became the center of a vast empire, and the Chaldean became the traders, thinkers, and administrators of the greatest empire Agon has seen. In addition to all present-day human territories, the empire's borders eventually encompassed the homelands of the orks and the humans. Before their subjugation, these races launched countless raids into Chaldean territories, proving themselves to be dangerous neighbors, and provoking the wrath, and subsequent punishment of the empire.

The alfar were also warlike and fond of staging bloody raids, and eventually, Ashantos decided to move against the children of the God-King. Though they were victorious on the plains of Moldar, not even the emperor's armies could defeat the alfar in the subterranean fastnesses of Nagast. In the end, the Chaldeans had to settle for securing and fortifying the surface parts of the alfar homeland, while Melek's armies retreated underground.

Endings.

After many years of peace and prosperity, the people of the Chaldean empire grew content as well as complacent. The armies of the empire slumbered as its people grew fat and happy. All was well and the growing decadence of the empires city-states mattered little while the peace held.

Until suddenly two apparently unconnected disasters struck the Chaldean empire swiftly and mortally. Tales tell of the priests of Eanna streaming out of their temples, howling, and gibbering in madness. Moments later the river itself heaved up in an immense and destructive flash flood. The river Eanna boiled and raged as if the Goddess herself was gasping her final breath... A handful of obscure accounts also insist that on the day of the flood the oases around the mouth of the river were torn asunder by a horrendous and mighty scream that blasted from the ground, and it is said that those that had been looking to the sky witnessed a truly horrific sight. Apparently a dragon was seen erupting from the ground, flying into the skies and rending his own flesh from his own bones.

Fat, prosperous cities were washed away in the blink of an eye, their peoples and riches drowned beneath the waves. At the same time, through dire coincidence or the machinations of Melek, the flood was immediately followed by a massive alfar invasion. Hidden from the eyes of the Chaldean, the evil alfar had amassed an enormous army, which now blasted out of Nagast's caverns, and onto the heartland of the empire. The destruction was both terrible and utterly complete in scope.

The Last Bastion.

It is widely believed that a small group of survivors must have somehow managed to escape the invasion, however. An ancient, dormant portal found among the ruins of Kasdim on Cairn matches the description of the hub nexus-portal in Ashana. Studies have also shown the ruins of Kasdim to date significantly more recent to those found among the central continent of Agon. Why Kasdim lies forgotten and empty, and where its custodians may have disappeared to is unknown.

Through intensive studies of recently discovered texts containing accounts and histories dating back many ages, it has been proposed that the dragon son of Eanna and the bone-dragon demi-god entity known as Cyriakos are very likely one and the same being. Through folk-legend, we know that it was believed that Eanna blessed a droplet of her blood to give life to the valleys around where the Chaldean civilization arose. We also know that at a time corresponding to the destruction of Chaldea and the moment when it is thought Eanna herself was slain, a dragon was supposedly witnessed by a number of sources to burst from the earth around the mouth of the River Eanna. Accounts describe a bellowing beast erupting into the skies, tearing its own skin from its body.

Some centuries after these events we see the rise of the Severii (in Chaldean, lit: Lost Children) a skeletal race of undead sporting twisted versions of ancient Chaldean armor and architecture. The Severii have built cities along the exact same areas as the Chaldeans had built forts along the surface of alfar lands in their efforts to contain the alfar aggressions. It must also be noted that the Severii show an almost single-minded hostility and enmity to the alfar.

An obscure alfar legend that speaks of Melek twisting a dragon’s dreams to insanity allows some further conjecture on this subject. The legend tells of the God-King, wishing vengeance against the Chaldeans’ insult to his people, devising a plan to wreak brutal and devastating revenge on the empire and her goddess. Melek spent the decades following the Chaldean invasion whispering into the dreams of a slumbering dragon, twisting them into raging nightmares. This dragon slumbered in a series of caves located beneath the mouth of the Eanna river. What came of these dreams is unknown, other than the flooding of the river, the death of the goddess Eanna and the destruction of her nation all occurred around the same time as the accounts of the dragon entity being observed exploding up from the river bed. Drawing upon these fables and forgotten legends it could be suggested that the skeletal dragon known as Cyriakos is the twisted result of Melek's maddening whispers. We can surmise that Melek influenced the great dragon to some heinous act that weakened or possibly even killed his goddess-mother. This could have been some attempt by the God-King to satisfy his own sense of ironic justice. Such an act combined with the years of twisted dreams no doubt would have the result of raging and guilt-ridden insanity. It is no large leap to then arrive at the conclusion that the Severii, a word that in Chaldean means lost children, are a direct result of Cyriakos seeking some twisted form of redemption and even vengeance against the alfar and their God-King.