Convergence Engine
Overview
The Convergence Engine was an ancient and extraordinarily powerful device, remembered primarily through the devastation wrought by its destruction. According to A History of Rislandia, the Engine exploded beneath Devil's Mountain during the Great Sundering, an event of world-altering consequence. The precise origin, purpose, and construction of the Engine are not recorded in surviving sources; it is known chiefly by the scale of the catastrophe its detonation caused.
History
The Explosion and the Sundering
According to A History of Rislandia, the Convergence Engine exploded beneath Devil's Mountain during the Great Sundering. The text records that ancient Giants were "caught in the Convergence Engine explosion during the Sundering," and that this exposure transformed them into what later generations would call evolved giants. The explosion thus stands as a pivotal moment in the history of giant-kind, marking the boundary between the ancient Giants of earlier ages and the evolved giants known to later Rislandian scholarship.
No account in the available record explains who built the Convergence Engine, what its intended function was, or how it came to detonate. Its destruction appears to have been simultaneous with, or integral to, the broader cataclysm of the Sundering itself.
Legacy
The Golgmarsh Question
According to A History of Rislandia, modern scholars debate whether the legend of Golgmarsh the Giant represents a cultural memory of the Convergence Engine explosion. The sourcebook does not resolve this debate, presenting it as an open question among historians and mythographers. If the identification is correct, the legend would constitute one of the oldest surviving echoes of the Sundering in Rislandian oral tradition.
Transformation of the Giants
The most concretely documented consequence of the explosion was the transformation of ancient Giants into evolved giants. This biological and perhaps metaphysical change shaped the nature of giant-kind for all subsequent history, making the Convergence Engine's destruction one of the foundational events in the prehistory of Areth.