Iphexar · Cosmology
Cosmology
What theologians, scholars, and astronomers have pieced together about how the world came to be — and what divine forces have shaped it since.
The Celestria Cycle
The calendar. Twelve months, seven days, four seasons. And the festivals that mark them.
Gods & Religion
The Old Gods, the eight broadly acknowledged Modern Gods, and how religion actually works in the 4th Age.
The Cosmic Timeline
What follows is the scholarly and theological reconstruction of how the world came to be — assembled from divine records, ancient texts, and the accumulated inference of the Celestrian Observatory. Presented here is what can be reasonably claimed. The full picture, as any honest scholar will admit, remains elusive.
Era I
The Age Before
Before the world as mortals know it, there was something older. Theological traditions across Midralis describe a prior state: formless, pre-divine, the absence that makes a world possible. What existed before the first gods is not knowable from within the world they produced.
Era II
The Primordials — Before the Gods
Before the gods that mortals pray to, there were older beings: vast, elemental, more principle than person. The Celestrian Observatory records scattered references to these entities across the oldest available texts. They are not worshipped. They are barely named. What they were and whether they persist in any form is a matter of deep scholarly dispute and no practical consensus.
Era III
The Age of Ascendance — Old Gods Emerge
The Old Gods emerged from the confluence of deep forces and the accumulated spiritual weight of the earliest civilizations. They were fewer than the Modern Gods, vaster in individual power, and more capable of direct action in the mortal world. Solara was among the earliest and most widely worshipped: an Old God of solar radiance whose presence is still felt, quite literally, every day.
Era IV
The Celestial Schism — The Divine War
What scholars call the Celestial Schism was a war among the divine, its causes debated, its consequences undeniable. Many Old Gods fell or were destroyed. Some were corrupted into what became the first Devils and Demons. Solara made the final sacrifice: she became the Sun itself — a permanent transformation that placed her beyond the reach of the corruption that had consumed other Old Gods, because she was no longer a person in any sense that corruption could touch. She still exists. She is the Sun. She simply cannot be spoken with anymore.
Era V
The Worlds Divide — Three Realms
The catastrophic peak of the Divine War produced what theologians describe as the separation of three derivative worlds from a single origin. The exact mechanism of this division is one of the deepest unresolved questions in Midralian cosmology — but its result is observable: three distinct realms, each carrying the character of the forces that shaped it at the moment of separation.
Era VI
The Divine Truce — Gods Withdraw
With the Divine War concluded, the surviving Old Gods brokered a truce. The Devils and Demons were confined to the Six Hells. And the gods — both those who survived the war and those who would emerge afterward — ceased to act directly in the mortal world. They could influence, inspire, and be present through their worshippers, but not intervene directly. This is not a matter of theological debate: it is simply what is observable. The gods do not reach down and change things. They haven’t for thousands of years.
Era VII
The Elemental Planes Materialize
In the centuries after the Divine Truce, the Elemental Planes materialized within the Mortal Sphere. Scholars believe they are derivatives of older cosmic forces, distorted by the violence of the Divine War. From them arose the Elemental Lords — beings of immense power whose nature and intent would become catastrophically clear at Year 0. The canonical planes are Ignifer, Aeolynth, Geolithra, Marivar, Arboria, and Ferronex.
Year 0
The Elemental Cataclysm
The Elemental Lords launched their assault on Midralis. The dragons who had served as celestial guardians of the Mortal Sphere were pushed to near-extinction defending it. The combined effort of dragons, mortal civilizations, and champions empowered by the Modern Gods defeated the Elemental Lords — at total cost. Continents shifted. Oceans moved. Old Midralis was remade into Neo Midralis. Year 0 is this moment. All Midralian history is counted from it.
New Age
Modern Gods Ascendant — Year 1 N.A. onward
In the power vacuum following both catastrophes, Modern Gods emerged from mortal belief — less vast than Old Gods, more numerous, more personally responsive to the needs of the communities that shaped them. They are the gods most mortals pray to in the current era. They cannot act directly. They are aware of this. They are present anyway.
Three Worlds
Scholars and theologians across Midralis agree on the existence of three distinct realms, each real, each dangerous in its own way, each separated from the others by barriers that are occasionally, under specific conditions, crossable.
Midralis
The Mortal Realm
The world mortals were born into. Shaped by four thousand years of civilizations building on each other’s ruins. Neither paradise nor ruin — something in between, which is perhaps the most honest thing that can be said about it.
Veraldié
The Feywilds
A realm of extraordinary beauty and concentrated power. Home of the Åelvarin, from whose lineage all Åels of Midralis descend. The Fey Migration brought many of its people to Midralis — some fleeing something within Veraldié itself, some drawn by connections to the mortal world. What exactly they were fleeing is a question that tends to produce uncomfortable answers.
Xum
The Shadow Domain
A realm of twisted forces and corrupted power. Its relationship to Veraldié is structurally close, they share an origin, in theological terms, which is one of the reasons Veraldié’s gradual darkening has been the subject of concerned scholarship. Most mortals know Xum primarily as a name for things that come from somewhere deeply wrong.
“She does not love us. She does not hate us. She simply keeps the stars in their places, and in doing so she makes possible every act of love and hate that we perform beneath her sky.”
— Sister Vaenne, Celestrian Observatory, Keldern