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That which we call the void scar was once the capital seat of the Elder. There was a time in which the primal race of Man was totally enslaved by the mighty Elder and the Dwarves sent supplicants to pay homage to the three mighty rulers of the entire Elder empire, the Triad.

The Triad's powers continued to grow as they unraveled the secrets of the heavens, the earth, the science of magic, and the very power of creation itself.

Trav'ien, master of steel had discovered feats of metallurgy that even the Dwarves could not fathom. It is said that he tore the secrets he weaved into the Elder arsenal from the scales and bones of the dragons themselves, instead of forging is arms and armor, he began to grow them. His warriors were nigh immortal, wearing heavy plate impenetrable to all but the heaviest dwarven seige weaponry and weilding greatswords whose edges would grow more cruel with wear rather than dulling.

Luc'ryn, mistress of the flames sought deep within the flames the art of pyromancy, training the Elder battlemages in the arcane. Soon she became consumed by a new obsession, the bloodmagic. Though blood magic has faded from the world, the memories of those ancient and vile sorceries are burned into the minds of the surviving races. Luc'ryn's adepts used Blood magic to twist men, elder, and dwarves to serve the inner circle, transforming them into what could only be called Demons.

Volax'ius, eternal emperor and weaver of fate ruled the city from atop the high citadel. Volax'ius had the power of prophetic vision and in seeing the future the Elder believed that he could affect the outcome of destiny. He ruled for thousands of years without challenge, something that had been hitherto unheard of for all Elder history. Volax'ius discarded his Elestri name and adopted one of Draconic origin after he saw into the mythic ages and traced his peoples' lineage to the very blood of the primal dragons.

Volax'ius united the various kingdoms of ancient Elestria forming a single Elestrian Dominion, elevating the seven surviving feudal lords to peerage in a single united court rather than obliterating his enemies as all others had tried before. After uniting the seven kings under his own banner, he crushed the fledgling human republic that had cast the last Elestri empire into disarray after their successful uprising against their enslavement by the Elestri. Few humans survived the massacre, and fewer still escaped being re-enslaved by the Elestri. Finally, he led a successful campaign against the mountainhomes of the dwarven peoples, who begrudgingly were forced to surrender and swear fealty to the Elestri in exchange for a concordat that would grant them limited personhood by Elestri law.

The gateway was a mystical barrier deep beneath the foot of Mount Ereathan. Beneath this crack in the earth lay a chamber beneath which there was no bottom, no light, no thing. Volax'ius spent three months meditating in this chamber in the attempt to discern its origin and nature, but beyond the lip of the chasm he could find no meaning or enlightenment, but each time her turned his psychic gaze somewhere else in the world he saw waking visions more clear than any of the visions that allowed him to conquer every corner of the world. So agrieved by his inability to come to know this place Volax'ius threw himself bodily into the chasm, or so he claimed after emerging from the crags of Ereathan.

Whether or not Volax'ius really threw himself into the abyss or not is unknown, but when he emerged from Ereathan, he was a changed man. Before a powerful and decisive ruler and military genius, Volax'ius retreated to the purely spiritual and the political.

Immediately upon emerging from the chasm he called forth Trav'ien, a low-ranked shieldbearer known for little more than vigilant service to Volax'ius and declared him imperial paladin and chief in command of the Elestri military force. This incensed the greatest of the seven lords so that he broke his oath and waged war against Volax'ius. Instead of responding with force, Volax'ius ordered his army to withdraw and sent a missive that he would challenge this rebel lord to single combat, the prize being the title of Emperor.

The rebel lord accepted Volax'ius challenge before the court, but the night of the melee, the rebel lord attempted to assassinate Volax'ius. Volax'ius had foreseen this and had instructed Trav'ien to single-handedly kill the group of cutthroats sent to slay his king. Trav'ien against all odds slew all but one of the men, who swore on pain of death that he would testify before the court that Trav'ien had single-handedly slain the five assassins and that they were sent by the cowardly rebel lord whose intention was to depose the Emperor by subterfuge rather than might. Volax'ius instead carried on as though nothing had happened, and ordered Trav'ien to take the man before the court but keep him silent until after Volax'ius had emerged victorious and the rebel lord had been slain.

Upon arriving before the court, the rebel lord, in fear of the fact that Volax'ius was still alive, invoked his right to a champion by the law, choosing instead his most experienced warlord to fight in his place. Volax'ius simply smiled and elected his right to a champion, naming the rebel lord's own daughter as his champion.

Volax'ius' choice astounded the court, as the rebel lord's daughter had been condemned to a lifetime of reformatory imprisonment for perverse misuse of the dark arts of necromancy and sorcery. No one had seen her in decades and surely she would be certain to be slain instantly by her lord father's champion.

Volax'ius had already ordered her freed from the dungeons and brought before the court, free of bindings. She was offered a blade by the adjudicator, but refused. Instead, Volax'ius approached her, consecrated her Luc'ryn, and gifted her all lands and titles belonging to her lord father. He also gave her a polished black stone before the court.

