After the events of The World's Beginning, recorded history begins in the Twin Crescents with the Dark Ages.
The Dark Ages
After the fall of the last great civilization and the start of a new one, the twin crescents entered a brief Dark Ages. Elves and dwarves warred amongst each other for attention and favor from their deities. They lived in ramshackle wooden cities and scattered tribal settlements across the western crescent, called Hellan.
The eastern crescent, called Isandor, was inhabited by orcs. The orcs formed tribal bands that answered to high warlords.
For a time, the world simply turned.
The dwarves and elves continued to fight until the gods eventually intervened. They gifted magical gemstones of unimaginable destructive power to the dwarven and elven leaders to show them that both races were equal. Orcs received a gemstone too. The gods believed that arming the races with the stones would mean they would not dare challenge each other. For a time, the gemstones made it clear that all races were loved equally by their creators. The elves received Ilterendi and the dwarves were given Mithrus. Over twelve were created and dispensed, but only one was given to each race.
The Age of Life (AL Year 0)
After a sufficient period of non-interaction where all seemed to be going well, the gods created humanity. Humanity’s goal— or rather, the role of the Thranic humans— was to foster peace between dwarves and elves and inspire further development of society.
Soon, an elven prophet who claimed to be sent by the sun god arrived in Vestia. Secretly from the Veil, she had revolutionary ideas for agriculture, military might, and city planning drawn from other universes. She catapulted elvenkind into the feudal era. This elf, named Veladriel Dawnwalker, was worshipped as a saint and crowned Queen of Vestia. She married Ahellion Dawnwalker shortly afterward.
The dwarves retreated to their mountain home of Snowpeak and stole, repurposed, and otherwise improved upon the ideas spread far and wide by Veladriel. Their own ingenuity resulted in a massive underground city, which became the new capital of the Kingdom of Snowpeak. The elves took offense to the dwarves vying for superiority, and broke the peace by flooding dwarven mines on the edge of elven territory.
Great battles raged for some time with humanity always seeking the higher road. Humans attempted to set aside differences and unite the lands. From their capital, the republic of Thrain, they eventually brokered a truce between elves and dwarves.
It was here that the gods’ plans fell apart. After a visit to the planet’s core by the god of deceit, a volcanic eruption was spurred that wiped out most life on the eastern crescent. Isandor became a wasteland. The orcs who remained rebuilt, but their eyes turned west to the fertile green lands of Hellan…
Orcs, minotaurs, centaurs, and goblins began encroaching into territory the dwarves and elves had previously owned. They sought farmland and hospitable places to raise their families. However, their warlike, brutal culture clashed too hard with the sensibilities of Hellan’s inhabitants. War was coming on an unprecedented scale. Hellan needed to prepare.
Humankind Forms the Confederacy (AL Year 440)
There is no greater unifying force than a common enemy. Thranic humans took the opportunity of encroaching orcish warbands to propose a diplomatic solution — elves, dwarves, and humankind should become a single unified faction. The humans named it “the Confederacy”. The idea garnered support from all ends of Hellan, and was signed into existence in Thrain’s senate building.
The Confederacy was comprised of a ruling council of ambassadors from each member state. Each member of the Confederacy contributed a portion of their militaries to the council’s control, and provided economic assistance. Roads between nations were secured and built. Infrastructure improved. The Confederacy’s careful planning improved the quality of life and commerce in Hellan. Perhaps most importantly, forts were built and supplied on the southern border to prevent the orcs from entering Hellan.
The Confederacy is humankind’s crowning achievement. They are diplomatic, honorable people with a structured justice system. Their capital city of Thrain thrives with a group of senators led by a Praetor. Different castes are celebrated as crucial pieces of their successful republic.
Dwarvenkind's Military Uprising (AL Year 548)
For a time, there was relative peace in Hellan under the Confederacy's rule. The orcs could not unify, and fought amongst themselves for generations over every last scrap of land in Isandor. The races they had previously enslaved, notably Catfolk, escaped servitude. Isandor was in chaos. Until the threat began to loom larger, Hellan kept mostly to itself.
The dwarves eventually concocted a plan to destroy the orcish hordes for good. They sought to combine the power of the gemstones that the gods had gifted each mortal race. Their smiths crafted a beautiful chain made from precious metals to hold Ilterendi, the elven stone, and Mithrus, the dwarven stone.
At the moment the elves brought forth Ilterendi to be placed into the chain, dwarven smiths who coveted the gems attacked and slew their King. They attempted to take the elven Queen’s life as well, but she escaped. Ilterendi and Mithrus were lost.
