Epochs

The world of Ayaria is divided into several different eras. While time does not flow at the same rate everywhere, unless someone is from an Elsewhere the same events tend to have happened in the same order everywhere.

The Fall of Heaven

Something happened in the heavens, before the Hours came to be what they were. They lived in the heavens above the world, but were in contact with others of their kind. Then a great silence fell over all the heavens, and the Hours were alone. Lacking anywhere else to go, they decided to continue their work on the world that would become Ayaria.

In order to spread their magic over the world, they required a sacrifice. They chose one of their own, named Ayaria. She did not want to be sacrificed, but she was. And her essence infused the world with their magic.

The Court of Twelve

The Hours needed a structure to govern themselves with. They settled on a council of twelve, and they called themselves Hours. Each Hour would have their own area of influence, and in times of crisis they would come together to defend themselves.

Little is known of them, and so people's guesses about what went on there and the proper order and heirarchy of things formed the basis of many early religions.

The First Lineages

The first lineages that the Hours made include mundane humans and giants, the former to serve a number of roles and the latter mainly to build their cities.

Beyond those two, what would become known as Shylings were made as well. Shylings have always existed in the world, a broad term that most use to mean monster, but which originally referred to creatures that once had a purpose that is now abandoned or forgotten. What the Hours could not bother to do themselves, they created boutique creatures to do on their behalf.

Piercing the Veil

The Sixth Hour, who above all else longed to return to the rest of their kind, began a plan in secret to try to reconnect with their lost kin. She pierced the veil between this star and all others, and called out into the darkness, trying to summon forth their own kind.

She failed.

The Coming of Artificers

The first Artificers came on a vast ship capable of traversing the heavens. And yet, unlike any that the Hours had ever seen before. The Hours have absolute control over all things made of flesh, even the ability to make machines out of organic things. Yet the Artificers had the opposite: they had total master over the inorganic, even their bodies made of plastic and steel.

The other Hours, not knowing what the Artificers were or the Sixth Hour's secret project, assumed that these were the creatures which blotted out all other stars that were known to them. So the Hours pulled them down from the heavens, that they might make war with them on the land.

The First War

The Hours had the advantage of being in their own domain, of all the resources they could possibly muster, and of being totally united. Yet their foe had a power they could not match even then, and they fought each other to a standstill until both were utterly exhausted.

How long the war lasted could not be calculated, for the Hours made frequent use of their power over time to avert disaster or pitch battles in their favor. Some speculate that there may still be ancient warriors locked in a kind of stasis even now, until something destroys the magic holding them in place.

The Age of Conflict

Back and forth the Hours and Artificers would go. Sometimes at war, sometimes at peace. Only rarely would both sides entirely unite, as the Hours began to gradually turn to factionalism and their united purpose drifting into self-centered pursuits.

The First Elves

It is said that the first elves were made shortly into the Age of Conflict, as the Hours required a more elaborate government to retain control of their creations, and the elves proved more suitable to this than relying solely humans.

The First Vampire

It is thought that around this time The Red Duke was created. Birthed in blood, The Red Duke's first notable act after his creation was to eat his proverbial father, The Fifth Hour.

The War of Legacies

Also called The War of Blots, The Great War, The Last War, and so on. It's the last war between the Artificers and the Hours, as well as the longest and most destructive.

The Fall of Sundale

Sundale was the personal demesne of The Seventh Hour. Sundale was a place of much beauty and prosperity, and always remained as a neutral territory between the Artificers and the other Hours, even in the midst of their past wars. This policy of neutral proved its undoing in The Last War, though. Both sides suspected Sundale of sympathizing with the other, and so both invaded. The once prosperous city was reduced to ruins and endured unfathomable destruction.

In the course of the fighting, the Artificers released a biological weapon that would devastate the Hours' soldiers. Whether or not they realized that it would linger long after the fighting ended, the remnants of the biological weapon gives Sundale its modern name: The Blind Cannibal Mountains.

The Iron Blight

After Sundale fell and both sides retreated from it, The Hours devised their own weapon of mass destruction. Not that they had a dirth of those in the first place. Where The Fall of Sundale involved a weapon that could only target biological targets, The Iron Blight would only target things made of iron or advanced alloys.

Its exact mechanisms are unknown, but its efficacy was not. Unlike The Fall of Sundale, the Hours made no effort to contain their weapon and it spread across the whole of the world. The breakdown of iron from The Iron Blight produces more of the blight, which spreads on contact with more Iron, even affecting bronze and other alloys.

Not many things are known to give Artificers their final death, but The Iron Blight will destroy not only the physical Artificer's body, but their soul as well.

Betrayal

The Eleventh and Twelfth Hours joined with the Artificers, abandoning their former allies. A massive crater marks the site of their death. Their bodies have never been recovered, as the crater remains dangerous even over a thousand years later.

