Nearly forty thousand years ago, the city that would one day become Stormreach was the academic center of the mighty Cul’sir Empire. In comparison to their contemporaries among the Sul’at giants of Karul’Tash, the Cul’sir giants couldn’t have been more different. Where the Sul’at were fierce and tribal, the forebears of today’s fire giant clans, the Cul’sir were a sophisticated and integrated society, composed primarily of ancestors of the modern cloud giants and storm giants. For the betterment of their civilization, the Cul’sir chose to break with tradition and unite under a single emperor, and for thousands of years their society was the preeminent one in Xen’drik. (The Cul’sir even claimed that it was their works alone that drew the attention of Argonnessen, and that the secrets of dragon magic would have remained lost to giantkind were it not for them.) All this would change with the coming of the quori.
As advanced as they were, the Cul’sir were nevertheless unprepared for an invasion of such scale. Their arcane advances were considerable, but the Cul’sir had no war machine to speak of and had opted to expend most of their resources on the infrastructure of the empire and the development of other civic works (as was proper for any truly civilized people). As such, the Cul’sir were caught largely unaware when the quori invaded, and they suffered substantial losses at the outset of hostilities. For their part, the Sul’at were emboldened, taking the invasion as an opportunity to demonstrate their superiority to the Cul’sir in matters of war. And indeed, it was the Sul’at League that finally produced the Moon Breaker—the doomsday weapon that decimated the quori and sealed off their home plane of Dal Quor from Eberron.
The result was a largely embarrassing campaign for the Cul’sir giants, whose slave races took their masters’ failures during the war as signs of weakness. When a revolt broke out, the emperor (who had feared just such an eventuality) immediately called upon his learned spellcasters to craft a doomsday weapon of their own, one so ingenious that it could suppress the uprising without unleashing the destruction the Sul’at weapon had caused.
One of those assigned to the task was a gifted arcanist by the name of Antaegus, who was rare among his kind for being born with magical aptitude (as opposed to the academic wizardry others learned). As work on the new weapon progressed, serious misgivings began to plague Antaegus. For what he deemed “security reasons,” the emperor had ordered the weapon researched and assembled by different teams, each ignorant of what the others were doing. In his private divinations, Antaegus saw great calamity on the horizon and feared that the emperor was taking his people down a truly dark path—the wrong path. There had been no time to study the repercussions of the Sul’at weapon, and he suspected pride to be the emperor’s motivation in ordering this creation. Despite the emperor’s decree, Antaegus decided that he needed to know just what he was participating in. And so he broke into his master’s laboratory.
What Antaegus uncovered left him shocked and confused. The emperor’s demand called for a weapon that would release a horrible contagion into the air, one that would affect the slave races without doing any damage to the giants’ lands or buildings. Further, the weapon would draw on an ancient source of power—malevolent power—to provide the dark energy required to generate and release a magical plague of such proportions. This source of sentient power was old when the world was young—and it sat beneath the imperial city.
At a loss, Antaegus gathered up what materials he could, including the entirety of his team’s work on the project and, in a moment of desperation, destroyed them. In an instant, he single-handedly set the Cul’sir emperor’s plan back a year or more. When the emperor heard the news, he called for Antaegus’s immediate execution, but his own advisors thwarted him, since they saw the honor in what the sorcerer had done and defended his right to live. In the end, the emperor “banished” Antaegus until the end of the war, at which time his final fate would be decided. The emperor forced Antaegus’s former associates to imprison the sorcerer in a specially prepared object that magically suspended its occupant’s life functions.
Obviously, the war did not go nearly as well for the emperor as he had expected, and almost forty millennia passed before the Kundarak dwarves finally returned Antaegus to life. By that time, everything he had known was gone.
GETTING INVOLVED
In the first days after Antaegus’s release, he was immensely confused. The world had moved on to an extent he had never even conceived, and he found himself utterly alone in it. In an attempt to stave off sheer madness, the giant set about understanding the city in which he found himself. Thanks in part to his ability to walk unseen, Antaegus soon learned the ultimate fate of his former civilization and the dragons’ role in those events. He walked around the tents of Rushemé and saw firsthand what his once-proud race had become. Today, his primary goal is to retain his frayed sanity, but almost as important is his desire to uncover what became of the doomsday weapon he once helped construct. After thousands of years in proximity to it, Antaegus now has an intuitive understanding of the entity suffusing the city, but he fears the prolonged exposure to its taint has taken an as yet uncertain toll on his soul.
Shaken though he is, Antaegus remains one of the most powerful creatures in Stormreach, one whose moves and motives might shape the course of the city’s future. Perhaps the easiest way to integrate him into a campaign is to introduce him as a rogue element for an unrelated conflict or situation. Antaegus’s search for answers is likely to put him in the thick of the affairs of certain dragonmarked houses (Kundarak and Tharashk in particular) and his existence is bound to be noted by other giants eventually, despite his efforts. Gaulronak and the other Guardians of Rusheme are liable to view him as a spirit of the land, which will only complicate his affairs. (In return, Antaegus views them as devolved mockeries of his former race.)
It’s important to note that Antaegus is not the pure-hearted champion he once was (or believed he was). If he truly loses his mind, the insane sorcerer could search out the doomsday device in an attempt to secure it for the war he expects to wage with the dragons that destroyed his civilization. Whatever he does, Antaegus is the city’s quintessential random factor, a powerful and unstable individual with few existing ties.