The Rathe, Council of Earth

The first God of Power

In EverQuest II’s Creation the Rathe is the first God of Power, given the task of bringing order to chaos. Seeing how vast that task was, it divided itself into twelve equal parts and made Earth. Those parts are the Rathe Council: not one god but many, an extension of the Plane of Earth itself.

A god in many bodies

Their plane is a single living thing of soil and plants. Cut one councillor down and another soon rises in its place, and the plane’s creatures, mostly earth elementals and thinking plants, are part of it too. Even the planes of Growth and Underfoot draw their power from it. It is a land of jungles, caverns, muddy lakes and burrows, of jewels formed by the earth’s own power, and of temples far too large for any mortal to have built.

Every councillor has grass-green hair and earthen skin veined with gold and turquoise. Of all the powers of the Planes of Order, only they have looked down on Norrath with real interest, yet they remain truly neutral toward the other gods, orderly neutral in temper.

The first invasion

Their peace was broken in the Elder Age. An ogre named Murdunk led the first Rallosian army into the Plane of Earth, urged on by Rallos Zek’s son Eriak and eager to prove himself fit to lead the Warlord’s forces. Many guardians of earth died, and many of Murdunk’s soldiers with them, but the Rathe could not stay dead. Every slain councillor was replaced, and the surviving invaders were hurled out of the plane by its wards.

The death that stuck

Rallos Zek answered with a second, larger army under the tacticians Tallon and Vallon, with the scarred Murdunk brought along for what he knew. This time they captured the Rathe Council and dragged its members to Norrath, and there one of them was executed. On Norrath, that death was permanent. Where the councillor fell, the Rathe Mountains rose and Lake Rathetear formed.

The reborn Rathe took their revenge on the army’s leaders, and Murdunk was killed.

The curse

To make sure no one would ever try again, the Rathe, helped by several other gods, cursed every creature of Zek. The curse froze the giants’ green homeland into what is now Everfrost and left Zek’s children lesser in mind and body. Rallos Zek pulled Tallon and Vallon to safety in his own plane, then tore the essence of war out of Eriak, whom he blamed for not warning him of the wards, and gave the pieces to the two tacticians. Eriak was sent to forge weapons in the depths of Drunder, and the Warlord still bears the wards’ scars beneath his armour.

Their servants

Some of Murdunk’s ogres never left. The vegorogs, hulking ogre-shaped things of rotting plants, moss and fungus, are said to be those soldiers, twisted by the Rathe into servants with hearts of stone.

The vault

The Rathe keep something dangerous, too. With Tarew Marr and Xegony they once combined their essences into the Quintessence of the Elements, an object of infinite power, as the in-game book ZSQuint tells. Realising how dangerous it would be in anyone’s hands, they locked it away in their own vault.