Ages of Urd#

Every age of Urd ends with somebody breaking something. I'd like to know what we're going to break.

An archivist of the Grand Library of Crecia

The short version
The gods made Urd and filled it with peoples. Then they made mankind, lost Ettephemone, and went to war over her, with the kingdoms of Menes and Narsis fighting it for them. The War of Souls buried Narsis, burned Menes and broke the Everspark, and the survivors built the provinces on the pieces. Plague, the Spire and the rise of mankind brought Sedia to where it is now: 1512 AWS, the first year of the Age of Commerce.

Age1
The Age of Peace
31801 to 1 BB
Age2
The Breaking
0 to 2144 TB
Age3
The Age of Magic
2145 to 3117 TB
Age4
The War of Souls
3118 to 3180 TB
Age5
The Age of Man
0 to 1512 AWS
Age6
The Age of Commerce
1512 AWS, now

Counting the years#

Years before mankind are counted back from its making: BB, before the Breaking, so 26000 BB is long before 1000 BB. From the making of mankind the years count forward (TB). The Age of Man started the count again at 0 AWS, After the War of Souls, from the night the Everspark broke. It is the date everyone uses now. 0 AWS was 3180 TB.

The scholars keep the old counts. Everyone else says 1512 and means now.

The ages#

The Age of Peace#

31801 to 1 BB

It began with Lythantos, whose self split with the spark of life into two more: Dekkashraen and Ettephemone. Each of the three made subjects in their own image. Ettephemone made the celestials, Dekkashraen the infernals, and Lythantos the thirteen Ancients, who were given the perfect blend of both powers and the secrets of all magic.

The world was Ettephemone’s garden, and in the long peace the gods filled it with peoples. The first city on Sedia was Amone, in the lowlands that are Menusia now. It stood before any people but the celestials, the infernals and the Ancients, and the three came nearer the world there than they ever have since. The elves, the sprites and the pixies were made at Amone.

Around the making of the dwarves and the orcs it went wrong. Making them took more of the three than anything before, and Amone bent under it the way the world bends wherever a god comes close: the jungle grew over the city in a season, its hours ran crooked, and its old turned to dust. The three learned they couldn’t come near the world without breaking it. So each poured a sliver of itself into a shape Urd could bear, an avatar, and their servants set the First Seals to hold the gods themselves at a distance, so that only the avatars would pass. It was the avatars who walked among the peoples after that, and the peoples never learned to tell them from the gods.

The servants left Amone to the jungle and built Menus on the high plateau above it, a city the celestials, the infernals and the Ancients ran together, each keeping the others in balance. Menus stood for twenty thousand years, and the avatars lived there.

31801 BB: Urd is made.
about 30000 BB: The celestials, the infernals and the Ancients. Amone, the first city.
about 27000 BB: The first of the other magical creatures.
about 26000 BB: The elves, sprites and pixies.
about 21000 BB: The dwarves and the orcs. Amone is lost to the jungle, the first avatars are made, the First Seals are set and Menus is built.
about 1000 BB: The under-races: goblins, trolls, kobolds and gnomes.

The Breaking#

0 to 2144 TB

At the end of the Age of Peace, at Menus, Lythantos and Ettephemone made mankind through their son Roahn, who was meant to unite the races by passing on the love his parents gave him. Mankind bred faster than any people before it, lived shorter lives, and could make a home anywhere.

Soon after, Ettephemone’s avatar was gone. Lythantos searched Urd for her and could not find her. When he asked Urd where she was, the world wailed for its mother. When he asked who had killed her, Urd named his brother, and told him of Dekkashraen’s jealousy.

After that everything moved faster. Mankind outgrew Menus in a few generations and went north, and over the centuries its towns grew into the kingdom of Esthar. Lythantos’s avatar went with them. Over the two thousand years that followed, the celestials, the infernals and the Ancients disappeared from Urd one by one, and the half-races grew up among mankind. Of the avatars, only the brothers’ were left.

Without its makers Menus ran down. Its water came up to the plateau through great aqueducts and mechanisms the Ancients built, and when the last of them left, the aqueducts broke. The mechanisms didn’t stop. They still pull the water up and spill it into the city, and on the night they broke, the lower city of Menus flooded with its people still in it. The water has never gone down. The survivors went north to Esthar, and what Menus knew went under with it.

0 TB: Mankind is made at Menus, and Ettephemone disappears.
the first centuries: Mankind goes north, and its towns grow into Esthar.
0 to 100 TB: The half-races first appear.
0 to 2144 TB: The celestials, infernals and Ancients disappear.
about 2144 TB: The last of the Ancients leaves, the aqueducts of Menus break, and its lower city floods.

The Age of Magic#

2145 to 3117 TB

The celestials, the infernals and the Ancients were gone, but what they knew had stayed behind, much of it under the water in Menus. Mankind’s oldest kingdom, Esthar, kept its capital where Lythantos’s avatar lived, and its mages, diving and digging for what Menus left, learned to work the arts of the Ancients, the celestials and the infernals together. Nobody has managed it since.

Far to the north, in a valley at the foot of the Jewall mountains, the kingdom of Narsis stood on the shore of a lake, under a peak the dwarves called the Sister. Narsis kept Dekkashraen’s faith and learned the same arts.

The two kingdoms fought more than once. Around 2900 TB a war commander named Menes, which is the old name Menus worn down by Estharian mouths, broke an army of Narsis, and Esthar took his name: for the rest of the age it was the Kingdom of Menes, and its capital the city of Menes. Families still claim his line, and most of their papers are forged.

about 2900 TB: Menes breaks an army of Narsis, and Esthar takes his name.

