History
From Lunos
History
In the beginning there was the First Age, when the gods of Heaven and Hell laid waste to the world above in their endless war. During this period Savara awoke, and established the world beneath for her children, where they grew and matured for untold centuries. One day, Savara rent the land in two, and the world above was divided in the Celestial Plains, and the world below became the Rift. As this great cataclysm occurred, Savara gave her children the gift of intelligence, creating the original eight races. This was the beginning of the Second Age
In the year 100, the first people to master the use of Magic set themselves up as gods, drawing excess power from the belief of their followers, ultimately causing insanity. For nine centuries, these ‘gods’ waged war across the entirety of the Rift. Only the Frozen Wastes remain unscathed, because nobody lives there. The Nautiloids of the Spire Sea quickly allied with forces of Heaven from the Bridge of the Gods, and sequestered themselves from the rest of the conflict, establishing the great city-nation of Spire. Back in the rest of the world, chaos ran rampant. The constant warfare led to interbreeding, eventually removing most traces of species individuality. The resulting conglomeration came to be known as humanity.
In 800, in an isolated refugee tribe scraping out a living in the Frozen Wastes, the prophet Lunos was born. He was dismayed at the constant conflict, and began to preach a new way: the Path of Light. Lunos quickly began to grow in power, but unlike the other ‘gods’ he fed his newfound power back into his believers, thus avoiding insanity. The Path of Light spread quickly, and was aided by Savara, who had grown angry at the constant squabbling of her new children. Seeing that they were headed along the same path as those on the Celestial Plains, Savara resolved to take a more active role in their development, and began speaking to those that would listen. The order of Druids sprung up from this, and in addition to their own beliefs was overjoyed at the Path of Light and aided its spread tremendously.
In 850, Savara released the ninth race, which had grown in isolation underground. The Stingers, as they came to be known, naturally consisted of large hive-minds, and were thus immune to the power-grabs of those who sought belief. They sprung out of the sand of the Great Desert and quickly took it over, exiling the remaining combatants and freeing the people.
The final stroke to end the wars came in the year 950, when the people of the Great Plains, long the chief prize due to their large numbers and massive fields, grew tired of being enslaved and decided to create a god of their own. At midnight at the very beginning of 950, every believer in the entire nation threw off their oppressors in the name of their new god: Sol. Response to the revolts was swift, but the mages received a shock upon arriving when they found the sun high in the sky at midnight. The first god ever to be created entirely from belief, Sol was a true avatar of the people, unconcerned with personal power and exempt from the power-mad insanity that gripped the others. Powered by the unconditional and willing belief of the most populous nation in the Rift, Sol was also much more powerful than any of his rivals and easily destroyed all of them. With the most powerful mages dead, the wars came swiftly to a close, and in the year 1000 the last false god was finally destroyed. On that night Savara made her first and only ultimatum: any person attempting to become a god again would be struck down permanently and without mercy. This began the Third Age.
In the year 13 Sol established the Empire of the Sun, and appointed a mortal Emperor to act as his representative and to govern the people. Sol recognized that constant divine intervention would ultimately weaken his people, and so he resolved to take a more passive role. His last direct act as a god was to establish a portal to the Great Desert, allowing trade with the great civilizations springing up there and thus jump-starting the cultural re-development of his own people in the wake of the wars.
In the year 500 the island of Olympia in the Highlands organized itself in to a confederation of city-states. Across the Rift, the other nations began to slowly establish themselves and rebuild. Lunos retired back to the land of his birth and created the nation of Loska. All was not entirely well with the world, however. Jealous of the power Heaven was gaining, Hell dramatically stepped up efforts to destroy all life in the Rift. Massive plagues occasionally destroyed entire cities, and rumors of other horrors spread through the land. As death and destruction began to spread, certain evil people began to try to tap into this power. They experimented with all sorts of rituals and prayers, trying to tap into what they believed could only be a source of divine power left over from the wars. This belief, combined with the growing fear of the general populace, created a second god. This dark god took the name Void, and began experimenting with its new power. It quickly discovered that there was a ready source of evil things coming from Hell, and that it could build belief relatively easily simply by aiding the forces of Hell. To this day, Hell assumes that the rising frequency of successful attacks is due to a gradual weakening of whatever protects the Rift. They have no idea that they are actually being aided by one of the very being they seek to destroy. Void, meanwhile, is perfectly content to rake in the belief in all things evil in exchange for funneling Hell strikes to the places where evil people ask for them.
In the year 1776, the Third Age came to a close when the legendary explorer Alphonze Great became the first person since the wars to travel all the way around the world, and to establish a map of where everything was. Many major landmarks still bear his name in honor of this achievement.
The Fourth Age was comparatively quiet, continuing the trend of rebuilding and development. It lasted for 1224 years, ending with the foundation of the Mage’s Guild.
The Fifth Age has persisted for several centuries now.
