A History of the Known World

How to Read the Aevumn Calendar

Time in Aevum is measured differently from what you may be accustomed to. The Aevum week has ten days, each named for one of the eight gods plus two days of transition. The days, in order, are:

The Aevum year has 365 days, divided into twelve named Cycles of 30 days each, four festival days celebrating a solstice or equinox, and Dia Circulus at the year's end. Each Cycle corresponds to a season or natural event.

The present day, at the time this history closes, is Dia Incipium, Day 1 of the Cycle of Rain, the first Day of Year 50 in the New Reckoning. The Festival of Revelation.

Noteworthy Holidays

Aevum's calendar is anchored by a number of sacred days observed across the known world, each tied to a god, a season, or a principle. The following holidays are celebrated in Asylum and beyond.

The Age of Creation

Before there was sky, before there was earth, before there was light, before there was dark, there were the gods. Eternal, without beginning or end, these unknowable forces stood amidst the primordial stuff of the universe as exemplars of the base forces that make up all things.

And this was the First Division.

First spoke Lux, the Birth of Light, in a voice bright and clear,
and from his voice the void was filled with his will.
And this was the second division.

Next spoke Vitana, the Midwife, in a voice of growth and patience,
and Aevum was formed as a perfect circle of vibrant light and life.
And this was the third division.

Next spoke Alitura, the Shaper, in a voice both wild and with purpose,
and from the circle of light, all the mountains and the valleys,
the streams and the oceans, the trees and the plants and the beasts
and yes, mankind was born.
And this was the fourth division.

Next spoke Agnitio, the Answerer, in a voice of wisdom and purpose,
and from the world all the sentient races of the earth
gained knowledge of themselves and their separation from the beasts.
And this was the fifth division.

Next spoke Nequitia, the Split-Tongued,
in a voice from everywhere and nowhere at all,
and from this separation did the races of the world
learn to deceive each other, and themselves.
And this was the sixth division.

Next came Proelius, the Decider, in a voice of unbearable strength,
and from this strength did the races of the earth
learn to make war with each other and seek conquest.
And this was the seventh division.

Next came Nox, the Nightbringer, in a voice of terrible quiet,
and from these wars did the races of the earth
know what it was to have their brief lives end.
And this was the eighth division.

And last will come Tempestas, He Who Sweeps Away,
in a voice of fury and force,
and from this storm will the world be swept clean,
to begin anew the cycle.
And this will be the last division. From the transcripts of Brother Emon, Fifth Lorekeeper of Agnitio

A History of the Known World

The Age of Separation

In the beginning of recorded history, the three great races kept to themselves. The elves occupied the endless forests of northern Solorien, the continent from which the sun rises. The dwarves delved into the mountains of the south. Between them, humanity spread across the plains - short-lived and burning with ambition.

For uncounted generations this arrangement held. Then humanity, in the span of a single millennium, raised an empire that stretched between the elven forests and the dwarven mountains. Their speed was terrifying to the older races and impressive to themselves. They named this empire after nothing, because they could not imagine it ending. It ended.

The Age of Expansion

From Solorien the races eventually spread westward. Sailors and explorers found Tenebris, a second continent of untold natural wealth, sitting just beyond the horizon. The discovery changed everything.

By this time the elves had formed a loose confederation of city-states known as the Northern States. The dwarves had organized into the Southern Federation. Both nations saw in Tenebris an opportunity to expand their power and, more importantly, to gain an advantage over the other. The race to colonize Tenebris was the beginning of a rivalry that would simmer for centuries.

Between Solorien and Tenebris, on a volcanic tropical island that had once been home only to pirates, criminals, and the indigenous halfling Wata Wa Nusu, lay Asylum. It became the hinge point of two great empires. Both nations opened embassies there. Both nations endorsed privateers to harass the other's shipping. Both nations smiled at each other across diplomatic tables while their spies moved through the docks below.

The Appearance of the Obelisk

Nothing changed Asylum - and the world - so completely as the Obelisk. Overnight, a massive iron landmass shaped like a stone sarcophagus rose from the center of the ocean at the exact point where every compass in the world pointed. Completely barren, formed entirely of sedimentary rock, stark and unwelcoming, it was enormous and utterly without explanation.

The industrious began mining it almost immediately. Most of the iron proved ordinary. But roughly one vein in ten yielded something different: darker, denser, almost alive in its resistance to working. Cold Iron - valued by smiths for its extraordinary workability, and prized above all else by those who create magic items for its ability to conduct and contain magical energy. A one-pound ingot of Cold Iron fetches a hundred gold pieces at market. Cold Iron weapons count as magical against aberrations, celestials, elementals, fey, fiends, and undead; Cold Iron armor prevents critical hits from those same creatures; and magic items forged with it require only half the normal time to create.

