Lore · Cities & Peoples
Erudin, Paineel & the Hole
Erudites who jumped into the Hole to reach Paineel were jumping into an old battlefield. Here is how it got there.
Heretics
About two hundred years after Erud led his people to Odus, some Erudites grew in knowledge of the ancient dark arts. Their brothers criticised them, persecuted them, and finally drove them from the city they had helped to found. So the heretics’ own History of the Hole tells it. Erudin’s High Council banished Miragul for practising necromancy, cutting a whole sphere of knowledge out of Erudite learning.
A war of magic
For the first time in centuries the Erudites fought each other, in a civil war not unlike the one they had fled on the mainland, except that it was fought with magic instead of swords and bows. Hundreds died and great buildings fell. The heretics fled to the south of Odus, and in one final battle such energy was released that it tore an immense hole into the earth.
A city in the pit
The heretics, who call themselves Cazicites, built Paineel into the sides of that chasm. Both sides still hate each other, but fear of what the last battle unleashed has kept the peace. Paineel has almost no friends: the dark races dislike its people for being Erudites, and everyone else shuns them for necromancy and for worshipping Cazic-Thule. Its people tend to be proud, aloof and driven to gain necromantic power, living with dangers welling up from the Hole and recurring tension with Erudin.
Old Paineel and new
The first Paineel did not last. The Cazicites were forced to flee it too, and rebuilt a new Paineel nearby in the image of the old, which in time outshone it. The ruins of Old Paineel are what you crawled through at the bottom of the Hole.
What came through the Wall
There the gnome Ognit Eznertob, exploring with two friends, channelled a little energy into the Wall of Living Flesh. It shuddered and turned a sickly colour, a terrifying earthquake followed, and Al’Kabor was furious when he heard. Ognit had breached the barrier, and an army of elemental beings poured out into Odus. They were turned back only with great effort and at great risk.
Entering Paineel
Outsiders rarely visit. Most die on the way down, attacked by mistrustful locals or falling into the Hole, before they ever see the black stone spires that mark the city’s entrance. Strangers are never welcome unless they have something desirable to offer, and visitors must make a sacrifice of blood to enter. Inside, a sloping grassy yard lets young pupils practise, with undead guardsmen at the outer gates so that students in trouble can flee back inside. Those ready for more go into the warrens wedged into the surrounding cliffs. New necromancers are sent to Coriante Verisue, “perhaps the oldest ‘living’ resident of Paineel.”
Where the sources disagree
The RPG credits Miragul’s followers with founding Paineel, the manual credits the heretics in general, and the House of Thule preview says Miragul broke with “the rulers of Paineel.”
One Verant story says the first Paineel “fell into rubble beneath the hands of Master Yael”; the Heretics’ own history only says they were forced to flee. We found no fuller account.
The wall at the bottom of the Hole is called the Wall of Living Flesh in Ognit’s story and the Wall of Living Stone in the 2009 Underfoot event.
Sources
[1] Library of Erudin: Paineel (History of the Hole; Assistant Researcher’s Notes) · [2] Library of Erudin: “The History of Norrath” (original EverQuest manual text)
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Retold in our own words from the sources listed on this page; short quotes are marked and sourced. The illustration is an original AI-generated painting made for this page alone, not from the game.