Lore · Legendary Figures
Lanys T’Vyl & Bloody Kithicor
Kithicor Forest at night, when the undead came out and every low-level halfling ran for Rivervale: this is the battle the forest remembers.
The march
Across Antonica both sides prepared for war, quartermasters scrambling and anyone who could carry a weapon carrying one. The Teir’Dal were confident. They had Innoruuk’s blessing, and his own daughter, Lanys T’Vyl, led them with her mentor, Laarthik K’Shin. Their goal was High Keep: take it, split Qeynos from Freeport, and strangle the races of light.
On a cold, rainy morning the dark elf army began to march. The RPG says that force nearly destroyed both Rivervale and High Keep.
Sources: Library of Erudin: Battle of Bloody Kithicor · Library of Erudin: Lanys T’Vyl
The ranger
A fan encyclopedia remembers Kithicor as a ranger said to have held his namesake forest against a legion of dark elves. We have not yet found the primary text, so we record it here as tradition.
Where did Lanys go?
Afterwards, the Teir’Dal king and queen sent the priest Vizier D’Kalz to find out. At the skeleton stone in Nektulos Forest he summoned the spirit of Laarthik K’Shin, an elder shadowknight. Laarthik said his invocation at a mysterious stone had opened a portal to the Plane of Hate; Innoruuk snatched Lanys through it to save her, and Tunare used the same opening to banish her physical form from Norrath.
To bring her back they needed the gnome necromancer Falrazim Zaftamor, who had shifted his spirit into a drake to cheat his failing body, only to find he could no longer cast necromancy, and had spent three hundred years running errands for Meldrath to be changed back. He agreed to help on one condition: they find him a new host too.
Sources: Library of Erudin: Lanys T’Vyl
Born on the Moon of Blood
Verant’s Hate is Born begins with the Moon of Blood, Innoruuk’s holiest night, which comes once every twenty-seven months. Every follower must murder a good being, and dark elf nobles choose a commoner to mate with and then sacrifice. In Sionachie Heartsinger’s telling, Innoruuk “spawned an evil creature on the land” who grew in strength and hatred and rallied the dark elves to her banner, guarded by her mentor Laarthik K’Shin.
Sources: Library of Erudin: Lanys T’Vyl (Hate is Born; Sionachie Heartsinger)
The council at Highkeep
The in-game Bloody Kithicor: The Council opens with Lord Tephys of the Feir’Dal and Carson McCabe of Highkeep staring at each other “with long faces over the council table.” Tephys had sent word to Felwithe asking for help as soon as he heard of the Teir’Dal plans, and had no reply. Her own words survive in Pomp and Circumstance: “Your power is your own. Give it not to anyone, and you shall hold all… Know thy enemy and slay him.”
Sources: Library of Erudin: Lanys T’Vyl (Bloody Kithicor: The Council Vol. I; Pomp and Circumstance)
Goddess, or dead?
The sources disagree. The RPG Game Master’s Guide says Innoruuk raised her to demigod status after Kithicor as the Lady of Envy, possibly the youngest of Norrath’s deities, with a dark elf Cult of Envy keeping a temple fortress in the Rathe Mountains. A 2010 developer post says flatly that she “was slain after the Battle of Bloody Kithicor” and remains dead, her essence imprisoned in the Plane Sphere of Envy, as told in the Shadowknight epic.
Her cult keeps trying
The in-game papers mocked the cult. Tinker’s News reported that the Primordial Malice, trying to resurrect “their dead-as-a-doornail sweetheart,” botched it and unleashed chaos in the Mountains of Rathe, and Da Swamp News blamed “da followers of da corpse formerly knowed as Lanys T Vyl.” Later lore takes her forces seriously: a 2005 Report from the Wilds says the port of Firiona Vie had fallen to the forces of Lanys T’Vyl six months earlier, and a 2014 article finds her cultists allied with returning Combine in Combine Dredge.
Where the sources disagree
- The 2002 RPG says Innoruuk raised Lanys to demigod status after Kithicor and that a dark elf Cult of Envy keeps a temple to her in the Rathe Mountains. An EverQuest II developer later wrote that she was slain after the battle, “remains dead,” and that her essence is imprisoned in the Plane Sphere of Envy, as told in the Shadowknight epic.
Keep reading
Retold in our own words from the sources linked under each chapter; short quotes are marked and sourced. The illustration is an original AI-generated painting made for this page alone, not from the game.