Waterfall of Five Worlds

Waterfall of Five Worlds

The Legend of its Origin
On another world, a sun guttered and dimmed its final light to a sky barely lightened by those last rays. As the star’s last breath of heat fled what remained of the world hanging close to it, something old stirred. A primordial thing whose age extended beyond even what those called antediluvians could remember, it had waited for this moment of time. For time had become a precious thing to it all of a sudden. And that was something so unexpected after so long not marking the rolls of measurement of its great expanse of existence.

While it grew stronger in the decay of the end of all things, it did not rejoice. For all its power to devastate, to destroy and to annihilate, there was beauty and hope in the carnage it hewed with its power. The chilling cold trail of its wake always left some inexplicable wonder for those that would inevitably arise afterwards to ponder. Never did it take all. Not like now. Not like Death

So it was, that as the world died, it grew more powerful. How could it not grow from the chilling embrace that drank the warmth of the land and left the world weeping in its arms? Men had called it the death from the north, the chill, the unseen beast, and myriad other names. Yet, the great beast men named was not it but more truly Death. For Death had come cloaked in the guise of many others, playing the game to the end, until at last, Death was revealed once and for all as the master player to the only other player left.

Thus, in the last shuddering breaths of the world, it and Death faced off. Long had Death relished this moment, crimson stark in the bloody sea of eternity as the pinnacle of Death’s grand master plan. Drunk on the death of untold billions of living things, satiated on the murky expiration of greater demons and intoxicated by the heavenly final exhalations of the divine, still it hungered! For one and only one had remained. And that one had escaped Death’s embrace so many times since the beginning, tantalizingly close yet always snatched away

The beginning dance of their battle was sudden and had anyone still remained to witness it, breathtaking. Masters of destruction both, they wracked each other and the world around them until it bled and broke, shattering around them with the stress of their untrammeled conflict at the end of time

For all its power, splendor and ferocity, it knew the conclusion just as well as Death. But it fought nonetheless. If there was but one thing it had admired over the long reach of its existence it was the vast indefinable greatness that clung to those who flouted their destiny in the face of insurmountable inevitability. Those scarce few, who, when faced with the void that awaited them, gave cry to their life in such a voice that the void could not dispel the grandeur of the echo that lived on.

Therefore, as Death gave cry to its victory, it gave forth a cry of its own. One so powerful, so cogently filled with the life it had lived, that it shattered Deaths unyielding composure and Death grinned with such eagerness as Death devoured it at last. So pure was the draught and so strong the cry to life that as the void closed around the world drinking even Death into its ultimate embrace, the cry echoed on, slipping away from the void

Away it passed, sounding clarion true while sundering world after world with its passage, five in total, and none able to hold its timbre. The sixth, however, was different and the echo that was the great heart of a god ancient to the ancients, primordial to even this oldest of old worlds stopped at last. Like a karmic cenotaph, its entrance in Khaas carved an oubliette of massive proportions, where an avalanche of ice from five worlds collided to pour like cold carved tears wept in tribute to its past glory.

From the Journal of Njouls of Siesierte

In the journal, Njouls spent some time penning his surprising shipwreck and subsequent exile to a forsaken cold sheet of ice. He also spoke of a forbidding and dangerous place where ice poured from the heavens in a vast river. As it fell, the ice forms short lived mazes as it falls as the chill of the abyss is so cold if freezes the air and ice solid for a short time before the weight of the falling ice shatters it and sends it spiraling in to the deep. ©2003-2008 Emperors Choice Games and Miniatures Corp. All rights reserved.

From Maruk's Seven Sevens Quest

Maruk references the Waterfall of Five Worlds in his Five Worlds Ice Walk quest. He had to place his mark on a special place within the waterfall and traversed five worlds to make his way back to Khaas and get to the waterfall. More can be read about it here under Maruk's Seven Sevens Quest.