World History
Contents
The Prehistory
This will be added to the article as it is revealed, over time.
The Age of Lost Time: 0-1261
The First Age, or the Age of Lost Time, was a fairly benign period of history, though it reigned over an equally long and uncertain period of mortal development. The Age of Lost Time began with the synthesis of the first mortal race by Y'shendra, the Hyr'norai. Born in a grove somewhere within the southern portions of what is now the Daravinic Empire, these first Elves were shepherded by the Gods, as well as the Eldashan who they had created to guide them. They learned to hunt, to feed, to build, to wander. They were taught to walk and to communicate, to share emotions through words and the language of their form alike. Early literacy appeared in these days as well, ancient Elves communicating through runes and paintings inscribed on cave walls, or carvings on trees. By the end of the first lifetime of many of these old Elves, the first mortal race had been made fully functional, the drivers of change in a newly formed world.
Not long after, this process of being shepherded through the world was one the Elves reciprocated onto others. Humans were created in the year 347, and the unified Elves were given the task of teaching these strange, short-lived creatures the ways in which they might interact with the world. During this time, nearly all sapient life on Atharen resided in the region of Mornoth, the vast majority of them wandering as nomads, settled into a Paleolithic lifestyle. Very late into the First Age, in the year 1155, the eternal city of Vinasra Ilan was built, signaling to many in the region the end of the nomadic centuries that had preceded it. Fine accounts of this Age vary widely, though Daravinic scholars believe it to be the period in which men and Elves learned to harness fire, build tools and domesticate beasts. It was a primitive era, though Elves often envisage it to have been a period of magic and myth, with countless stories of old Elven heroes that once felled great beasts on land and sea.
The Age of Elves: 1262-3389
What truly primed the Second Age in the eyes of mortalkind was the birth of Elven monolithic nationalism. While most accounts from these periods vary and are deemed highly unreliable, there are many accounts of this period noting that the Elves felt their homeland to be under threat from invasive forces. While many within Daravin wished to continue a peaceful coexistence with the other races, the fiercely conservative Ald’norai believed their homeland was being stolen by the growing number of humans, many of whom had come west from Calanon. In response to this, Elven city-states began to raze, sack and enslave cities led by other races, while focusing on their own Empire-building to ensure they might retain their superior hand.
Mornoth's malign history began with the Elven fixation on growth and domination. They moved deep into Mornoth's corridors, settling cities along the rivers of what is now Daravin and Sil-Elaine, forging gilded principalities built on the backs of human slaves. This period of Elven expansionism began in the 1500s, with many of these realms the first of their kind. Systems of government and codes of law were constructed; city-states fought in competition and triumphed every so often, heralding Counts and then Duchies, and eventually something much more. A millennia passed, and then a millennia and a half. Little changed but small fluctuations of power, as civilization built, magic was learned and culture slowly evolved. From huts came wooden overlooks, then stone castles, then the marble towers Elves once treaded on to look down upon man.
Riala Elaine
In the year 2849, Riala Elaine was born in what is now the city of Arlain, though at the time it was Vinasra Ilan, the first of Mornoth’s cities; a center of culture and wealth, covered in flawless white towers and ziggurats. Riala was born to a powerful boble family, the patrons of wide farming estates that surrounded the city’s walls. Despite her wealth, the Elven woman was always rife with a deep ambition. It is said that early on that she knew how to stun the Court into submission as easily as she could rule them into action, dazzling and inspiring the courtiers of Vinasra until she had built a network powerful enough to take the city unilaterally as hers. Upon coming to power, her armies marched across the Amoras and Vinasir rivers, sacking countless cities and principalities in her name. All free human settlements that remained were subjugated and transformed into client slave states, ensuring hegemonic Elven dominance.
At this time, the Elves of Central Mornoth were known as the Ald’norai, or Ashen Elves, after their fiery ember-colored eyes, their ash white hair and their proficiency with a Pyromancy seemingly unique to them. They were divided into several Duchies across Mornoth’s center and its west, and with Riala becoming a powerful Duchess at the heart of Elven politics, many great enemies of hers were quick to rise. In the early half of the second century, the Elven states were constantly embroiled in war, mired in a competition to expand upon old magics and advance their arcane knowledge to surpass one another in war. Due to the Ald’norai mastery of flame, much of the countryside was often charred in the wake of frequent and gruesome battles, with many cities following this route into destruction by the end of these vicious wars.
Yet at the end, Riala was victorious, a justification for her violent conquest that tore the Elven realms asunder and costed millions of lives. Vinasra was renamed to Elaine Indorin - the origin of its present name - and it became the capital of the Kingdom of Silor, the world’s leading nation for centuries to follow.
