A Tale of Two Moons

The night sky split with a deafening concussion. Two beams of light, one smoking red, the other icy blue, speared down from the moons overhead to strike the land. And then, as if the beams were conduits that drained the energy of the moons away, the auras around both moons began to fade and dim…

With that, a year-long period of turmoil and portent was finally brought to a close by a group of clever and persistent adventurers from the cities of Ysallyra and Elysium, and the land breathed a sigh of relief, freed from the ominous magical workings that had hung over it for so long.

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In the year 283, two sorceresses sharing the same surname appeared in cities at opposite ends of the land. It quickly became clear that these two women, twins by the name of Shora and Sehalla Conforius, were on the continent for one purpose – the defeat and death of the other. To this end they bent the very laws of nature to their wills, casting spells of tremendous power that brought the two moons of Akanbar under their control. The result was the most horrendous weather since the Dragon Wars, a time of unending torrential rains, raging tides and devastating floods, while in the skies above the moons blazed with auras of fire and ice.

Eventually, seeing that their struggle was deadlocked – for the sisters were equal in power just as they were identical in appearance – the younger twin, Sehalla, fled the continent for the ancestral lands of House Conforius, which lie on the distant Carmena Isles. Shora pursued her, and the sisters passed out of sight and knowledge of man. But their work did not, and the unnatural weather raged on unchecked.

Finally, spurred onwards by prophecies that the mystics of their cities had unearthed, parties of adventurers from each realm set sail for the Carmena Isles. There, they believed, they would be able to find the sorceresses who had wreaked havoc with nature and compel them to undo their spells.

Sure enough, they found the Conforius sisters – changed to pillars of salt by each other’s magics, frozen forever in the wasteland their battles had made of their ancestral holdings. Unable to pry the secret of the weather from them, the adventurers had to set forth to find their own solution.

With help from the people of Carmena, the party managed to unearth the secret of nullification magic. They created an orb of nullification, which when invoked absorbed the greater part of the weather spells – draining away much of the unnatural aura around Akanbar’s moons, and allowing the natural balance to slowly restore itself.

Thus the crisis was averted, and the land set safe once more. But on the far Carmena Isles two pillars of salt still stand, memorial to the violence that blood siblings may do upon each other in the name of power.