History
The Four Ages
Four named ages across four thousand years of recorded New Age history. The eras they describe are real enough.
1st Age
The 1st Age
0 – 1400 N.A.
The 1st Age is the age of aftermath. Survivors of the Elemental Cataclysm faced a world remade — new coastlines, shifted continents, destabilized elemental planes still finding their post-Cataclysm configuration. The Shardbinders and Worldkeepers, having just fought the war that ended Old Midralis, transitioned from combatants to peacekeepers and began the work of establishing the knowledge infrastructure that Neo Midralis would need.
Year 0
The Elemental Cataclysm
The Elemental Lords launch their assault on Midralis. The dragons who served as celestial guardians of the Mortal Sphere are pushed to near-extinction defending it. The combined effort of dragons, mortal civilizations, and champions empowered by the Modern Gods defeats the Elemental Lords — at total cost. Continents shift. Oceans move. Old Midralis is remade into Neo Midralis. Year 0 is this moment. Everything is counted from it.
~200 N.A.
Celestrian Observatory Founded
The loose collegial associations of surviving Prismaturge practitioners produce new Chromatic Current maps from scratch and formalize into what will eventually become the Ninefold Conservatory. The Celestrian Observatory is formally established around Year 200 N.A., providing the astronomical stable point the new calendar system requires and beginning the institutional tradition of neutral record-keeping that defines it in the current age.
~200–700 N.A.
The Shardbinder and Worldkeeper Transition
The Shardbinders and Worldkeepers redefine their peacetime mandate across two centuries of internal debate. The working consensus: maintain knowledge of the Cataclysm’s causes, protect shard sites and knowledge repositories, monitor for external threats, and refrain from involvement in mortal political disputes. This last commitment proves the most difficult to maintain.
~700 N.A.
Rise of the Galekian Empire
The Galekian Empire emerges from Auridia’s post-Cataclysm fragmentation as the first major attempt at continental consolidation. Dracovian-led, expansionist, and carrying an ideology of ordered civilizational dominance, it will define the next seven hundred years of Midralian history — through its expansion, its war, and its collapse.
2nd Age
The 2nd Age
1400 – 2300 N.A.
The 2nd Age is the age of empire, its rise, its overreach, and the long aftermath of its collapse. The Galekian Empire’s 200-Year War against Kyou is the defining event: the moment when the most powerful civilization in Auridian history reached for the western continent and failed, permanently. What followed was a Kyou that had survived the worst Auridia could send, and an Auridia fractured into a political landscape that never fully reconstituted.
~700–900 N.A.
Galekian Expansion
The Galekian Empire expands across Auridia, absorbing or destroying most of the independent political formations that had emerged after the Cataclysm. Shardbinder sites are destroyed or absorbed as the Empire systematically dismantles institutions it cannot control. The Empire’s relationship to the Shardbinders establishes a pattern that every major power afterward will repeat.
~900–1100 N.A.
The 200-Year War
The Galekian Empire’s sustained assault on Kyou fails. The military alliance that formed to resist it will eventually become the Hino Federation of States: a political framework forged by the specific experience of holding together against something that should have won. Kyou’s political identity for the next three thousand years is shaped by those two centuries of refusal.
~1100–1400 N.A.
Galekian Collapse — Auridia Balkanised
The Galekian Empire collapses from the combination of the failed war, internal fractures, and the structural instability of a civilization whose administrative coherence depended on continued expansion. Auridia fractures permanently into the balkanized state it occupies in the current era. The Kält Region, the Empire’s heartland, contracts rather than empties. The Dracovian remnant states that remain are sparse, independent, and historically self-aware in ways that three thousand years of aftermath have only deepened.
~1400 N.A.
Hino Federation of States Founded
The military alliance that resisted the 200-Year War formalizes into the Hino Federation of States: a multi-state framework that will maintain Kyou’s political cohesion and independence from Auridian institutional reach across the next three thousand years.
~1500–1700 N.A.
Shadow Ork Invasion — Kyou’s Gloomphase
An external force assaults Kyou from the south, beginning the Forever Wars: a conflict over land grants and territorial recognition that is still ongoing in its fifteenth century in the current era. The Shadow Ork invasion defines a period of Kyou history known as the Gloomphase. Its resolution, such as it is, produces the contested territorial arrangements that remain unresolved in the current era of the 4th Age
3rd Age
The 3rd Age
2300 – 3300 N.A.
The 3rd Age is characterized by expansion, discovery, and the accumulating instability of a world whose structural underpinnings are under increasing pressure. First contact with the Veiled Continent. The invention of the Memoric. And then, in the latter half of the Age, a sequence of events whose full documentation remains in sealed Concordiax archives: the breaking of the Umero Seal, the Fey Migration, and the War of the Fallen Stars.
~2300 N.A.