Scraps of tapestries and murals have survived from this time depicting the duel between Luc'ryn and her father's champion. Despite the duel being only seconds long, the outcome of it shaped the history of the entire Elestri people and began the forging of a rule that to this day remains the longest uninterrupted reign in recorded history. The murals often depict a lone girl standing before a giant, and the following images depict all manner of monstrous shadowy horrors bearing down on a scared, withered man. Even if the accounts of their use are unreliable, Luc'ryn's mastery of the once and now forbidden arts is unquestioned.

Following the slaughter of her father's champion, Luc'ryn condemned her father and much of his court to death. She ordered her father's kingdom ripped apart root and stone and all of her assets dedicated to the building of a great city in the honor of her emperor atop mount Ereathan, whose streets would be paved with the stones of her father's keep and whose wasteworks would be maintained by her father's surviving attendants and their servants. What followed was the building of what many would call the "City of Eternal Lamentation" by a slave labor force comprised of the Elestri who backed the challenger to the empire.

Despite razing her kingdom to the ground and enslaving her own people, Luc'ryn was treated with honor by Volax'ius. Even if he was the only one to honor her. He alone valued her council and he came to rely on her for matters of faith and of concerns regarding the deep mysteries buried beneath Ereathan and backward and forward through time. Though the rest of the court feared and loathed her.

The City of Eternal Lamentation as it was first called began to become the true seat of power for the six realms of the Elestrian Dominion. Soon orders of supplication were charged to the dwarven kings beneath, and jealousy and distrust grew between the six realms of dominion and the three true rulers of the Dominion. Seeing a bloody civil war coming, Volax'ius commissioned Trav'ien to journey to the mountainhomes and learn what he could of Dwarven metallurgy as consul to the empire.

Under Trav'ien's study, the Dwarven smiths outfitted a legion of Elestrian soldiers loyal to the empire in exotic and powerful arms and armor.

But this was not enough to stem the coming tide, Volax'ius declared. He ordered Luc'ryn to construct a magisterium dedicated to the codification and teaching of the arcane arts to a select elite whose blood contained only the highest concentration of remaining draconic heritage. Volax'ius personally ordered Elestri men and women from all over the empire to study under Luc'ryn and help her to refine their knowledge of the arcane arts.

Meanwhile, Trav'ien's study of metallurgy instilled in him a deep appreciation for Dwarven culture. Over the years, he studied their histories, language, and religious texts and began to draw parallels to the word of Volax'ius to the scriptures handed down through the ages by Dwarven scribes, allegedly handed down all the way back from the mind of creation itself. Trav'ien's studies in Dwarven history eventually led him to discover a new form of metallurgy.

Dragons are creatures of iron and flame. As such, the Dwarves and Dragons had always been natural enemies. Volax'ius had taught through scripture for decades that the Elestri were the descendants of dragons. His teachings stated that while Dragons were flame made flesh, the Elestri were perfected Dragons. The Elestri shared many similarities to Dragons, but based on the fragments of Dragon bones and scales that Trav'ien had found, the Dragons were far superior creatures in terms of strength and sheer indestructibility.

Trav'ien's study of the Dwarven people had given him a deep respect of intellect, history and science, as opposed to his peoples' customary respect for spirituality, legend, and magic. Trav'ien soon realized that the Dragons were superior to the Elestri in every way but one: Their capacity for intellect. Dragons were highly intelligent creatures, but would war with one another at every turn and were incapable of natural coexistence except through overt domination of everything and everyone around them. Soon, he realized that this was exactly what the Elestri were: Weaker, far more virulent, but all the more lowly because they had failed to use their intellect to do anything but the same that had wiped out the Dragons.

Trav'ien's experiments with dragon bones and scale samples had yielded fruit. He had learned to forge Dragonbone as though it were steel, and had learned to link and carve dragon scales into suits of armor. But to outfit himself and his loyal corps of paladins, he would need more.

Trav'ien sought a place told of in legend, a mountain where the Dwarves believed that the dragons first emerged from. Dwarven ecologists claimed that Dragons roosted in this place and when they reached an age where they had grown too large to fly, they would return and eventually starve to death. The name of the place had been lost to time, but Trav'ien had been able to ascertain the location --It was Ereathan.

Upon his return to Erea'than, Trav'ien presented his emperor with an Elestri army clad in dwarven alloys. As a reward for Trav'ien's success and loyal service to his emperor, a new section of the city would be consecrated in his honor and dedicated to a new holy legion of Elestri warrior-smiths.

Trav'ien oversaw the construction of the white quarter, all the while in secret carrying out his search for the graveyard of the Drakes. Trav'ien at this time was sure that Volax'ius' prophecies were mere delusion and the emperor could not foresee the future, so he continued his work cautiously without consultation of the emperor, hoping to forestall the coming civil war by holding hostage the imerial city.

Before long, Trav'ien discovered the remnants of a vast Dragon graveyard in the crags below the imperial city. He set to work smithing dozens of sets of Dragon scale and bone weapons and armor, imbuing them with holy protections he had learned from his time with the Dwarves and forming in secret the Black Order.