The Valleymen

Valleymen, the last "true" lineage to be made by the Hours, are said to have been made toward the end of The Last War.

The False Gifts

Peace only came after both sides were thoroughly exhausted. The Artificers acknowledged defeat in the war, while the Hours acknowledged the domain of the Artificers. Both sides pledged eternal peace, but as part of these accords the Hours demanded tribute of the Artificers. Or perhaps the Artificers offered their tribute of their own volition. History is unclear here.

What is clear is that the Artificers' gifts were poisoned. Not on the scale of a human lifetime, but on the scale of an Hour's lifetime, it would slowly drive them insane.

The Death of the Gods

Over the next few hundred years, the breakdown of the Hours and their society began to make itself manifest. Until, eventually, they all perished.

The Perversion of Elfkind

Around this time, all latter generations of elves will be changed. No longer merely advanced humans but with a few notable features changed to make them stand out. Their bodies will be changed to fit the aesthetic desires of the Hours, who begin to take on elves not just as advisors or administrators, but as concubines and living aesthetic pieces.

Descent

The Seventh Hour visited the Ninth, at the behest of the Third. The Seventh Hour ate the Ninth. Thus, the Seventh began to be hunted down but managed to flee and remain hidden from his peers for a long time. Especially as the other Hours began to lose their minds or withdraw.

Instead of get in on this action, The Sixth Hour ascended to the heavens for a final time. She left behind her Chalice, but brought everything else of hers with her. Her ultimate fate is unknown.

The Burning of the Thrones

Perhaps realizing the breakdown of his people's social order, or perhaps driven by the madness of his Chalice, The Fourth Hour tried to convene all of the remaining Hours at a great council at a place called Thrones.

What was said there is lost to history. What is known is that the Thrones were destroyed so thoroughly that all that remains of it is the desert around Suzer, an entire continent destroyed and reduced to sand.

Only the Fourth, Seventh and Tenth Hours are known to have survived. The Fourth because he orchestrated it. The Seventh because he fled, but was summarily hunted down by the Fourth and killed elsewhere. The Tenth because he was among his own people and did not attend the summit.

It is known that the Tenth and Fourth Hours had a confrontation shortly afterwards. It is not known if the Tenth joined the Fourth, or was destroyed.

The Last Flight of the Hours

The Fourth Hour ascended to a celestial fortress, which he then used to pilot over the world and reassert the rule of the Hours. For a very long time, he ruled unopposed. The Artificers nearly destroyed by the combined might of all the Hours' resources, the world firmly in the hands of the Fourth's generals and administrators, and the Fourth ruling over a world nearly united in single purpose for the first time.

When he came to assert this dominance over the Valleymen, believing them to still be enslaved, the Valleymen shot his flying castle out of the sky. It is said that The Fourth Hour's fortress fell into the sea, and is now the womb of a thousand kind of monsters waiting to be birthed by its reemergence.

The Red Years

After they killed the last Hour, the Valleymen began to spread out from The Kingdom of Two Valleys. An autocrat named Baal came to power, and began a centuries long campaign of terror and mass enslavement.

Nostrum

For Nostrum, it is said that The Red Years never ended. Only in very recent history have slave raids from The Kingdom of Two Valleys not been rampant, as Nostrum in all its long history has never acquiesced to the demands to allow the Valleymen to trade freely inside its borders.

The Rule of Man

The administrative territories that The Fourth Hour left behind became the new territories of fledging states. Kingdoms, empires, republics, et al began to try to find out how to survive in a world abandoned by their gods. Some found new gods.

Consolidation

The first sign that times were changing came when a shepherd's son named Maxentius managed to conquer Midasgard after over two decades of siege. Midasgard became the capital of a new empire, called The Empyrean Empire.

Within Maxentius's lifetime, he united the whole of the imperial heartland. As far north as the shadow of the Tower; as far east as Sundale; as far south as The Kingdom of Two Valleys; as far west as Arboros.

The Desolation of Arboros

Arboros was a minor kingdom south of the elven dominion. A Changeling came to power there, and massively destabilized the world. The elves came to Midasgard, then both the elven dominion and the empire worked together to eradicate the Changeling. It is said that they found a weapon among the stars which could be targeted from Midasgard. Like an arrow, it fell from the sky and obliterated Arboros. A hundred miles away, doors flew open from the concussive impact of the weapon.

Arboros remains as a land of magical desolation, from which monsters emerge.

The Summers of Blood

Taking advantage of an empire weakened after its long war with Arboros, half of the empire rose in rebellion against the rest. It divided neatly along geographical lines, with the eastern and western half of the empire at war. At first, the emperor saw many early successes before it bogged down along the East River, where the wide river, marshy conditions, and rebel strongholds made it impossible to advance further.

