Lore · Expansion Sagas
The Planes of Power & Zebuxoruk
For a lot of us, Planes of Power was EverQuest at its peak: flagging, the Plane of Knowledge, the elemental planes, and a Quarm kill if your guild was good enough. Underneath the keys and flags was a story about forbidden knowledge.
The Forsaken
Zebuxoruk is neither good nor evil, depending on which legend you believe. The other gods dislike him or do not care. At some point he walked Norrath as a mortal man after escaping the Plane of Justice or the Void, and the pantheon calls him the Forsaken One and the Disgraced. A hidden city on Norrath is said to honor, not worship, this “Ungod”; it is full of fallen priests, shadowknights and paladins who believe the gods are more mortal than they think.
His crime was knowledge. In his own words in the Plane of Time, he wanted to share the gods’ knowledge with the people of Norrath, because he believed that if mortals stopped worshipping them, the gods themselves would fall and a new age of darkness would follow.
Sources: Allakhazam: Zebuxoruk · EverQuest.com: The Fabled Planes of Power Lore, Part 22 · Library of Erudin: Zebuxoruk, Plane of Time (NPC dialogue)
The prison in time
The gods imprisoned him in the Plane of Time, a plane wrapped in endless energy where the gods of influence and nature meet, trapped in time and safe from attack. Creatures and mortals stuck there for ages were eager to help anyone who might free them.
Zebuxoruk’s time bubble was tied to four spires, one for each element, and guarded by Quarm, a four-headed dragon the four elemental gods made from fire, earth, water and air. That is why every raid guild had to fight through the elemental planes, Fennin Ro’s Plane of Fire and the Reef of Coirnav among them, before it could open the door.
Sources: Allakhazam: Plane of Time · EverQuest.com: The Fabled Planes of Power Lore, Part 22 · Library of Erudin: Coirnav (fan encyclopedia)
Coirnav
The Plane of Water’s defender was unusual. Most avatars are lesser copies of one god; Coirnav embodies the will of all three gods of the Triumvirate of Water at once, and appears as a massive chimera of sea creatures. When mortals invaded to free Zebuxoruk, the Triumvirate shaped the Reef of Coirnav as the battlefield, with Coirnav leading the defense.
Sources: Allakhazam: Coirnav · Library of Erudin: Coirnav (fan encyclopedia)
What the planes paid
The invasion cost the gods too. In one EverQuest II book, as mortals pushed deeper, lesser planes began to blink out so the greater planes could draw on their energy, and Quellious had to take back the demi-plane of Serenity to keep Tranquility alive.
Sources: Library of Erudin: Quellious (The History of the Hand)
Druzzil Ro rewrites time
Zebuxoruk’s own account says that just as he was about to share his forbidden knowledge, his old teacher Druzzil Ro, the Matron of the Art, appeared and forbade it, saying another escape would compromise the gods’ will. Apologizing, she cast a spell to set things back as they had been.
He then watched time tear in two, not into halves but into two whole copies that went on unaware of each other and slowly began to differ. Fans read this as the official bridge between EverQuest and EverQuest II, whose histories diverge.
Sources: Library of Erudin: Druzzil Ro (Zebuxoruk’s account) · Allakhazam: Druzzil Ro
Where the sources disagree
- A fan guide says that, per Seeds of Destruction lore, Planes of Power “never technically happened” because Druzzil Ro reset events after Quarm. We have not yet found the official text that says so.
- Zebuxoruk escaped from “the Plane of Justice or the Void”; the official lore deliberately does not say which.
Keep reading
Retold in our own words from the sources linked under each chapter; short quotes are marked and sourced. The illustration is an original AI-generated painting made for this page alone, not from the game.