In the wake of the Great Necromancer's ritual, the winds of magic did not settle but ran wild across the realms, and warlocks of every allegiance raced to master them in the age of ruin remembered as The Genesis of Malign Sorcery. Predatory spells prowled the battlefields like beasts, endless storms that hunted the living and the dead alike, sparing neither the wizard who summoned them nor the foe he loosed them upon.
The Slaves to Darkness embraced the chaos gladly, their dark apostles binding the loose magic into cackling engines of ruin, while the Nighthaunt fed upon the surplus death-energy until whole spectral legions swelled beyond counting. Against them the battle-mages of the free peoples learned a grim new calculus, for a spell miscast in such conditions might devour its own caster, and a battlefield's very air could turn to acid, fire or grasping shadow between one breath and the next.
War itself was remade. No commander could now march without a coven at his side, and the greatest engagements became duels of unbound sorcery in which the soldiery below were little more than kindling. Whole armies were unmade by a single errant endless spell, and the wise came to fear the sky above a battle as much as the enemy before them.
The Genesis of Malign Sorcery has no single field or day of decision, for it is the war that never ends — the loosing of magic upon the realms as a permanent condition of the age, a scar that every later conflict would be fought within rather than against.
The chronicle continues
