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 organizing. They enslaved the iksar for labor and food, and from their capital of Chelsith they explored dark rites and forgotten evils that would later shape iksar knowledge and philosophy.
Sources: Allakhazam: Shissar · Library of Erudin: Rise of the Iksar
The Green Mist
Nearly two thousand years before the Combine Empire, the Green Mist swept over Kunark. 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.
Emperor Ssraeshza, military and spiritual leader of the Shissar, spoke of a vision that promised to deliver the noble Shissar to Luclin, the moon, free of the green death forever.
Sources: Library of Erudin: Shissar
Two escapes
Not everyone trusted him. A noble named Zhisza quietly made his own plan to stay alive 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.
On Luclin, the Shissar later captured the Vah Shir hero Khati Sha in the Grey and twisted him into the grimlings’ god.
Sources: Library of Erudin: Shissar · Library of Erudin: Khati Sha
An empire in Cazic-Thule’s name
The RPG’s Monsters of Luclin says the Shissar ruled a vast empire from Kunark. Races that were useful to them, like the iksar, were enslaved, and those who resisted were exterminated, all in the name of Cazic-Thule, who was their patron at the time. The Shissar claim they created the iksar as a servant race, but most scholars dismiss this as typical snake-folk arrogance. The iksar book Before Green calls the period the Age of the Snake, when the iksar “had yet to unite.”
Why the gods struck
The RPG’s Luclin book says the Shissar became so arrogant they believed their power rivalled the gods’, and the gods punished them with the green mist. In the Plane of Knowledge, Elder Aytael gives a related explanation: 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 iksar book Green Mist describes a green cloud over the Overthere, with a face of death forming at its core, belonging to no god that either people knew.
Sources: Library of Erudin: Shissar (Luclin — The Shissar; About Zebuxoruk; Green Mist)
T’sharnell’s account
The RPG gives a second, different account of the escape, in the writings of the court wizard T’sharnell. 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.” This differs from the in-game Encyclopedia, which credits Ssraeshza’s vision.
Behind walls of vacuum
On Luclin the goddess let the fearful survivors stay in the region now called the Grey. 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 right at the temple. The RPG says the Grey was once green and fertile before they came. Even dead Shissar 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.
Zhisza’s line and the iksar memory
Volume II of the in-game Encyclopedia says centuries passed after Zhisza went into Empotith, and his hopes of beating the iksar and reclaiming the empire’s glory waned. The iksar never forgot. In EverQuest II’s Paying Homage to the Past they remember watching their captors “melt away” in the mist while they were untouched, and mark it by desecrating something the Shissar made. On Luclin, a Shissar order 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.
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.