Ancient misgivings and spite amongst dwarves and elves re-ignited. Dwarven settlements were ransacked by elves searching for Ilterendi. Tension heightened. The orcish threat loomed, but infighting in the Confederacy was worse.
The dwarven kingdom was in chaos after the murder of their King. His heir was only a child, unfit to rule; the nobles of the dwarven cities finally elected a retired military general to be the new King of the Mountain. King Lokkhan was a wise man. He recovered the gemstones after a few years (with great sacrifice), and warily forged a new truce with the elves. Lokkhan saw that peace was the only way to protect their lands from the orcish threat.
Unfortunately, it was discovered that the faction of smiths who stole Ilterendi and Mithrus worshipped Vandun— the god of deceit. The elves cried out that the dwarves harbored corruption in their ranks. King Lokkhan claimed the gemstone theft was spurred only by a few twisted individuals. To this day, neither faction trusts each other.
The Snowfell Dwarves have lived in a militaristic society ever since. Traditionalists long for the days of a republic, while the militarists staunchly believe in their new social order. Seeing the impending threat of the orcish hordes, the dwarves began to build a wall across southern Hellan to protect it.
Elvenkind Finds Religion (AL Year 673)
From the beginning of time, the elven people have worshipped the sun and sky. They even chose to adopt the moniker “Sun Elves”. When the elven prophet Veladriel appeared, she was heralded as an angel of the sun god and quickly ascended to become the spiritual leader of their race. Queen Veladriel and her cunning husband King Ahellion have been the sole monarchs of the sun elf kingdom ever since.
Over the years, various factions of elves splintered from their sun-loving ancestors. The Dark Elves, Star Elves, and now-extinct Wood Elves are all individual races who created new identities for themselves. The most dominant group, the Sun Elves, sought to bring all others back into their rigid system of sun-worship; but it has proven unsuccessful.
As the orcish threat grew, Veladriel formalized sun-worship into a new religion called Verunism (named for the sun, Veruna). Verunism brought together all of the disparate, scattered pockets of sun elves across Hellan into one unified force that would later become the basis for King Ahellion’s creation of the Sun Elf empire.
Drums of War (AL Year 700)
In this tenuous era of militaristic dwarves, arduously religious sun elves, and diplomatic humans, the Confederacy was pushed to its limits when the Orcish Warlords finally struck. Hordes of orcs, goblins, centaurs, and other creatures mustered all of their forces and set upon the wall the dwarves had built. It had taken almost 300 years, but the forces of the entire continent of Isandor marched under one banner.
The Confederacy’s armies gathered and eradicated a settlement of Dark Elves in Winterheart (next to the dwarven capital) to prevent any opportunistic invasions. Then, they marched south to meet the orcish forces directly.
The dwarves valiantly manned their wall and fought off the first wave of orcish invaders. And the second. And the third. Their forces were dwindling when the elves and humans finally made it to the wall to provide reinforcements; at which time, the wall had been breached. The dwarves made a full retreat to save the shreds of their people who remained. Queen Tristia Renbran, the militaristic leader of the dwarves, swore that they would keep to themselves from that point on. The dwarves all went underground and barricaded their capital off from the world.
The rest of the Confederacy fought on. Blood was shed on both sides, until the unthinkable happened.
Two gods appeared on the battlefield. Vandun, patron of deceit, and Arth, patron of vitality, supported the orcish claim. Their shamans began to destroy the wall and all of its surrounding settlements. Hejong, god of war, was irate. War was his domain. For the others to subvert it and stack the odds against mortalkind was unjust and against the gods’ code. Hejong took to the battlefield and defeated both gods. He pinned Arth in the Dark Below with the blade of Strom’kar stuck through his heart, and Vandun was banished to the pantheon in chains.
The war was quickly won after the evil gods were defeated. This event came to be known as the Battle at the Border. The orcs returned to their mountains and deserts. Their morale was shattered and faith, shaken. Hellan’s people rejoiced. The dwarves, cut off from communication with the outside world, did not partake in the celebrations and instead focused inward on rebuilding their sorrow-filled nation who had experienced so much loss and suffering.
Armageddon (AL Year 726)
Major efforts to rebuild were made. The nearly-300-year-old Confederacy was strained without the dwarves. The sun elves began slowly encroaching on dwarven land and taking over old farming territories, expanding forts, and building roads. Humans frowned on their actions, but little could be done. Not a dwarf remained above ground to protest.
The sun elves sent their forces on expeditionary forces to Isandor, and began to conquer it in small pieces. They discovered the Ruins of Anatheum in the desert, a very technologically society that had fallen thousands of years ago. This discovery spurred their civilization to develop the early workings of electric lights, heat, and cooling.