The discovery sparked a gold rush, a privateering war, and a religious pilgrimage all at once. A flotilla of ships formed semi-permanently around the Obelisk's edges. A floating market with inns grew to serve the needs of those who mined it, complete with everything a prospector might need and several things they shouldn't have. Scaffolding covers the Obelisk's sheer sides. Every kilometer of its surface is fought over. Claim jumping is common. Life here is dangerous. For those who seek their fortune, the risk is held to be worth the reward.

But there were always those with a more spiritual reason to visit. Because of the magical nature of Cold Iron, some theorized that the Obelisk was in some way keeping something in - that the island itself was a prison. Some said it held a demon prince. Some said a dead god lay entombed within. Others said it was Tempestas himself, dreaming the long sleep before the Final Division. In any event, travel to the Obelisk became a religious pilgrimage. People from all over Aevum came to walk its shores, breathe its cold air, and seek whatever answers a barren rock could give them.

No one understood at the time that all of them - the miners, the merchants, the faithful - were right about the Obelisk being a prison. They were only wrong about who was imprisoned. The Cold Iron within it was not a resource. It was a corruption, seeded into the world as a weapon. Someone, or something, was slowly working to open it from the inside.

The Chronicle of the Seal-Bearers

What follows is a chronological account of the events of the last three years, as recorded from the accounts of those who lived them. Dates are given in Aevumn calendar notation.

Before the Seal-Bearers came together, each arrived in Asylum by their own path. These are their stories, told as they happened, before the world knew what any of them would become.

The original party: Nick, Quilla, Flax, Cass, and Liam. Hel and Dorrac join roughly a year into the adventure.

Hel and Dorrac join at the start of Year Two, expanding the group to seven.

The New Pantheon

Tempestas was meant to sweep the world clean so the cycle could begin again. He spoke. The last Division came. But it did not end the world. It changed its management. When the storm passed, Aevum still stood, scarred but breathing, and eight new hands held the old mantles. For godhood here is a station, not a person: a role to be inherited, like a crown or a debt. Those who walked out of the Confrontation with The Great Devastation walked into the heavens.

The Present

Fifty years have passed since the Confrontation with The Great Devastation. The world survived, the first time in any remembered cycle that it has, but it did not survive unchanged, and the people living in it do not all agree on what it survived into.

How the Present Came to Be

The old world did not end in peace. The Night of Fire, the demon occupation that followed it, and the open civil war between the Northern States and the Southern Federation had already left Asylum in ruins by the time the Great Devastation rose in the Mare Revelatum. The Governance Quarter was rubble. Highside’s walls had fallen. The Lookout, where the Wata Wa Nusu had prayed since before any of the civilized races arrived, was destroyed, replaced by a growing pit that filled slowly with water from below. When the Confrontation came and the old world ended, almost no one understood how close it had come to ending entirely. Only the Seal-Bearers knew, and the governments that survived have suppressed or reshaped what little they learned for political advantage in the fifty years since. Most of the world still knows only that something terrible happened, that the demons are gone, and that the gods are not who they used to be.

Ephemeris

At the Confrontation, the Obelisk cracked. The Cold Iron once confined to its interior veins leaked into the surrounding ocean; ships that anchored near it reported equipment failure, sickness, and nightmares, and the pilgrimages that once drew thousands stopped entirely. In the years since, it has become something else. It still stands at the center of the Mare Revelatum, but it is now called Ephemeris, the living temple of Tempestas. The scaffolding, the docks, the floating market, the inns and claim-shacks built during the great iron rush, all of it is still there. None of it has been dismantled. But none of it is used. Every structure is blanketed in a strange, lush plant life found nowhere else in the world: flowers that bloom and wither in the span of an afternoon, vines that climb a rafter and die back within days, trees that drop their leaves and put out new growth in the space of a week. A full seasonal cycle compressed into days. The island itself seems to age at an extraordinary rate, and so does anything living that stays on it too long. Insects that land there mature, breed, and die before nightfall. Animals that wander the old mining paths grow visibly older with each visit. Scholars debate whether this is a curse or a blessing, whether Ephemeris is showing the world what Tempestas’ domain truly means, or slowly consuming everything that stands on it. Pilgrims come anyway, for exactly that reason. To stand on Ephemeris and watch a flower live and die in an hour is the closest most mortals will ever come to experiencing the cycle entire.

The Great Powers

The great powers that once fought over Asylum have been reshaped by a generation of upheaval. The Northern States and the Southern Federation, now renamed Elenethil and Zhangrym in the years following the Final Division, both endure, their old rivalry now refracted through the lens of competing theologies. Feyveil, once called the Isle of the Ancients, has become a place where the Feywild bleeds into the mortal world, its reborn Atara Oren now a towering sacred grove where Vitana is most powerfully present. The Penumbra, built upon what was once the Isle of the Dead, has become the world’s greatest repository of knowledge about the dead, run by scholars and clerics of Nox who tend both the library and the necropolis with equal devotion. The Praesidium, the risen city of the Tritons, sits half above and half below the waves in the southern Mare Revelatum, its ancient keepers now openly partnered with Agnitio as custodians of the world’s deepest knowledge. And in Tenebris, the frontier settlement of Snowpoint marks Alitura’s presence at the edge of the known world.

