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Preview 4: The Dawn of the Mortal Realm

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Defendi:
The Nephilim Wars
God didn?t release all  mortals upon the earth at once.  He knew that would end in disaster.  He put all the mortals to sleep and seeded their bodies, by race, throughout the world, all of them far to the east of Belkan?th.  The Dwarves were the first to come to Him, to fight alongside the Faithful, so God woke them before all others.
   But little did they know that the plans of the Fallen had preceded the last battle of the War in Heaven.  The fallen angels had taken the forms of husbands and lovers and lain with the daughters of mortality. In the first days in the Mortal Realm, the daughters of dwarves gave birth to the first of the race of giants, the nephilim.  Bamon smiled upon them and they grew and flourished.
   He finally had his children.
   The dwarves quaked in terror on the surface of the Mortal Realm.  Presence of God in the Holy See  no longer bathed the world in light.  Instead, it brutally beat down upon them from the sun above.  Worse yet, it vanished at night and they knew darkness the likes of which they?d only seen underground or in the lands of the Fallen.  They decided to delve underground again, for only there could they feel like they were back in Heaven.
   The first among the dwarves was Khal, blessed with great wisdom and faith.  The dwarves rallied around him.
   The strongest and most powerful if the nephilim was Ulaugg.  He forced the nephilim to his will, and they succumbed to his might.
   The Sundering had left the dwarves without tools and the metals of the Mortal Realm differed from the metals of Heaven.  Thus, the first encounters between nephilim and dwarves were primitive, brutal battles.  They fought with club, tooth, and bare hands and tore each other limb from limb.
   But Khal saw a better way.  He prayed and God granted him a vision of a large series of caves.  Khal led his people to these caves.  He smelted soft metals and forged tools.  Then he delved deep into the earth.
   Khal named the place Durand?l, the Great Vault.
   Meanwhile, on the surface, Ulaugg formed the nephilim into a great army.  He trained his troops and formed them into brutal units.  Then he attacked Durand?l.
   The Nephilim Wars continued for approximately twenty years before Ulaugg hatched his most devious plan.  He set upon the hills near Durand?l and tunneled through the ground over one of the played-out mines.  His nephilim worked long and hard.  After months of toil, they fell through into the dwarven kingdom.
   The nephilim army flanked the dwarves and took them by surprise.  The nephilim tore through the dwarven kingdom, slaying every male, female, and child who stumbled across their path.
   Khal organized a defense, but it already seemed too late.  The nephilim ran like wildfire through the private, undefended halls of Durand?l.
   Khal knew it would take too long to organize all the dwarven soldiers.  Instead of allowing his people to perish, he led an assault against Ulaugg himself.  While his elite guard fought Ulaugg?s strongest giants, Khal faced the fiend in single combat.
   The sounds of the battle rang through the halls of Durand?l.  The might of the nephilim king swelled with the power Bamon.  His strength became unfathomable, and the hall shattered around the two combatants as they fought.
   But Khal kept his head.  He darted around and about the nephilim.  He slipped between his legs and dashed around his guard.  His blows became calculated to enrage the nephilim, not defeat him.
   He knew that he couldn?t overpower the nephilim, not with Bamon filling the creature with power, but he bore a great faith in God.  For a dwarf, that meant a great faith in himself.
   Khal kept taunting the fiend.  His anger mounted and as they fought the halls of Durand?l crumbled.  Finally, Khal removed his own gauntlet and slapped the nephilim across the face.
   Then he fled before the pure, unadulterated fury of Ulaugg.  As the nephilim raged, the halls shook and the stone shattered.  Behind the dwarven king, the great vaults collapsed.  The stone pummeled down, smashing the giants and finally crushing Ulaugg to death.
   When the dust cleared, a tenth of Durand?l had crumbled, but the dwarves were safe.  The nephilim threat had been crushed.
   And the dwarves rebuilt their kingdom.

The Years of Building
With the fall of Ulaugg, the dwarves found themselves at peace.  The nephilim degenerated into small tribes, roaming the countryside.  They no longer threatened the dwarves.
   This was a time of great growth.  Though the metals forged by the dwarves were weak and soft, their priests learned to bless the mining implements with powerful magics so that they could more easily carve through stone.
   They repaired Durand?l and it grew into a tremendous kingdom.  Khal lived out the rest of his days in peace and built a nation of greatness under the mountains of the eastern  Mortal Realm , beyond the Dragon Peaks.
   In time, Khal died.  The entire dwarven kingdom mourned for a period of five years.  Khal?s son took his place.
   They wondered at the absence of the other mortal races and in the end, they came to the conclusion that only the dwarves had survived the Sundering and that the surface had fallen to evil.  After all, it spent half the time cut off from the light of God, under the eye of a skull-like moon.  The priests also revealed that the dwarven Prophet Ziruk-Nurak (of the Five Prophets who Sundered Heaven) was the savior of their race, that he had led the Sundering ritual.
   Toward the end of this age, a new dwarven hero was born, named Dumag.  This bright dwarf quickly mastered all the known arts of metal craft.
   However, he knew his knowledge was not complete.  There were metals harder and more durable than anything the dwarves could smelt.  The metals of Heaven were lost to them and the dwarves cast about in ignorance, unearthing the treasures that God had planted in the ground so many centuries ago, when the land was still Heaven Even then, He foresaw this day.
   So Dumag studied fire.  Slowly, he learned the secret of iron.  Then he mastered steel.  Finally, the mystical metals of the earth.
   By the time he was 80, he moved from smelting into forging.  He created hammers and axes and armor of incredible quality.
   But a strange thing happened.  The more love and attention he placed into the creation of an item, the more powerful it became.  The clerics of Durand?l examined the items and determined they were imbued with holy energies.
   By the end of his days, Dumag revolutionized dwarven metalwork.  He also created the most powerful artifacts in the history of the dwarven kingdoms.
   Meanwhile, Bamon brooded about the failure of his nephilim.  He crafted a new plan.
   He burrowed into the Mortal Realm, forming a connection between it and Hell.  The energies of evil permeated this place and the first Ulcer bloomed.  Then Bamon took the eggs of great lizards and bathed them in the tainted energy.  They mutated and changed to become the first dragons.
   He placed the eggs in mountains throughout the Dragon Peaks to the east of Belkan?th. 
   Meanwhile, the Archangel Areniel was not idle.  He saw the plan Bamon was hatching (literally) and set about to counter it.  He touched the dragon eggs with God?s breath, carried down from Heaven in a divine vessel, so each dragon was cleansed of the taint of the Ulcer and could choose between good and evil.
   Soon the eggs hatched.
   All over the Dragon Peaks, wyrms crawled from clutches.  Soon, the dragons ranged out, devouring local wild life.
   According to legend, the first hatched dragon was a great and evil wyrm Belkunib?r.  He brutally subjugated the other dragons.  Before long, most of the Dragon Peaks paid annual tribute to Belkunib?r.
   Meanwhile,  King Agl?n, great-grandson of Khal, was about to see the birth of his first son.  To celebrate, Dumag began work on his greatest creation, Dulanbur the Fell Hammer.  He worked for years on the project and finally succeeded in forging the greatest hammer ever made.  He presented it to Agl?n for his son, Izul?r, who was then taking his first steps.  Dumag then retired for the evening and never woke again.
   The dwarves held the Fell Hammer in a place of honor until Izul?r was old enough to wield it.  When Izul?r became king, the Fell Hammer became the symbol of his kingship.
   And the stones themselves trembled before it.

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