It was years before the sun elves once again made contact with dwarvenkind. Queen Tristia Renbran and King Ahellion Dawnwalker began to negotiate. Little did they know, the pantheon had other plans.
After the show of force by Hejong, Arth, and Vandun, one god saw fit to usurp the entire pantheon. This god’s name was Kerrigor. Kerrigor was the deity of death. As an ancient immortal who had witnessed the birth of Ilisara, Kerrigor had accumulated power over the years by serving as the caretaker of Ilisara’s Afterlife. The Afterlife was a dream-made-real by Kerrigor’s divinity, and powered by the constant transfer and reincarnation of souls.
The Afterlife was effectively an overlooked, unseen realm of divine power that existed parallel to the living world. None of the gods expected Kerrigor to one day reap the divinity from all of their souls with his scythe, Adun’shul, and become the One True God of Ilisara — but he did. Kerrigor offered boons to each former god, such as legendary weapons, mystical powers to heal, or even immortality. They were delivered to various places in Ilisara and allowed to live amongst mortals.
To mortals, nothing seemed to have changed. They still worshipped the old gods. To the pantheon, all was quiet. The god of death began quietly managing the domains of a dozen former gods. However, this peace could not last forever.
Kerrigor was eventually driven mad by the powers he held. Only the Titans, creators of the cosmos, had the capacity to manage Life, Death, War, and Peace in the world. Kerrigor committed suicide to escape the sheer exhaustion, confusion, and deep sense of wrongness that plagued his immortal soul.
His death caused the Afterlife to collide with the living world. When it did, the souls of those who died disappeared, and many long-dead souls were resurrected as though they had never passed on. Some of them retained memories from the Afterlife. Others didn’t.
The world felt the effects of the Afterlife, too. Entire cities — including Vestia, the sun elf capital — were demolished. Meteors hailed from the heavens. Earthquakes and shifting tectonic plates sunk portions of the crescents into the sea. The Veil spat out monsters and creatures that didn’t belong in Ilisara. New cities arose from pure pools of divinity. Parts of the world became blurred, fuzzy pieces of a fusion between the Afterlife and living world. It was, once more, chaos.
In the wake of Kerrigor’s death, divinity pooled in various places. It was taken by those knowledgeable enough to find it. Vandun rose again, only to be smote down by Veladriel and a cadre of mortal heroes. Veladriel ascended to godhood. Remedia, Seluna, Promidius, and others are among the gods who rose to claim their place as new deities.
Veladriel’s first act was to raise the city of Vestia back out of the ocean, resurrect all of its inhabitants, and restore it to its former glory. Vestia became the new seat of the Vestian Empire. Thrain and humankind swore fealty in the hopes that Veladriel would smile upon their city, while Veladriel coerced the dwarves into swearing fealty to her as well. With dwarves and humans under their command, the Vestian Empire became the dominant political force in the crescents.
The Confederacy became a council with no real authority that simply advised the two dictators of the known world: Imperatrix Veladriel and Imperator Ahellion. Vestia provided aid and began helping Thrain and Snowpeak rebuild.
Meanwhile, the orcs in Isandor decided to set sail from the crescents and find a new place to call home. The sun elves conquered Isandor in their absence.
After all had settled, these kingdoms belong to the Vestian Empire as of AL Year 732:
The Isles (AL Year 730)
The aftermath of the Afterlife’s collision with Ilisara was intensely complicated. New gods born of Kerrigor’s latent divinity vied for attention. The rules that once bound the pantheon had been undone. Even the shroud of mist that kept the crescents blocked off from the rest of the world had been destroyed, allowing ships to travel beyond the twin crescents' waters for the first time in eons.
The orcs found a new and fertile land in Oros, a continent to the east of the crescents. An adventurer from Vestia shipwrecked on Arcadia, a continent in the west. Soon the discovery of all the Isles was made — five new continents containing a few independent kingdoms and one very powerful empire. The Isles had no gods, but their peoples were at a similar level of development as the Twin Crescents’ civilizations. In fact, in some areas, they were more advanced.
The Vestian Empire quickly formed an alliance with the Azure Empire in the Isles as the independent kingdoms of Arcadia, Beruna, Oros, and Aldemere warred with each other. A whole new era of diplomacy, intrigue, and more began.
Questions remain; where did all of Kerrigor’s divinity go? It hasn’t all been accounted for yet. Will the sun elves continue to expand their empire? What happened to Vandun’s worshippers, and why do they seem to have a new capital city in the Isles? How do the people of the Isles wield magic without divine influence?
The story is still being written.
Comentarios