The Day of the Silver Rain

In the annals of the Alderworth Kingdom, few dates are written in blacker ink than the 14th of High Sun, year 402 of the Second Era: the Day of the Silver Rain. At the height of his desperation, Agonar Silvercrest sought to end a decade-long drought that plagued the breadbasket province of Aethelgard. Dismissing the prayers of the peasantry as superstition, the local school or arcanists devised a colossal arcane ritual to force the heavens to weep.

The arch-mages constructed massive cloud-seeding towers of quicksilver and enchanted glass, intending to transmute the dry, sterile air into rain-bearing clouds. But in their calculations, they failed to account for the volatile interaction between the raw aetheric energy and the vast mercury reservoirs used as catalysts. When the spell was triggered, the sky did not turn grey with storm clouds; it turned a terrifying, reflective chrome.

For three hours, it rained. But it was not water that fell. It was molten, alchemically-supercharged silver. The “rain” descended with the force of hail and the heat of a forge. It punched through thatched roofs, set forests ablaze instantly, and coated the fields in a shimmering, lethal glaze. The fertile soil of Aethelgard was sealed beneath a solid, suffocating crust of metal.

The devastation was absolute. Tens of thousands died, either burned by the molten deluge or encased in silver tombs where they stood. The province, once the jewel of the empire’s agriculture, became known as The Argent Waste: a blindingly bright, lifeless desert of solid silver dunes and metal trees. To this day, scavengers and desperate miners venture into the wastes to chip away at the landscape, hoping to pry loose a fortune, though many succumb to “quicksilver madness”, a neurological decay caused by the lingering magical toxicity of the cursed metal.