Lore · Continents & Moons
The Shissar
Ssraeshza Temple was the end of the line for a lot of Luclin raid guilds. The Shissar inside had been waiting a very long time.
Masters of Kunark
The Shissar were an intelligent serpent race that took the lead on Kunark while the dragons were still slowly organising. From Kunark they ruled a vast empire in the name of Cazic-Thule, their patron in those days. Races that were useful to them, like the iksar, were enslaved for labour and food; those who resisted were exterminated. They claim to have created the iksar as a servant race, though most scholars dismiss that as typical snake-folk arrogance. The iksar remember the era as the Age of the Snake, when they “had yet to unite.” From their capital of Chelsith the Shissar explored dark rites and forgotten evils that would later shape iksar knowledge and philosophy.
Why the gods struck
They grew so arrogant they believed their power rivalled the gods’, and the gods punished them. In the Plane of Knowledge, Elder Aytael gives a related reason: their power-crazed nature led them to misuse Zebuxoruk’s gift of insight, which “drove them mad as a race” and drew the attention of the elder gods.
The Green Mist
Nearly two thousand years before the Combine Empire, the Green Mist swept over Kunark: a green cloud over the Overthere, a face of death forming at its core that belonged to no god either people knew. Over a year, tens of thousands of Shissar died. The pampered emperor, his nobles and their slaves shut themselves away from the lower castes to escape it, and Emperor Ssraeshza, military and spiritual leader of the Shissar, spoke of a vision that promised to deliver the noble Shissar to Luclin, free of the green death forever.
Two escapes
Not everyone trusted him. A noble named Zhisza quietly made his own plan to survive on Norrath, to retreat, rebuild and one day reclaim the empire. On the day Ssraeshza and his followers cast their great spells to reach Luclin, Zhisza and his nobles teleported deep into Empotith, an unfinished underground school of dark arts. Ssraeshza’s people arrived on the moon believing Zhisza dead. Centuries passed in Empotith, and Zhisza’s hopes of beating the iksar and reclaiming the empire’s glory slowly waned.
T’sharnell’s account
The court wizard T’sharnell left a different account of the escape. Only the Emperor, his councillor Vyz’dra, T’sharnell and a few retainers survived, and T’sharnell had hidden the royal heir in his wing of the palace. His cure “was partially successful,” he wrote: it carried them not to safety on Norrath but to the moon. “Is ambition a sin? In the eyes of the gods, apparently, it is.”
Behind walls of vacuum
On Luclin the goddess let the fearful survivors stay in the region now called the Grey, which was green and fertile before they came. To keep the Greenmist out, they covered their new temple with a dome of magical force and drew away all the air around it except at the temple itself. Even their dead still serve: a revenant wizard patrols the temple’s lower levels and the airless ground outside. Inside, the wizard Vyz’dra began plotting to seize power. And in the Grey the Shissar later captured the Vah Shir hero Khati Sha and twisted him into the grimlings’ god.
The memory of the mist
The iksar never forgot. They remember watching their captors “melt away” in the mist while they stood untouched, and mark the day by desecrating something the Shissar made. The Shissar have not forgotten either. On Luclin an order of theirs calls for “a renewed Age of Snake” and an assault on the Combine’s Katta Castrum: “There must be no survivors.”
Where the sources disagree
The iksar remember the Green Mist as a sacred deliverance; an iksar sage says the snake people had angered even their own gods.
The in-game Encyclopedia credits Ssraeshza’s vision for the escape; the RPG’s T’sharnell writings describe a partly failed cure spell.
Sources
[1] Allakhazam: Shissar · [2] Library of Erudin: Rise of the Iksar · [3] Library of Erudin: Shissar · [4] Library of Erudin: Khati Sha
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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.