First Contact with the Veiled Continent
Auridian expeditions reach the Veiled Continent: the third major landmass of the known world, whose populations speak Azaim and which has never permitted sustained outside contact. The expeditions that return describe fully developed civilizations and a relationship to outside visitors ranging from cautious to unwelcoming. No expedition since has established anything more durable. The Concordiax designates it Caligoria in its cartographic records.
~2400 N.A.
The Memoric Invented
The Memoric: a Prismaturgy working that creates a bound record of experienced events, preserved for later examination by any practitioner with appropriate access — is developed in the 3rd Age. Its inventor was subsequently suppressed by the Concordiax. Those records are held in the Concordiax’s sealed archive and have not been publicly examined. The Memoric itself, however, proliferated. The Concordiax’s archives use it extensively. Its evidence is considered nearly impossible to falsify in legal proceedings: a quality that has made it both the Concordiax’s most powerful institutional tool and the thing it most needs to control access to.
~2600 N.A.
The Great Seal of Umero Breaks
The Island of Umero sits at a Chromavein confluence that made it, in Old Midralis, the site of an extraordinary working: a Seal whose purpose is not publicly known and whose Concordiax records are classified at the highest level. Its breaking produced dimensional instability, a surge of Places of Power appearing across Midralis, and the conditions that enabled the Fey Migration. The Concordiax inherited custody of Umero without fully understanding what the Seal had been holding. Their picture remains incomplete.
~2600–2900 N.A.
The Fey Migration
The breaking of the Umero Seal opened passages to Veraldié that had been suppressed. Fey beings began crossing into Midralis — some fleeing the advancing corruption within Veraldié, others drawn by connections that the newly opened rifts made accessible after centuries of separation. The result: significant increase in the fey population of Midralis and the establishment of fey-adjacent communities across Auridia and Kyou.
~3250–3300 N.A.
The War of the Fallen Stars
A conflict of unknown origin that fell across Auridia in the decades before the 3rd Age’s end. Fifty years. Its causes are among the most thoroughly classified subjects in the Concordiax’s archive. Its name refers to something that fell during those years — characterized by contemporaries as stars descending, which may have been literal, metaphorical, or both. Memoric records exist. The Concordiax controls them. What is known from non-Concordiax sources is that whatever happened was significant enough that the survivors were determined to prevent it from ever happening again.
4th Age
The 4th Age
3300 N.A. – Present
The 4th Age is the age of institutional consolidation. The Concordiax was founded. The Auridian Union formed. The world was made safer — or made to appear safer, which is a different thing. It also contains Kyou’s Yokai crisis, the formal suppression of the Shardbinders, and, in the current era, something spreading across the land that no institutional framework has yet adequately described.
~3300 N.A.
The Auridian Pact — End of the War of the Fallen Stars
The War of the Fallen Stars ends with the Auridian Pact: a diplomatic framework establishing the institutional landscape of the 4th Age. Prismaturgy use is brought under regulatory framework. Kyou negotiates its own relationship to that framework. The tension between Auridian insistence on uniform standards and Kyou’s insistence on autonomy begins here and has not been resolved in the three centuries since.
~3350 N.A.
The Concordiax Founded
Founded as a post-war regulatory institution by sincere people who had survived the War of the Fallen Stars and were determined to prevent its recurrence. The founding ideology was coherent: regulated Prismurgy under institutional oversight was the solution to uncontrolled power. The founders were not cynics. In the current era of the 4th Age, the Concordiax is three centuries old and is the primary administrative instrument of the Auridian Union.
~3800–3900 N.A.
Kyou’s Yokai Crisis — The Spirit Realm Fractures
The Spirit Realm fractures in the late 3000s, producing a crisis in Kyou without precedent. Yokai — beings whose nature combined spiritual and material existence in ways that defied categorical treatment — manifest across Central and North Kyou in numbers that exceed every available institutional framework. The crisis produces violence but is not, exactly, a war. Its eventual truce establishes North Kyou as a designated red zone. The designation has not been lifted in over four centuries.
~4000 N.A.
Shardbinders Branded Enemies of the State
The Concordiax formally brands Shardbinders as potential enemies of the Auridian state. The official record describes the shift as a response to Shardbinder involvement in activities incompatible with Union security. What those activities specifically were is not documented in accessible records. Shardbinder presence in Union territory becomes legally ambiguous. Individuals known to be Shardbinders find the Verbum increasingly difficult to obtain.
4001 N.A. – Present
The Current Era
By the Concordiax’s own metrics, the past six centuries have been a success: no major wars, functioning regulation, the Yokai truce maintained. In the final centuries of the current era, something the Concordiax calls the Blight has begun spreading: a corruption that concentrates in shadow and weakens in direct sunlight. The Concordiax’s official position: a Prismaturgy contamination event requiring regulatory response. The Ninefold Conservatory’s private position: it does not behave like anything the existing framework was designed to address. The current year places us somewhere in the 4th Age