The Fate of the Great Devastation

The Great Devastation was an ancient force that sought to take Tempestas’ place as the engine of the Final Division. It manipulated events across the world for decades, using Niles Atterton, a priest of The Great Devastation, the transformed creatures of the deep ocean, and the Cold Iron corruption as tools. Whether it was destroyed at the Confrontation with The Great Devastation, or merely driven back, is a question the history books have never answered, and fifty years of uneasy quiet have not settled it.

The New Gods

The new gods are young in their roles, still learning what they are, disagreeing about what they should do, watched by mortals who remember some of them as people. The hands-off approach of the old gods was a considered philosophy that failed. The new gods know this. What they have chosen to do about it is the question at the heart of the new age.

The old gods built the house and left. The new gods grew up in the house. They know which floorboards creak and where the roof leaks. Whether that makes them better landlords or just more dangerous ones remains to be seen. Anonymous, overheard in a tavern in Asylum, Year 47 of the New Reckoning

Asylum: Organizations & Factions

Fifty years after the Final Division, Asylum is still governed, if that word applies, by the same uneasy coalition of power and self-interest that always kept it from falling entirely into chaos. What follows is a primer on the groups that matter.

The City Fathers

Insofar as Asylum has a governing body, the City Fathers are it. A loose council of the city’s most powerful figures, they meet on the first Dia Incipium of each Cycle to pass laws, hear criminal cases, and render judgment. The Fathers are answerable to no one but each other, and hold their positions by personal power, wealth, or political backing. Currently, the council comprises:

Vox Noctis

Beneath the island of Asylum runs an interconnected series of canals - initially built to move the city’s waste to the sea. They became the hiding place, the throne room, and the kingdom of Vox Noctis: the city’s thieves’ guild. The Voices, as they are sometimes called, have business interests and influence throughout the city. Their focus is protection rackets, smuggling, and petty theft. Whether they are a nuisance, a neighborhood protector, or the scourge of the city depends entirely on who is being asked.

The public face of the guild - insofar as such a thing exists - is an elf named Jasmine. Charming, acid-tongued, and very good at her job, she serves as intermediary between the guild and anyone who needs to reach them. Those who want a more direct audience with leadership must come through her first, and she does not always agree that the meeting is warranted.

The Blue Cloaks

Asylum’s city-sanctioned watch: a combination of policing force, jail warden, and judge. Empowered to enforce punishments for petty crimes, the Blue Cloaks keep most minor lawbreaking in check throughout the city. More serious matters result in a stay at the Hall of Mercy, Asylum’s prison.

Their ranks run from lowest to highest: Third Shield, Second Shield, First Shield, Third Sword, Second Sword, First Sword.

The leader of the Blue Cloaks, First Sword Boravik Sturn, is pragmatic about his responsibilities and his limits. He has made a tacit agreement with Vox Noctis: the Blue Cloaks stay out of the Docks, and in exchange the Voices keep the worst of the larceny in check. Neither side discusses this arrangement openly.

The Gold Hands

Originally a private guard force serving Duke Wylander and his interests alone, tasked with protecting Highside. Today, fifty years on, the Gold Hands have evolved into personal bodyguards for the rich and powerful of Asylum more broadly. Their elven leader, Shivah Nightshade, accepts gold from Prince Jesper Wylander but views herself as a protector of Elenethil’s interests more than the Wylanders’ specifically. Her position gives her unique insight into Highside’s political machinations, and she uses it.

The Wata Wa Nusu

Before the Obelisk. Before Tenebris. Before the pirates who first camped on Asylum’s shores. This island was home to the Wata Wa Nusu, a tribe of feral halflings who once roamed all across the island. As more settlers arrived they were driven deeper into the hills surrounding the city, until the hills were all they had left. They are fiercely protective of their remaining lands. People rarely travel into the hills because of them, and those who do go armed. Their oral tradition describes the edge of the world in terms that scholars are only now beginning to take seriously.

A Note on Sources

This document was compiled from the transcripts of Brother Emon, Lorekeeper of Agnitio; the archived notes of Quilla Bafflestone, recovered from the ruins of the Antiquarian Eye in Asylum; the personal correspondence of Gearspeaker Anton Verkel, made available to scholars following his ascension; and oral accounts gathered from survivors of the events described herein. Where sources conflict, this document has favored the account most consistent with the physical evidence. Where no evidence exists, it has said so plainly rather than speculate. History, like the gods, does not concern itself with what we would prefer to be true.