The Age of Crowns
The height of mortal civilization. An era of golden prosperity, bitter wars, and the slow growth of hubris. The age when mortals believed they had inherited the world, and began to learn the cost of that inheritance.
The Golden Centuries (~1000-1100 AS)
For roughly a hundred years, something resembling peace held. The Dominion consolidated its borders. The Hollowed Reach’s trade networks connected every corner of the continent. The Verdant Marches’ clans, protected by the Scarwall, developed their own rich culture. Even the Pale Wastes experienced a period of relative stability.
Trade flourished. The arts blossomed. Magical scholarship reached heights not seen since the Age of Divinity, as mortal mages, drawing on the Aetheric Web and supplementing their power with divine materials, pushed the boundaries of what was possible. Great works of architecture, literature, and enchantment were produced. It was, by most measures, the finest century mortals had ever known.
It did not last.
The Cinders Founded (~1100 AS)
Valdren VII, Hierarch of the Dominion, was not a trusting man. Faced with growing dissent from the lower castes and whispers of reform among the priesthood, he created the Cinders, a secret police force answerable only to the Hierarch, tasked with rooting out sedition, heresy, and threats to the divine order.
The Cinders operated in shadow: informants in every tavern, agents in every guild, interrogators in lightless cells beneath the Spine. They were feared, hated, and effective.
GM Only
GM Note: The Cinders are the organization Serith will later infiltrate and corrupt from her undersea prison. Their culture of secrecy and their access to the Dominion’s most sensitive operations made them the perfect instrument. By the present day (2203 AS), the Cinders serve Serith far more than they serve the Hierarch, though the Hierarch does not know this.
The Driftmere Rebellion (~1150 AS)
Pirates, outcasts, deserters, and the simply ungovernable lashed their ships together in the open sea and declared independence. Driftmere, a floating city of rope and timber, perpetually growing, perpetually rotting, perpetually rebuilding, was born.
The Concord of Tides dispatched fleets to destroy it. Twice. They failed both times, Driftmere simply moved, its inhabitants scattering like fish and reassembling elsewhere. The Concord eventually accepted Driftmere as a permanent, ungovernable fixture of the maritime world: part free port, part pirate haven, part ongoing insult.
The Ashite Wars (~1200-1300 AS)
A century of intermittent conflict between the Ashen Dominion and the Hollowed Reach over control of Ashite trade routes. The Dominion demanded monopoly control over the export of divine materials mined from the Spine of Order. The Reach demanded free trade.
The wars were brutal but indecisive. Naval engagements in the southern seas. Siege warfare along the coast. Proxy conflicts in neutral territories. The fighting ended around 1300 AS with a treaty that granted the Reach limited trading rights while preserving the Dominion’s claim to the Spine’s output. Both sides considered it a defeat.
The Deep Awakening (~1350 AS)
Lantern-Keepers on the southern coast reported something new: not the usual Black Tide horrors washing ashore, but movement, vast, slow, deliberate, in the Abyssal Trench where Yvenne had dragged Serith’s prison. Something massive was shifting in the deep.
The Lantern-Keepers doubled their watch. Along the coast, fishermen and dockworkers reported strange dreams: a woman’s voice, whispering from beneath dark water. The dreams were dismissed as superstition.
The first recorded use of the phrase “Serith’s Whispers” would not appear for another century, but the phenomenon had begun.
The Greensingers’ Warning (~1400 AS)
The druids of the Verdant Marches reported an alarming development: Thyrea’s Cradle, the deepest, most sacred heart of the divine corpse-forest, was dreaming. The Greensingers described visions of movement in the deep root-networks, of something stirring beneath the forest floor, of the Cradle’s ambient consciousness shifting from passive growth to something more active and less benign.
The Greensingers brought their warning to the Marchwardens’ Council, to the Dominion, to the Star-Readers. It was largely ignored. The Marches were always strange. The forest was always restless. Surely this was nothing new.
The Hollow War (~1500 AS)
It was very much something new, but the threat that erupted first came from the north.
The undead of the Pale Wastes mounted their largest offensive since the Theomachis. An army of the dead, not the organized Remnants of the Accords, but a vast, howling horde of feral undead, poured from the Hollowdeep, the vast underground cavern system beneath the Wastes. They overwhelmed the northern Holds within weeks.
The Ashen Vigil, reinforced by reluctant Dominion troops, fought a three-year campaign to push them back. The cost was staggering: tens of thousands of lives, entire Holds destroyed, and a generation of soldiers broken by the experience of fighting an enemy that did not tire, did not fear, and sometimes wore the faces of people they had known.
The dead were driven back into the Hollowdeep. The question of what had driven them out was never satisfactorily answered.
The Unification Attempt (~1600-1650 AS)
A Marchwarden named Brynn Ironcrown, brilliant, charismatic, and ruthless, attempted what no one had managed since the Marchwarden system was established: she tried to unify the Verdant Marches under a single banner.
Through a combination of diplomacy, strategic marriages, military victories, and sheer force of personality, Brynn succeeded. For twelve years, the Marches functioned as a united nation. Trade improved. Defences strengthened. The Scarwall was maintained and extended.
Then Brynn was assassinated, poisoned at a feast by agents whose identity remains debated to this day (Dominion operatives, rival clan loyalists, and Reach merchants have all been blamed). The clans splintered immediately, and the brief unity collapsed into recrimination and feuding.
Brynn Ironcrown’s story is a cautionary tale in the Marches. It is also an inspiration.
GM Only
GM Note: Brynn Ironcrown is the direct historical parallel for Kaelith Thornborn, the current Marchwarden attempting the same feat. Kaelith knows this history intimately. She is determined not to repeat Brynn’s mistakes, but she may be making new ones.
The Black Tide of 1700
The worst Black Tide in recorded history struck the southern coast. The sea turned black, literally, opaquely black, as though ink had been poured into the ocean, and remained so for forty days.
During those forty days, the coast was besieged. Creatures from the deep, things with too many limbs, things that screamed in languages no mortal spoke, things that dissolved when killed and left only the smell of brine and rot, assaulted every coastal settlement from Tidewall to the smallest fishing village. Thousands died. The Lantern-Keepers were nearly destroyed, losing two-thirds of their number, but they held the line until the Tide receded.
The Black Tide of 1700 cemented the Lantern-Keepers’ importance. Even the Concord of Tides, which had long dismissed them as superstitious coastguards, began funding their operations.
No one asked, or no one wanted to ask, what the Tide’s retreat meant. Whether it was driven back, or whether it simply returned to where it came from, satisfied.
The Decline Begins (~1750-1800 AS)
The Age of Crowns ended not with a cataclysm but with a slow, creeping realization.
The Dominion’s Ashite reserves showed the first signs of depletion. Mines that had produced for centuries began to run dry. New veins were harder to find, deeper to reach, and more dangerous to work. The caste system, built on the assumption of endless divine bounty, began to strain.
Political instability grew. Hierarch succeeded Hierarch in increasingly short reigns. The Reach’s Concord grew bloated and corrupt. The Marches remained fractured. The Pale Wastes endured, as they always had, but the Vigil’s numbers dwindled as fewer recruits were willing to serve.
The great empires were past their peak. Everyone knew it. No one knew what came next.
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