The Rift

From TSSWiki

The Rift appeared during the First Sun in the Age of Rending. It was during this Age that the Nameless God tempted Queen Andalonian with the wretched craft of Necromancy. Having successfully swayed her to the dark arts, the Nameless God made a bond with her.

He fed into her slivers of his great power making her much more powerful than she should have been. With this extra power, she attempted to free the God so that he would make her immortal, a deity. She almost succeeded.

But Xaltion soon realized what was going on and just as the Nameless One emerged from the prison where Xaltion had exiled him to, Xaltion struck him down with one mighty blow. The force of the blow was so great, that it caused the land to split, heave, shift, and change forever. Among the many changes the land endured, the most drastic was the appearance of the Rift.

With it came, horrible creatures known as Rift Spawn. These creatures wander out of the Rift and across the land, destroying anything they come in contact with until they are stopped. The Rift split the Kingdoms apart, forming the two that are now known as Lazaron and Karatta.

Karatta is on the side of the Rift where foul energies seep through and corrupt the soil, the creatures, the water, trees, even the races. Lazaron is on a side that has no negative energies from the Rift affecting it, but still deals daily with Rift Spawn. From the Rift many horrors have come.

Dekatar, the evil Necromancer that very nearly ravished the world, came from the Rift. He summoned forth the Chaos Legions (Orcs, Goblins, and Ogres), which the remainder of still dwell in Karatta. But daily more terror wanders out of the Rift in the form of Rift Spawn. Rift Spawn is the general name given to any creature that comes out of the Rift. The creatures can be anything from giant rat like creatures to dragons.

To date, little is known about the Rift. Very few have gone into the Rift, and only two have come back, paying the price of their sanity for vague information on this place. What has been gathered about the Rift leads the scholars and scribes to believe that the Rift is not necessarily a place, but rather the absence of a place.

As cliché as it may sound, it is thought that Xaltion's strike was so powerful that it didn't just break the land, but tore it from the very fiber of its existence. Basically, what was there isn't there anymore and it is like it never was there. So a void in fabric of the world was created. In essence it is a dimensional portal. There is no known way through it, though there is the chance that a spell might be able to cross it. But that has yet to be discovered