THARIZDUN: ESCAPE ATTEMPT!

As described in The Gates of Madness, a cult of Tharizdun used a shard of the Living Gate to open the Vast Gate, creating a window into his prison just wide enough for him to send through the Voidharrow.

The Vast Gate first appeared in Bruce Cordell’s adventure The Gates of Firestorm Peak (1996), where it was described as the portal through which the Far Realm exerted its influence on the adventure’s dungeon. The Living Gate, though, was first described in Player’s Handbook 3 and The Plane Above (2010)—a strange Astral portal, also leading to the Far Realm, discovered by Pelor, Ioun, and Tharizdun near the beginning of time. The shattering of the Living Gate created the shard-mind race and proved a pivotal event in the history of psionic power.

So the cult used part of the Living Gate to open the Vast Gate, creating a tiny window into Tharizdun’s prison. Tharizdun sent the Voidharrow through that window with the idea that his cultists could use it to enhance the power of the Vast Gate and widen the portal so Tharizdun himself could emerge from his prison. But, as so often happens, a group of adventurers foiled that dastardly plan. Even as the Voidharrow transformed the unwitting cultists into demons, the adventurers came in and disrupted the Vast Gate. In the ensuing chaos, demons and other fragments of the Voidharrow were scattered throughout the cosmos.

The demon called Nu Alin, introduced in Mark of Nerath, was one of the cultists who opened the portal, transformed by the Voidharrow into a liquid being that inhabited mortal bodies. A vial of the Voidharrow substance itself came back to the world with the adventurers, where it ended up in the wizard Moorin’s tower in Fallcrest.