Elves lived long - perhaps even longer back then, and this allowed Riala to forge an orderly Kingdom, more and more developed each coming decade. Yet by the end, she was dissatisfied. In her mind, she had failed to reach her goals. Despite constant, near-decisive conflict with the remaining Hyr'norai in an effort to subdue the last of her Elven peers, she had failed to gain much ground in Calanon and even Mornoth had seen some instability at the hand of human slave revolts. She needed longer, or maybe she couldn’t bear to lose what she had built — and so she indulged in magics that offered eternal life.
For some time, seemingly having developed immortality, Riala was given God-like reverence by her subjects. She offered the same gift to her most loyal of soldiers and courtiers, her vassals and then more and more of her people, and for a century Silor thrived in a golden age unlike any before it. But as it is known to scholars of this time, this fixation on immortality held adverse consequence to her realm.
Wraedan punished her, twisting his Black Sigil to that of a gruesome punishment, a curse that culled those who had defied death for too long. Riala died in the year 3364, her skin charred black, soul burning her from within. She was the first of her kind to be culled in this way, though the Sigil rapidly swept over the majority of Silor’s political and military order over the following years, leading to apocalyptic hysteria and civil unrest that culminated in a series of civil wars.
Silor's Collapse
A year after Riala's death saw the total collapse of Silor's stability. The slave uprisings of yore became a real threat during this time — and it is from these riots that Lorien was born, with disparate factions of rebelling slaves fleeing north to find freedom. Beyond that, an even greater fracturing of Elven society occurred simultaneously; the Hyr'norai, a traditionalist sect of Elves dedicated to preserving their old ways within the greater “Ald’norai” society, broke away in the midst of the catastrophic civil wars and the plummeting morale of their kin. They had warned against adopting means of immortality which might defy the Gods, and as they had been correct in their warnings, the Hyr'norai felt vindicated in leaving.
This group of Elves most often occupied soldierly and marshal roles, and so the strength of the Elven armies plummeted in their absence. Ethnic divisions formed from within, and old 'Kingdoms' now encompassed by Silor sought independence within the carnage. The Elven war-machine became utterly divided.
From the realm that once encompassed the Straits of Adena, known as Mithira, a vast army of humans washed over Silor’s north, razing cities to the ground; culling Elves by the millions in a vengeance two thousand years in the making.
An upstart man named Valen Dres led the charge, a charismatic Draedan of Valteran's who rallied millions to his cause; an army unlike any the world had ever known. An army filled with bitter rage, hatred, and a need for vindication. Silor’s armies sluggishly marched to meet him, but were quickly overwhelmed - in their depleted state - by the sheer number of followers he had amassed, and his own arcane ability.
Elaine Indorin was taken, and in the following years, a mass exodus of Ald’norai to what is now Sil-Elaine quickly became a genocide, as the humans of Mornoth partook in a blood rage unlike anything witnessed before or since.
Silor had fallen. The end of the Age of Elves came at hand, more than half a millennia after becoming a monument to what followed.
The Age of Tyranny/The Age of Man: 3390-3962
While the non-human population of Atharen typically refers to the Third Age as the Age of Tyranny, many within the region of Mornoth, and particularly in Daravin, refer to it as ‘the Age of Man’. Mornoth carried, until this time, much of the world’s foundational history due to its status as the homeland of the Elves. Yet due to the imperious nature of the Ashen Elves, who now called themselves Sil'norai, humans had been subjected to thousands of years of chattel slavery. With the conquest of Silor by Valen Dres, the younger races had taken the mantle of supremacy from their old masters and had begun to build their world anew.
The Unbroken Empire formed, and then expanded greatly. Mithira, Daravin and Sil-Elaine were the first of its provinces, but unlike the Sil'norai who had failed to expand deep into Calanon, the Empire was widely successful in its attempts. Humans thrived in Daravin, building new cities along the province’s rivers and taking hold over the great Elven cities of old. Not long into the Third Age, in the year 3477, Genteven was founded — though it would sit as an inconsequential trade port for nearly six hundred years.
Lorien unified not long after, forming a formidable Kingdom to the north that the Empire would never be able to topple.
As for the Elves...
Some Lord Elves call this time the ‘Time of Shame’. In order to assimilate the Sil'norai into productive members of the Empire, they were allowed to keep their monarchy, the descendants of Queen Riala. They were invited to attend court in Adena, and were educated in affairs necessary to administer their people in the changing times. By all accounts, Valen had been good to his former slavers, even though a number of the Elven nobility loathed him. Elves, again, lived long and many still remembered the conquest of their home — their fall from grace. And of course, the genocide against them to remove them from Daravin, a place many viewed as the true Elven homeland.
But they let their grudges linger, and never deigned to act on them. Not four centuries into the Age of Man, this generation of begrudging Elves had all been claimed by age, and many of the younger ones were far keener to the intrigue of human court and the Common tongue. The Elven language began to change as did their culture, and the whole region adopted a single form of currency - the farthing - to tighten their ever more entangled market. Elves prospered again, and the old city of Veranor - capital of Sil-Elaine - became a bustling hub of trade, education and industry with the coming of Imperial technological advances.
