Volume I — The Iphexar Setting
Iphexar
A world over four thousand years past the catastrophe that remade it. Two fundamental forces. Four ages of civilization. Gods who withdrew from direct intervention long ago. Institutions that regulate what they struggle to fully understand. And something spreading across the land that nobody in authority seems able to explain.
What Kind of World Is This?
Iphexar is a high fantasy world built on the premise that power has structure and structure has consequences. Two fundamental forces — Prisma, which belongs to the world, and Spira, which belongs to souls — underlie everything that practitioners do. They do not mix. They do not simplify. They demand entirely different things from the people who wield them, and the tension between a world that can be mapped and a soul that cannot is one of the central dynamics of every story set here.
It is also a world in which the institutions that govern daily life are sincere in their origins and complicated in their present state. The Concordiax was founded by survivors of catastrophe who wanted to prevent its recurrence. The Celestrian Observatory was built to keep the sky in order and became the closest thing to a universally trusted neutral institution. The Shardbinders were created at the moment the world nearly broke — and have been mythologized and marginalized ever since. The gap between what institutions were built for and what they have become is the political landscape of the 4th Age.
“History in Midralis is not neutral. It is written by institutions, filtered by survivors, and shaped by forces that have never been named in any official record.”
— History of Midralis, Preface — v2.2Three Things That Make Iphexar Distinct
The World at a Glance
The mortal realm is Midralis — shaped by four thousand years of civilizations building on each other’s ruins. It is divided between two primary landmasses: Auridia, where the dominant institutions of the 4th Age are headquartered, and Kyou, where the Hino Federation of States maintains its own path. Floating landmasses called Ephyria drift above the world, and the Cimmerian Depths descend in layers beneath the surface. The current era is somewhere in the 4th Age, more than four thousand years after the catastrophe that remade the world.
Beyond Midralis lie the Feywilds of Veraldié — a realm of extraordinary beauty and power, whose inhabitants occasionally find their way to Midralis — and darker places that most people prefer not to name directly. Twenty-two ancestries inhabit this world. Hundreds of languages are spoken in it. And the calendar runs on a 366-day cycle maintained by the Celestrian Observatory, named the Celestria Cycle after the stellar deity who keeps the heavens in order.