Lore · Expansion Sagas
Mata Muram & Discord
Gates of Discord and Omens of War were EverQuest at its hardest. Behind them stood one overlord, and behind him, something worse.
A world called Kuua
Kuua was once an ordinary world like Norrath, until Discord, an ethereal poison, seeped into it. Its races turned on each other, and the sky filled with ash and embers. The most civilised of them, the dragorn, believe they were carved from stone and earth by a great dragon named Dranik, and they valued courage above all. When the world turned, they withdrew to fortify their city, and then began fighting among themselves too. Dragorn who lived through it remember brothers fighting brothers, and their city falling to a conqueror.
The overlord
The elder Chinak wrote in a blood-smudged book that he saw the great dragon Mata Muram only once, flying over Dranik. Some say he can change from dragon to a two-legged form. His own Muramites whispered that he had become twisted and disfigured, his dark powers more frightening every day, and that he had seen no visitors for months. One officer wrote that the overlord and his magic were “becoming more volatile by the day.” Some worried that his mastery of magic and of his legion “has consumed his every thought,” and there were “whispers of treachery” among his creatures of fire and ice.
Harbinger’s Spire
The Muramites took Harbinger’s Spire, once a dragorn lookout tower, and made it a beacon to carry news across Mata Muram’s domain; some of his captains carry infused crystal shards that can send beacons up from it. Korshawn, who studied there as a young chaplain, shudders at what the “discordlings” have done to it, and Bolodakan calls it an outrage that the Muramites are “defiling the memory of the great father Dranik.”
The legion and the conquered
His servants obeyed without question. Commander Grigar’s orders came “directly from Mata Muram himself, our great leader.” An officer who admitted his master’s magic was growing volatile still refused to betray him, and told his troops to keep in line and hold their ground against the dragorn. One aspirant, enduring grueling trials, hoped to be worthy “to serve at Mata Muram’s side with my army of Disciples,” and then to take his revenge. The conquered saw the other side: Lenarsk, once tailor to Dranik’s nobles and famous hunters, lost everything “when they infected our lands,” and an old warrior remembers fighting the legions as they flooded into Kuua.
Riftseekers
His aim reached beyond Kuua. He commanded his elite ikaav to learn the ways of the riftseekers, so they could command the paths between worlds and keep building an army for his legion “and superiors.” In the Riftseekers’ Sanctum, Taromani offers to swap stories, and begins one of his own: “In a shattered realm, there existed a twisted overlord that ruled all.”
The god behind him
Mata Muram’s invasion was turned back by Norrath’s heroes, but his forces were only part of Discord’s armies, which all worship a dark god of a discordant pantheon. That god was furious at the failure and intrigued by the power that had caused it. He found a weakness in the timeweave, left when Druzzil Ro rewove time to stop Zebuxoruk escaping, and sent agents back into Norrath’s history to cripple it in advance.
Where the sources disagree
A fan encyclopedia calls Mata Muram one slave trader among many at the front of the shroud of Discord, keeping the best of each conquered people for his army and selling the rest. The official in-game text only shows him building an army for “my legion and superiors.”
The 2008 official text never names the dark god of Discord.
Sources
[1] Library of Erudin: Omens of War History (fan encyclopedia) · [2] Library of Erudin: Mata Muram · [3] EverQuest.com: Seeds of Destruction, Unfolding the Lore Part 1 (2008)
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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.