Since Mount Celestia had fallen, under the downward corruption of chaotic, primordial void power from the upper planes, even the creatures of the Material Plane had gradually begun to clearly sense that something was wrong.
The lightless nights grew ever longer. Even during the brief days, the dim, gloomy skies were forever shrouded in clouds and haze that never dispersed.
All manner of extreme and unnatural weather—droughts, frosts, hailstorms, tsunamis, tornadoes, and the like—had instead become commonplace.
And it was the druids of the nature sect on Moonshadow Island who felt these changes first.
"Mother Earth is walking toward weakness. And death." The high priest gazed at the wheat fields beyond the city, their harvests dwindling and their color slowly turning a dark yellow from lack of sunlight, then spoke shakily to Alicia II, who sat on the throne with her brows tightly furrowed.
"All we can do is endure. And wait." Elisa said, looking out over the Sword Coast, whose waters had already taken on a deep indigo hue.
What she did not say was that, on the Coriel Continent as it now stood, perhaps the situation on their isolated Moonshadow Island was still comparatively good.
And just as the queen had guessed, nearly thirteen uninterrupted years of such extreme weather had long since destroyed the continent's already fragile agricultural ecosystem.
According to news from the Northlands, far to the east of the Anauroch Desert, the nations led by Unther and Thay had long since fought one another into a scorched wasteland in their struggle to seize more food and resources for survival.
Any refugees with even a few sources of information and the means to act had long abandoned their decaying homelands, exhausting every possible method to migrate westward across the continent—to the Northlands, the only place that