During the civil war, whether as a result of it, Arboros falling, or due to unrelated circumstance is unclear, Blooded began to arise all over the empire. All at once, all over, a magical plague swept the land. Vampires and vampiric creatures began to appear all over, and the empire could no longer function as a single, unified unit. It became, in essence, a number of disunified city-states that rarely saw travel between themselves for fear of the Blooded.

The circumstances forced a compromise, and the two settled. There would then be a system of two co-emperors: one in the west, and one in the east. Gradually, they restored order over the empire.

The Scouring

Not long after Dorian reunited with the empire, Maxentius died. By this point, he had ruled for generations. How exactly he prolonged his life is disputed. He did appoint an heir before his death, but the legitimacy of his appointment was called into question. Lucius, his half-elven son born of an elven concubine, was immediately disputed by the nobility of the palace and several members of Maxentius's family who were born of his first, second, and third wives.

Thus, as the capital struggled to find an emperor that suited them, members of the royal family died in droves. Legionary commanders were largely left off their leash, as the power struggle centered on the top remained at the top for the most part. The eastern half of the empire remained largely uneventful and prospered in this time.

The Scourge of Man

After a granddaughter of Maxentius took to the throne, she began a policy of eradicating elven influence at court. What elves could be enslaved were enslaved, what elves could flee fled, and what elves tried to remain were killed. Eventually, elfkind were forced out of the empire and elven knights who traveled through did so in secrecy.

Despite several attempts over the next few centuries, the Empyreans were never able to successfully invade the elven homeland. In the shadow of the Tower, elves continued to prosper and attempt to influence matters from afar.

The Theologians' War

The empress Donna, after scouring the empire of elven influence, turned her attention to another prickly matter of state. It was unclear early in her rein if she would maintain the same strict policy on theology that Maxentius held, and this ambivalence on the matter encouraged many secret cults to come to the fore.

After baiting the trap through her silence, she sprung it. The theologians were arrested, imperial inquisitors uncovered what cults were still secret, and eradicated those as well. Those who converted to an imperial cult known as The Empyrean Truths, while those who refused to convert were killed en masse.

Erasure was not the only goal. The practical functions of religion were replaced by imperial, secular arms of government. Religious titles and practices were incorporated into the imperial government and structure, with Donna leading a wholesale reorganization of the state.

It is during this time that the Deiform came to be. A class of artifact so immensely powerful that it is said they were the most powerful creations since the fall of the Hours. Entire Deiform Cities were made, and distributed among the most powerful noble houses, cities which never had need for a standing garrison or city wall, so powerful were the magical guardians which protected them.

The Lord-Cardinals' War

Eventually, Donna died. Many emperors, some of note and some totally mediocre, came and went in her absence, some riding the coattails of previous emperors and some proving totally competent. The centuries between The Theologians' War and The Lord-Cardinals' War are considered the high point of Empyrean power, and in this time they established the colonies of Westfal and were by far the largest land empire in the world.

This all came to an end one summer, during the rein of Maxentius VII, when the Lord-Cardinal of the Northwest beget a war with the Lord-Cardinal of the Southwest, and the emperor's light hand allowed the whole empire to spiral into a long, brutal civil war. At the start of the war the emperor boasted twenty legions, twenty thousand men strong. By the end of the war, the empire had a measly five legions at one quarter their strength.

The Black Deal

The Valleyman, taking advantage of the weakened Empyrean Empire, ceased their policy of peaceful trading and began a wholesale invasion of the Empyreans. Led by one Captain Ashenzari, a hundred Valleyman ships burned down Doros and every coastal settlement on the eastern coast of the empire. The Marble Coast, as it had been known, is said to have become a coast of ashes.

Unable to bring a stop to the Valleyman invasion, Empress Tatianna negotiated a peace with the Valleymen. They would allow the Valleymen to openly trade slaves, including Empyrean citizens, where previously they had only been allowed for slaves the Empyreans themselves had captured.

This is also around the time that Nostrum successfully rebelled, and without a navy to contest the small continent's rebellion, the empire's homeland could not mount an invasion of the newly risen kingdom. That, and the Nostrum gods had made their long exodus back from the Empyrean heartland into their home territories, and the Empyreans were so thoroughly trounced by the Valleymen they lacked the infrastructure to recapture the gods.

Hammond's War

The last civil war. A slave named Hammond began a geurilla campaign in the southeast, in the vicinity of where Doros once lay. Like Dorian, Hammond made use of the inhospitable terrain to his advantage while mounting an increasingly large army of former slaves and sympathetic veterans.

Unlike Dorian, Hammond failed. He defeated an entire legion, executing its general, but the next year the same legion reformed itself and mounted a new offensive. Aided by a party of Valleyman mercenaries, they defeated Hammond's army on the field and recaptured all the rebelling slaves.

