As artifice continues to break new ground every day, the earth becomes more and more exploited. Chasms are bored into the earth to strip-mine precious crystals with magical properties for a prophet. Courier imps have gotten lost in lands they were foreign to and thrived, upsetting the balance of ecosystems. The magical glow coming off of cities made reading the stars at night harder as the night grew brighter.
Evils like these drove Father Ishod to travel the land preaching the need for the Kindred to abandon their societal trappings and live in harmony with the land like their ancestors did long before these developments took place. Father Ishod had even built up a modest following throughout many fiefdoms. These tended to be just small covens that would host him and his closest disciples.
But when society fell into the maw of the great Devourers, those covens were poised to share the news of Father Ishod with the world. Artifice, they said, had been the cause of the Devourers’ manifestation, and they claimed Father Ishod prophesied it long ago. As hundreds of new believers entrusted themselves to his teachings, Father Ishod’s discipleship began to grow, and his small band of nomads became a caravan, and then a small army. Father Ishod was overwhelmed by it all. In his mind, he had neither condemned artifice explicitly nor provided explanation for the emergence of The Devourers, and yet, hundreds flocked to him through a misunderstanding of his desire to live in harmony with nature and protect it. His troubles were not to last long, though.
While many had held out hope that the Devourers were gone after the first night of worldwide terror, it seems that they would forever be close at hand, and anywhere that enough people gathered they would be drawn to feast on that community, like sharks drawn to the smell of blood in the water. Father Ishod’s new following was decimated in the second known emergence of the Devourers, later dubbed the Harvest in the Wild.
Father Ishod still preaches harmony with nature and sustainable existence, but his following is practically non-existent now. Those of his devotees who weren’t consumed by the dark cried false prophet, citing all of the words that had been put in Ishod’s mouth, and abandoned him.