In the twilight of the Olmoy Empire, Yaxun B’alam, the last king, known as the Half-God, presided over a dominion that once spanned across lands untold. A wizard of fearsome prowess, Yaxun B'alam commanded not only the mortal realm but the eldritch energies granted by the Great Old Ones. To his people, he was a living deity, a master of creation and destruction.
The Olmoy, once favored by the mysterious and terrible Great Old Ones, walked paths of darkness rarely traversed by mortals. Their gods walked the earth, towering, incomprehensible beings that treated the lives of mortals as mere playthings. The Olmoy people obeyed without question, building monuments to their alien masters, sacrificing in their name, and maintaining the ancient ziggurats where dread rituals took place.
It was during the height of Yaxun B'alam's reign that calamity struck. The Elder Gods, enigmatic powers beyond even the comprehension of the Great Old Ones, unleashed their fury upon them. The precise cause is unknown, though whispered legends claim the Great Old Ones had meddled with forces they could not control—shifting planets like marbles, toying with the stars. In their hubris, they incurred the wrath of the Elder Gods, who regarded the fragile lives upon these planets with the same indifference one might show an anthill.
One by one, the Great Old Ones were bound or cast into eternal slumber. Some were imprisoned on distant worlds, locked in cosmic prisons. Others were banished beneath the seas, their once-towering forms submerged beneath the crushing depths, and others still were sealed deep within the earth, entombed in realms never meant for the living.
As their gods vanished, so too did the powers of the Olmoy priests. Once feared clerics and warlocks, the priests suddenly found themselves abandoned. The cities echoed with the cries of despair as the priests’ divine connection was severed. Some priests, faced with the loss of their god-given powers, turned their blades inward, offering themselves as final sacrifices in a vain hope of regaining favor. Others became mere shadows of their former selves, reduced to nothing more than bureaucrats clinging to what remained of their influence. In coming centuries, rituals were crafted to communicate in limited ways with the Great Old Ones, but for this period, the people were divorced entirely from their gods.
In the Lost City of Zor-Kela the fall of the Great Old Ones was meticulously inscribed on the walls of the Temple of Forgotten Kings. The grim depictions show the once-glorious gods shackled and banished, while Yaxun B’alam watches his empire crumble. His own powers waned, his connection to his patrons severed as the heavens fell silent. The Half-God was now only half the man he once was.
As the armies of elves and dwarves marched upon Chan Kanul, the Olmoy capital, the final blow was struck. The last high priests, who had desperately clung to the hope that their gods would return, were powerless in the face of their enemies. Yaxun B’alam’s magic faltered. His towering ziggurats, once sources of awe and terror, were little more than hollow monuments to a dying empire.
The battle was swift and bloody. As Yaxun B'alam's powers slipped, so did his grip on his empire. With the divine protections of the Great Old Ones gone, the combined forces of elves and dwarves overwhelmed the Olmoy armies. Yaxun B’alam himself was struck down, though some say his body was never found, vanishing in the chaos of the final battle, perhaps spirited away by his still-loyal servants—or perhaps taken by forces unknown.
The fall of the Olmoy was complete. The once-great empire lay in ruin, its people scattered, its priests dead or destitute, and its gods sealed away, never to return. Yaxun B’alam’s legacy endures only in the crumbling stones of his temples, and in the whispered tales of those who still fear the dark powers he once commanded.