From "Lucky" Lantis DeGage, Fighting the Tide: A Memoir

The situation grew more dire with every passing day. We citizens, huddled within the walls of Ashtan, held little hope. Although the Occultists had brought glad tidings of the defeat of the Tsol'teth leader Agith'maal at Seleucar a week earlier, that defeat had not benefited us in the least. Instead, the Tsol'teth general Gattan'lier had redoubled his own assault, using his black magic to batter at the city gates. If the Occultists had not devoted their life essence to countering the Tsol'teth magic, we would have been destroyed in the very beginning.

The Black Wave brought out a new side of the mysterious Occultists. Before, they had been granted sanctuary in Ashtan simply because, even in the amnesty given them by the new Selucarian Empire, they felt more comfortable away from the Church-sympathetic city of Shallam. Although tolerated in Ashtan, they were never fully trusted even there, as stories proliferated of the atrocities they committed in their mysterious search for forbidden knowledge. Most Occultists preferred to hide behind secret identities, taking on common faces as grocers, or scribes, or even beggars.

When the Tsol'teth magic threatened to destroy Ashtan's army outright, however, the many hidden Occultists who had not joined the military in the beginning revealed themselves. At the end of the first day, when more than half our own army stood on the side of Gattan'lier, firmly under the control of his black magic, more than one hundred Occultists joined ranks, using their mysterious monstrous assistants to cover the Ashtanian retreat into the city. And for the week after the siege began, the Occultists used their own life essence to prevent the Tsol'teth's magic from demolishing the city walls. However, despite the vigilance of the Sentaari and Occultists, who watched to be sure that no citizens were possessed by the enemy, and the Serpentlords and soldiers, who guarded against incursions, some citizens still disappeared from their underground shelters.

By the time we saw the Selucarian relief army on the horizon, the Occultists were nearly exhausted. Gravin, the current Duke of Ashtan, had appointed me as the liaison with the Occult cabal. When I spoke to thank the Ashtanian Secretary of the Occultists, he shook his head wearily in demurral. "No thanks are necessary. As long as you don't investigate the recent string of disappearances too closely, none of us will have any problems." I was chilled, but there was little I could do. It was clear that the Occultists had killed our own citizens and devoured their energy, but they used that energy to save the entire city. Were they evil or good? I could not decide then, nor can I now. Adchachel, the Occultist Demiurge, was burned alive to stop his murderous rages after eating Agith'maal's heart. He had to be tracked to his own secret laboratory, where a close circle of his friends defended him to the death. Was their defense a matter of loyalty to their leader? Or had they gone to the dark side, following the twisted spirit of Agith'maal?

After communicating telepathically with the generals of the Selucarian army, the Duke of Ashtan commanded that all his remaining loyal warriors enter the field, with their ears plugged up against the Tsol'teth's foul chant of disloyalty. The formation was to be spearheaded by Sentaari and Occultists, who could use their various powers to retake the minds of as many possessed soldiers as possible, while the relief army pursued a similar strategy. Once each monk and necromancer had commanded a possessed soldier back to the fold, our regular troops would advance, spearing toward the Tsol'teth general Gattan'lier, clearing a path for the champions to engage him and strip away his cloak of darkness, so that the sunlight would cripple his powers and render him fully mortal.

Although I heard the plan in the council of war, I did not get to see how it played out. As an administrator and architect, my job was to reassure the frightened citizens of the city, and to oversee the city's defense against sappers and rams. During the week of siege, I'd already helped collapse five attempted tunnels, and we were all on the alert for more. During this battle, however, it was no tunnel that collapsed. Instead, there was an earthquake, one fierce enough to topple many buildings in Ashtan itself. One of the falling buildings was impolite enough to fall on me, and that's how I spent the glorious Battle of Ashtan: buried in rubble, with a ton of masonry on my legs.

I heard later that the earthquake was the dying strike of Gattan'lier, as dozens of heroes swarmed him, tearing at his cloak and striking him with sword and spell. None of the Tsol'teth were slain cheaply in the War of the Deep; Gattan'lier's retributive earthquake claimed the lives of a third of those on the battlefield, on his side and ours.

As I oversaw the rebuilding of Ashtan from my wheelchair, I had occasion to speak with Seleucar's newest officer, our only specialist on the invading armies: Blade Captain Matic Ridley, the hobgoblin noble who had defected during the Battle of Seleucar. He struck me then as a deeply honorable and very brave being, and I mourned with him the corruption of his own race. Later on, we formed a lasting friendship, but at that time, he was hot to hurry on to Shallam to help finish off the last of his erstwhile Masters, the Tsol'teth Terrin'ukia, or, as Matic called him, "Master Blood Drinker ".

And as I scanned the blueprints for the rebuilt Royal Compound, the city received notice that the Underrealm siege of Shallam had been broken by the combined powers of the Church, the Shallamese regulars, and the reinforcements from Seleucar. Again, the final Tsol'teth had wreaked tremendous havoc before he could finally be killed; this time, it was the famed Warleader Lockwood of Seleucar who was slain, even as he killed the last of the Tsol'teth with his curved sword.

As the last of the magical portals was destroyed and the last of the monster army was destroyed, the rulers of Seleucar spoke long and in depth with the hobgoblin defector Ridley. It became clear then that the Tsol'teth had never even contemplated conquest, but planned to destroy the entire kingdom, and possibly the entire surface world. They came from a realm far underground, which they called "anzari-tarin", which meant "World of Darkness"; but the common folk came to refer to the Tsol'teth domain as the Underrealm.

It was a year after the armies of Piraeus turned back the Black Wave from the Underrealm when the famed prophet Lehrinas, who had lived three hundred years to see his prophecy of the Selucarian Empire and the Black Wave come true, fell dead at his writing desk. Before him was a sheet of paper containing his last prophecy, which was unfinished…