The War of Souls#

3118 to 3180 TB

The War of Souls was the brothers’ war. Lythantos went to war against Dekkashraen for Ettephemone, and the Kingdom of Menes and Narsis fought it for them. Their armies and their people were what the brothers spent on each other. With Ettephemone’s avatar gone there was nobody either brother would listen to, and in sixty-two years neither of them stopped.

Nearly all of it was fought on the farmland between the two kingdoms. Both sides used the old arts there until the ground gave way, and that is Mellowdeep Marsh. The magic is still in it: lightning out of a clear sky, lanterns that burn cold, an hour that happens twice. The dead never quite left either. Some still walk the causeways looking for their companies, and most of the lights the peat cutters call will-o-wisps are soldiers who don’t know the war is over.

Ritkus, King of Menes, never wanted the war. He fought it because Lythantos’s avatar lived in his city, and he spent most of his reign trying to end it. His mages didn’t wait for him. Near the end of the war they broke the Sister and brought it down into the valley of Narsis, and the city and its lake were buried under the mountain. The broken root of the Sister is Darkchasm, and Tharsis stands on the rest.

The army of Narsis was still at Mellowdeep, with no home to go back to. It came south to the walls of Menes, and Ritkus opened the gates. Some say he did it out of pity, to end the war with mercy. Others say Dekkashraen’s will was in him. Either way the army and the turncoats inside the walls burned the city for eleven days, and only the inner walls and the Palace on its hill held. What’s left inside those walls is still called the Inner City.

Lythantos’s avatar was in the Grand Temple when the gates opened. In his rage he reached out of the world, through space and through time, took hold of his brother, and unmade them both. The Everspark, the crystal staff that held him to Urd, couldn’t hold what he did and burst into nine pieces. Its light was seen from every corner of Sedia, and the years are counted from that night.

The Exuvae teach that Lythantos reached out of the world to find his brother. The Rift Watch thinks something on the other side noticed him reaching, and that the point of dark light over the Scar is where it’s still looking in. Some say he reached back in time as well, to the night Ettephemone was lost, which is why no two stories of her death agree.

3118 TB: The War of Souls begins.
late in the war: The mages of Menes bring the Sister down on Narsis.
3180 TB: Ritkus opens the gates of Menes, the city burns, and the Everspark breaks.

The Age of Man#

0 to 1512 AWS

Nobody won. Under the mountain, the last of Narsis’s army went down into the halls beneath their buried city, and their god never came for them. That’s why they’re called the spawn Dekkashraen forsook.

In the ruins of Menes the ground slipped the way Mellowdeep’s does, the dead wouldn’t stay down, and sickness came up out of the ash pits. Over the next two centuries most of the survivors left. Most crossed the Plains of Sedia to Crecia, Esthar’s old trading post on the coast, where Lady Erzabet Vharmas brought them to order. Jewall, high in its mountains, took in nobody: nobody from the ruins could climb that far. Parties carried the nine pieces of the Everspark out of the ruins, and wherever one was set down a province grew. Only the Inner City and the Palace never emptied.

That founding is the Reformation. Tharsis came first: within a few decades of the fall, Tharvol Sisko led survivors up onto the fallen mountain over Narsis and built there. By about 250 AWS every province had its great city. The Reformation gave Sedia its cities and the ranks of citizenship it still keeps. Magic was outlawed for what it had done. The old arts and artifacts, even those the gods had made, were destroyed where they could be and buried or hidden where they couldn’t. That, more than any treaty, was the end of the war.

Around 420 AWS trade between the great cities brought plague, and it stayed for seventy years. Nothing the law allowed could stop it, so the law gave way: the ban on magic was lifted, and around 475 AWS the clerical spire was founded to heal what it could. Fifteen years later the mages founded their own spire, the Maginaerum Arcanum, and put the plague down almost at once. Its magic was careful and weak next to the old arts, and the Spire meant it to be: it forbade the use of spirit and enforced its rules with real fervor. Around 890 AWS, as people came to trust magic again, the Spire became a college as well as an order.

The old races were slow to notice, but mankind’s inventions changed Sedia. Over fifteen centuries mankind took the upper hand in numbers and importance and stopped being the young race that knew nothing: it pushed technology, politics and society forward, and most of the people who hold power became human.

0 AWS: The Everspark breaks. Survivors flee the ruins of Menes across the Plains of Sedia to Crecia.
in the first decades: Tharsis is founded, the first province raised after the fall.
by about 250 AWS: Every province has its great city, raised around a piece of the Everspark.
about 420 to 490 AWS: The Seventy-Year Plague. The ban on magic is lifted.
about 475 AWS: The clerical spire is founded.
about 490 AWS: The Maginaerum Arcanum is founded and puts down the plague.
about 890 AWS: The Spire becomes a college as well as an order.
about 1400 to 1430 AWS: The gnomes leave the mines of Jewall for the Gnomish Refuge Camp.

The Age of Commerce#

1512 AWS, now

The age you play in has only just begun. Trade routes are opening across the continent and down into the ruins of Esthar, Crecia’s explorers are buying ships, and the provinces are richer and better connected than they have been since the Reformation. Whatever this age breaks, it hasn’t broken it yet.

Before this, and after#

A common belief holds that Urd has done all this before: that every age begins and ends with three powerful beings who join hands to seal what was and start what comes next. Followers of Ettephemone believe she will rise again and take the hands of the two who brought chaos to Urd. Nobody has asked the other two.

Anything old on Urd has something older under it. Amone became Menus and Menus became Menes, fables became legends and legends became myths, and most people telling the stories couldn’t say which city they mean. The scholars can’t always either.