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.