Editing Setting:Tabula Gloria/Benalor/The Gate (section)

=The Worst Way to Die=
After its defeat in the Three-Way War, Benalor couldn't stand to lose at home, especially to what they thought was an impending Vashialian assault the likes the government could never imagine. As far as they knew, their rival's magics now were capable of reaching the Heavens Above, the Wight one of their plentiful mutated creations which not only destroyed the Heavenriders but, as insult to injury, used one of their bodies to deliver the warning. With that in mind, the Vashialians could easily destroy them and not even step into Benaloran territory to do so. King Esteg III, already demoralized by the failure of the Heavenrider Program, initiated the evacuation to the Gate. He would also send a message through one of his advisers to deliver to the Aethergears, to initialize the teleportation device within the structure. Though the King wasn't sure if the link survived from the flying machine which carried the doomed Heavenriders, it would be better than nothing, though some present-day scholars believe it was a panicked decision made under great duress instead.

Only half of the Empire's population made it to the Gate before the legendary strike was made upon Benalor from the Heavens Above, most of the latter half either dying immediately from the blast, or soon becoming injured or killed from the resulting shock wave which ripped through the civilized areas. Witnessing the blast from afar, the Aethergears decided to put the Gate into lockdown were another strike to come, a process which would have made it impossible to open the door to the Gate. They believed that this would give them enough time to fend off the presumed Vashialian advance long enough to activate the device within, which would not work for what, to them, was an unknown reason. Hundreds of thousands of people were locked inside the Gate at this point. Though they had access to fresh water, they were not able to hunt or to grow food in their subterranean environs. Some Shapers were among the locked population and were able to modify much of the Gate's inner structure to grow some of the natural mushrooms that grew inside the springs, but it wouldn't be enough to prevent starvation on an indescribable scale. That was coupled with the increasing case of cabin fever among the Gate's occupants, driving many of them to kill themselves and get it over with. And when the madness struck the supposedly hardened Aethergears... all hell broke loose.