Shadow Isles

The Shadow Isles are a cursed archipelago wrapped in the Black Mist, a corrupting fog that has tainted the land itself. They were not always so. The isles began as the Blessed Isles, a hidden chain veiled in white mist and preservation magic, where the Masters of Helia guarded the Waters of Life, a sacred aquifer that could cure any mortal ailment. Scholars gathered there from across the world, and the Buhru of the Serpent Isles still remember that their people once studied with Helia's orders before the isles were transformed. The transformation came through Viego, king of Camavor. When a poisoned assassin's blade meant for him struck his queen Isolde instead, Viego exhausted his treasury on cures and sent his general Kalista to find a miracle. She found the Blessed Isles, but Isolde died before the king could reach them. Viego breached the isles' magical shroud with his armada, and when the Masters refused to help him, he ordered a slaughter, guided into the inner sanctum by Thresh, a warden of the Helia vaults. He lowered Isolde's corpse into the Waters of Life, and the magic recoiled. Her reanimated wraith seized the Blade of the Ruined King and stabbed Viego through the heart. The explosion that followed merged life and death, the white mist turned black, and the Blessed Isles became the Shadow Isles. The Black Mist is a broken preservation system that freezes whatever it touches in undeath. The spirits of the folk who once lived on the isles have wandered beneath it for a thousand years, most of them contorted into wraiths, specters, and mistwalkers. The Mist periodically surges outward in Harrowings that strike distant shores, reaching even Bandle City, and hunters such as Lucian have spent years charting its movements across the seas. A few beings still dwell there. Yorick, last survivor of a Blessed Isles religious order, is kept alive by a vial of blessed water and commands the dead in his effort to end the curse. Karthus crossed from Bilgewater by choice, was remade by the Mist as the undying Deathsinger, and now styles himself the isles' emissary. The yordle Vex followed a Harrowing to its source and stayed for the gloom. Thresh, long counted the isles' greatest monster, was eventually killed by Illaoi and her companions. Viego himself rose again in the modern age, hunting the scattered fragments of Isolde's soul. He allied briefly with Vex before the Sentinels of Light defeated him, and after his shade tried to destroy Bilgewater, Illaoi and Miss Fortune sealed him inside a serpent-amber amulet crafted by the Brethren of the Dusk. Even so, treasure hunters still sail for the isles from way stations like the Daring Darling, an inn built on the route between Bilgewater and the shadowed coast.