Time passed. Centuries before anyone fully grasped the instability of a global Empire ran by a self-styled God. Valen Dres’ influence over the world’s affairs grew, but so too did his roster of foes. The ruling family of Lorien, the Empire’s main rival at the time, was a house governed by a historical line of Draedan with great prominence in global affairs. Partly with their backing, hidden deals were made with the internal nobility of Valen Dres’ realm, and a poison of ambition and envy seeped into the foundations of the Empire.
Corruption built up. A political and sociological breakdown followed, leading to increased tensions between the Empire’s many races, regions and ethnic groups. Many internal and external forces used these divisions to their advantage, and quickly the satin carpet was pulled from beneath the Emperor’s feet. In the midst of all this he had sought the secrets to full, incomparable divinity, and he was unbearably close. He and the Empire's Council, a collection of eighteen other Draedan, had begun to construct a weapon capable of killing the Living Gods, invading their planes and ripping apart their realms. When this secret was discovered by his courtiers and subsequently spread to his vassals, a rage of rebellions rose to take his head before he could crush his enemies beneath his heel. Before, essentially, it was too late.
But it was too late. Not because Valen had met the Godhood he so desired, but because he had gone far enough to where he refused to ever go back. Venadak confronted him directly, one of the few times the God ever saw fit to intervene, to compromise Valen's ascent into divinity. A long battle ensued, twelve Draedan descending upon the Divine Creator. In the midst of the conflict, it is said that the Emperor fired his fledgling weapon built against the Gods, and directly compromised Venadak's ability to stabilize the planes. Raw Magic flooded through the cracks as he reeled, desperately holding their reality together. The world was flooded with Corruption, Adena - Valen's capital - at its epicenter. The reaction from this sequence of events was horrifying and immediate, but also very long-lived. The Empire collapsed faster than any before it, and left an untenable scar upon the land that bled into the veins of every mortal and the sap of every tree.
The Age of Ashes: 3963-4499
The event that forged the Age of Ashes is coined many different things, across cultures and religions. Most ardent of the Path would go on to call it 'the Fall', Elves 'Noveron' - or the Sundering - and later, in the halls of Daravin's Omen, it would be called 'the First Rapture', or 'the Warning'. Most, across the world, call it the Bleeding of Venadak, or in shorter terms, the Bleeding.
The Bleeding became the core premise through which the Age of Ashes was built, and recognized. In the wake of that cataclysmic event, Mornoth was transmogrified from the most populous and developed region in Atharen to a wasteland of decay, agonizing suffering, infertility, invasive entities and a poison that had quickly nestled into nearly the entire region. The immediate impact was obvious: virtually everyone in Mithira at the time, tens of millions of people, died within an instant of the Bleeding’s descent. Sil-Elaine lost similar scores and around ninety percent of its population, nearly performing a total genocide of the Sil'norai race within a span of days and weeks. Daravin faced a loss of nearly half of its population, and the decimation of tens of ancient cities situated upon the Kingdom’s interior rivers. More than that, it was blighted forever after; as one goes closer to the borders of Mithira and Sil-Elaine, they find the waters growing noxious and the fields producing more rot than bounty.
Lorien, within Mornoth, was impacted the least, with Hollows mostly unhindered by the Bleeding and the mountains and hills separating most of their cities from the Bleeding’s initial impact, along with their distance. This spelled an ironic golden age for Lorien and the rest of Atharen, these countries becoming free of Unbroken rule, the influx of corruption a reasonable price to pay.
The Sil'norai were beaten. The high spires of Veranor flung to the streets below, their cities were razed and the majority of their race became infected with terminal illnesses or infertility. Bubbling tumors and aberrations of skin and flesh endemically spread through the forms of the Elves, and the vast majority of all Sil'norai died, particularly in Sil-Elaine’s north. After the Bleeding, a faction of upstart courtiers became Dranoch to survive, quickly culling those who defied them and completely embedding themselves into the realm’s power structure. This group - the Court of Dusk - proceeded to envelop Sil-Elaine into a tyrannical rule that it has endured since.
The Age of Ashes was transformational and destructive for Mornoth, more than any other part of the world. There is still a sense of loss, sorrow and anger that lives in nearly all of the region’s inhabitants from that time, the Sil'norai most of all, brought utterly to their knees.
The Age of Industry: 4500-4622
The current age has been one of relative peace across the continent of Atharen, with few international conflicts in the last three centuries. Mornoth has been slowly rebuilding since the slow regression of the Bleeding’s effects, though with the monumental rise of the Omen in recent centuries many believe it has gone down a frightful and shrouded path.
The Age of Industry is named for the rise of the Grisic Empire, and the industrialization seen within Grisic and Lorien. With living standards rapidly evolving in those two, quickly developing nations, Atharen has begun to see wide-scale colonization to a historic degree, and with so many nations beginning to or fully recovering from the Bleeding, many are eager to try their hand at unification, expansion, and war.
