A Brief History

Thousands of years ago, all lands were one Land and all worlds were one world, and only the Fae walked upon it, truly immortal and godlike in power.

Then at some time mortals joined them – little is known about where they came from or why – and the fae protected and taught them, took them as lovers and friends, enslaved them and bred them for war as pleased them. The nature of the world changed; magic split into three, and the Land broke into many lands.

The houses of the fae went to war with one another, and nearly tore reality apart in their fury. Death came to them where there was no death before, and all but a handful of the houses were reduced to shadows of their old glory. The poles of magic were set in place and the planes of the cosmos were created. The Principalities, empowered and entrusted at the creation to serve as custodians of magic, assumed guardianship of reality.

Mortals inherited the world, bringing forth nations and raising gods to worship. Centuries passed, sometimes in peace and sometimes in turmoil.

From time to time, the fragile peace comes under threat again. In the late 1090s the Nything, the Principality of Destruction, overstepped his duties to hold all magics hostage and had to be destroyed by the combined efforts of the peoples. In the early 1100s, the nearby Empire of the Golden Isles invaded and pillaged the Land, forcing the factions to a parley and truce.

A few years later, an army of invaders from another world – known to scholars as the Plane of Illusion – sought to seize the True Plane and had to be repelled, and the way back sealed, in 1108, with a vast and terrible enchantment. Over the coming years, the spirit of all terror and despair forged an alliance of corrupt nature spirits, werewolves and giants and the legions of the undead to plunge the world into darkness, and was finally defeated by a similarly potent symbol of hope.

In the mid-1110s, the diminished fae returned from hiding to take back the world they saw as rightly theirs. A new fae war erupted, and the ancient race fought itself to extinction, leaving a bare handful of survivors. In the last great battle, at the end of 1119, the magic seal separating Illusion from the True Plane was shattered, fragmenting reality and threatening the destruction of the whole cosmos. At the end of 1123, the peoples assembled a powerful magic device to reform the fractured world, ushering in a new age.

It was not the first time the world was remade, and it shall not be the last. But for now, peace is restored, and it is the dawning of a new age.