Later, the same general that defeated Hammond mounted his own rebellion. This time, on the side of abolition. He won that war, but the victory was shortlived. The power of the empire had waned to the point that the capital could not impose its new abolition of slaves on the provinces, and the new emperor was assassinated before he could lead his legions to reassert imperial authority over the provinces.

The Reckoning

The exact reason for the empire's fall remains contested to this day. What is known is the aftermath: Midasgard, the capital, devastated by a sentient blight that consumes any living thing which dares enter the city. The provinces devastated by a resurgence of the Blooded, leaving the empire's heartland uninhabitable to this very day. The last living remnant, its colony of Westfal, still claiming dominion over an empire long dead and buried.

The Fall of Man

With the fall of baser men, other creations of the Hours came to power. Namely, the elves who lie in the shadow of the Tower, and the Kingdom of Two Valleys.

The War of Two Emperors

Westfal, like the Empyreans before them, has a long history of civil wars and internal violence. Widogast, Lord of the Ghastlands, invaded Valeholm. Valeholm called upon the emperor to their aid, but the emperor refused. He gave a legal justification, but all knew the true reason was that the emperor held a marriage alliance with Widoghast and so would benefit from his invasion of Valeholm.

Valeholm and Stormhold were traditionally rivals through much of their history. Stormhold's raiders would march over the mountains into the lowlying Valeholm, and either make off with the fertile valley's riches or be trounced by their landed knights. Thus, it came as a surprise to everyone when Stormhold was the only ally to answer Valeholm's plea. The young lord Artorius called his banners, marched over the mountain, and broke the siege around Kornstadt, capital of Valeholm.

The only surviving noblewoman was a niece of the Lord of Valeholm, Stephanie. Artorius and Stephanie married, uniting the two in alliance. With Widoghast's power broken, he retreated back to the Ghastlands. With Valeholm and Stormhold united, they ruled in peace for some years. Songs sang of the Emperor of the South, but Artorius never made claim to the whole of the empire until the emperor died and was replaced by a much younger, brasher, insolent ruler. Insulted by the challenges to his house's legitimacy, the emperor made impossible demands of his two vassal houses, demands which were in violation of imperial law.

The resulting war, which lasted over a decade, saw Artorius's house ascend to the throne for one generation. The aftermath of the war saw lasting changes to the empire that remain in place to this day.

Settling Former Arboros

An elven exile, identity unknown, took her followers and fled not through the Forest of Exiles into Westfal, but instead into the desert that eastern Arboros became. Unable to survive there and with her followers dying in droves, in desperation she attempted to summon forth something, anything, that could teach her people to survive.

Thus, Saltpetre was born. Arid nomads taught the elven exiles how to survive, and a new civilization was born.

The Vanishing

Slowly, over the course of decades, things began to shift. The sun grew dimmer, winter longer, and the things in the world began to die. What caused this is still largely not known.

The Sun

The sun grew cold. It remained in the sky, but distant, dim. Crops produced a worse yield, mass famines were rampant, and the vast civilizations that had been were gradually eroded away into nearly nothing. Eventually, the whole world began to freeze until only the northern reaches of Nostrum and a scant few other places were left unfrozen in the summer.

The Elves

Elves gradually receded into their own northern territories, their loss noted but rarely missed by others.

The Valleymen

They went on one last, grand excursion into the world. A massive slave raid into Nostrum, the Narrows, even betraying their ancient peace with Westfal. After that last raid, the Valleymen were not seen again outside Cthonia for generations.

The Thaw

After the Breaking of the Tower in the north, the cold seemed to gradually recede. The landscape of the world changed as glaciers melted, new valleys made and new rivers born.

Settling Turia

The Narrows were completely abandoned during the vanishing, to the point that entire cities were utterly devoid of life. It became easy to take up their settlement and begin to reinhabit them, including what would become Turia. They negotiated a peace with the Valleymen after they emerged, but that peace is tenuous at best.

The Rise of Nostrum

Redwine never fell, remaining one of the few bastions of civilization as the world froze over. The rest of the continent did not fare so well, being totally abandoned beside for a few wandering tribes. Now Luten-Augusburg has been rebuilt, but two-thirds of the continent remain wilderness.

The Return of the Emperor

Much of the empire's interior remained inhabited, but isolated by the vast wilderness that gradually eroded the civilizations of old. Eventually, an emperor named Maxentius XVII mounted a vast expedition across Westfal, rebuilding roads, renegotiating old terms of fealty, and uniting the disparate peoples once more. More than one war of conquest was waged in this time too, of course.

The Elven Diaspora

Their power broken, their caste system destroyed, elfkind were forced from their ancient homeland in which they lived since the rein of the Hours. Not by outside pressure, but by a mass exodus of the lower castes as they fled from their Elders, most of whom died when their precious Tower collapsed.