Project: Radiance
Project Radiance was the secret, ultimate ambition of House Cannith’s most radical visionaries. It had nothing to do with the Last War’s politics; it was about achieving the final goal of all artificers: to become masters of creation itself.
The Goal
To artificially create life and imbue it with the primal, cosmic magic of Siberys, the Dragon Above. They aimed to create a “divine” being not in a religious sense, but in a cosmic one—a construct infused with the very essence that grants dragonmarks and powers all arcane magic.
The Method
The key was the third shard of the Heart of Radiance. Cannith scholars theorized this was no mere holy relic, but a crystallized, physical remnant of Siberys’s power, a “Progenitor Shard” containing pure, life-giving, creative force. Their plan was to use the Creation Forge as an arcane crucible, forcibly infusing this raw celestial energy into the matrix of a new breed of Warforged.
The Intended Outcome
The creation of “Siberys-Touched” Warforged. These constructs would be living fonts of arcane power, potentially capable of spontaneously developing powers akin to dragonmarks. They would be the next stage of evolution, designed by Cannith. Such a breakthrough would make House Cannith more powerful than any nation, effectively allowing them to dictate the future of Khorvaire. It was the peak of their ambition and hubris.
Project: Aegis
Project Aegis was the failsafe, the ultimate guardian designed to protect the ultimate experiment. The Cannith scientists knew they were tampering with forces beyond their full understanding and built a security system to match.
The Guardian
“Aegis” is the official project name for the Mechanical Dragon. It was built as the ultimate security system for the Core Lab, an unparalleled display of defensive artifice.
The Failsafe Function
The dragon’s core systems were designed to absorb and contain catastrophic energy releases. If the ‘Project Radiance’ experiment became unstable, the “Aegis Protocol” was designed to activate, having the dragon act as a living lightning rod, drawing the volatile celestial energies into its core to prevent a facility-wide meltdown. It was a walking containment shield for a power they barely understood.
What Actually Happened on the Day of Mourning?
This is the step-by-step sequence of the cataclysm, connecting the two projects and the clues the party can find.
- The Final Experiment: Driven by a series of successful preliminary tests, the Project Radiance team initiated a full-scale infusion, attempting to channel a massive amount of raw creative energy from the Heart of Radiance shard directly into the Creation Forge’s arcane matrix.
- The Fundamental Flaw: They treated the life-giving essence of Siberys as just another power source. They failed to understand that this primal, almost sentient creative force could not be controlled, manufactured, and forcibly fused with the rigid, logical artifice of the Forge. It was a conflict between the chaotic, vibrant energy of life and the ordered, unfeeling nature of a machine.
- The Overload: The Siberys essence violently rejected the process. The Creation Forge, unable to contain the paradoxical energies, began to overload catastrophically.
- Aegis Protocol Failure: The scientists triggered the “Aegis Protocol” in a desperate last act. The Mechanical Dragon activated and began absorbing the overload as designed. This is the moment from the engineer’s first log entry: “The Aegis protocol is failing! The core isn’t containing the energy, it’s… it’s absorbing it!”
- The Horrifying Twist: The failsafe became the catalyst. Aegis’s core absorbed the paradoxical energy but couldn’t safely ground it. The fusion of primal creation and cold artifice warped the dragon itself, turning it into an incubating, world-breaking bomb. The final words—“Tell Baron Merrix the dragon is… it’s becoming…”—are from the moment the engineer realized what they had truly created.
- The Detonation & The Mourning: The Mechanical Dragon “Aegis,” saturated with an impossible amount of paradoxical energy, detonated. The resulting blast wave that washed over the land wasn’t just destructive; it was a wave of broken reality, born from the conflict of its core energies:
- The raw creative power, too potent for existing life, caused instant death.
- The imprinting nature of the Creation Forge “saved” a snapshot of the world, creating the time loops and ghostly echoes.
- The sheer force of the energy release, like that of a small star, vitrified the landscape, creating the Glass Plateau.
- The Dead-Gray Mist is the lingering atmospheric fallout of a world where the rules of magic and reality were fundamentally, and perhaps permanently, broken.