History & Timeline
The current year is 621 P.M. (Post Migration). What is known of history comes primarily from Nylvish records, and those records are neither complete nor impartial. The Shattered Lands are gone. The civilizations that rose and fell there left fragments, some preserved in Nylvish libraries, most lost. The story of the world before the Shattering is a story told by survivors, and survivors remember what survived.
Before the Shattering
Section titled “Before the Shattering”The continents now called the Shattered Lands were once inhabited. The Nyl maintained the Lydirian Empire there for at least ten thousand years by their own records, though Janim scholars dispute the reliability of those early claims. The Janim were a separate people with a separate history, one that included, for a period, subjugation under Nylvish rule. That subjugation ended. The memory of it did not.
Roughly 350 years before the Shattering, the Lydirian Empire began colonizing what they then called the Wild Continents, the landmass now known as the Remnant Continent. The Anamor, Haqol, and Okoi already lived there. The Nyl arrived with the scale and organization of an empire behind them, and the Elkyr navigated the crossing.
The Janim followed, not as colonists of the Lydirian Empire but as a people making a deliberate break. Many left the Shattered Lands to put distance between themselves and everything that had happened there. On the Wild Continents, free of that weight, the Erbaune Empire took shape: a Janim civilization that grew to rival the Lydirian in scale and force. The two empires coexisted, contested, and managed one another across the continent. The Anamor, Haqol, and Okoi found themselves surrounded by organized arrivals with no intention of leaving.
The Shattering
Section titled “The Shattering”In Year 0 P.M., a spirit descended into the mortal world with the intention of ruling it. In response, a second spirit was summoned to drive the first back out of the mortal plane.
The conflict between them destroyed the Shattered Lands.
This is the common account, and it is accurate as far as it goes. What the accounts do not capture well is the scale. The cults and corrupted creatures that swept the Shattered Lands in the years preceding the final conflict consumed everything, including the Fyrisian dynasty, the last of the great Nylvish powers still standing on those continents. The records of what those years were like are held almost exclusively in Nylvish libraries, and most scholars who have read them do not describe the contents in detail. What has been preserved is not the kind of history people return to willingly.
The Elkyr transported the Nyl and Janim who remained on the Shattered Lands across to the Remnant Continent. The Nyl who arrived were the remnant of an empire that no longer had a homeland. The Janim who arrived joined those already established under the Erbaune banner.
The Anamor, Haqol, and Okoi absorbed another wave of organized arrivals.
The Remnant Era
Section titled “The Remnant Era”The five nations that exist today are the shape that settlement eventually took. The Nyl built Lithywae in the north, establishing the Imperial Dynasty of House Lyllynet at Athyllwyn in the Kaelthar Range, a deliberate echo of imperial memory on a continent that had not asked for it. Kyr’Elian took form in the east, the Elkyr’s home on a continent they had once only navigated.
The peoples already living on the continent fared differently. The Haqol were a small population before the Migration and a smaller one after it. The early settlement period was violent for them: hunted down and pushed out of their original territories, the survivors consolidated eastward, which is where they remain. The Anamor never consolidated at all. Their tribal structure predated the Migration and held through it; there are Anamor across the continent’s interior today, in numbers and groupings that no nation has ever fully mapped. The Okoi held their fortress-cities throughout the continent. The arriving powers looked at what it would cost to break those positions and decided against it. The Okoi negotiated favorable relations with whichever nations grew up around them and kept what they had.
The Erbaune Empire held for centuries.. The fracture came from within: a governance dispute over whether non-Highborn citizens could hold seats on the imperial council. Dosharen’s faction pushed for the reform; House Dajimir in the south opposed it on principle. After decades of institutional paralysis, both sides negotiated a formal partition rather than continue the deadlock. Dosharen took the north, Shejara the south, and the border between them has been a tense line ever since. Conspiracy-minded Janim will tell you the Nyl engineered the split. Whether that is true, it is the kind of story both sides find useful to believe.
The Marathat ruins were already there when the colonists arrived, buried under vegetation, soil, and centuries of accumulation. The civilization that built them is debated in-world. No prevailing consensus exists on who they were, though the absence of any Thuim remains in the ruins has been noted by careful scholars. What that absence means has not been correctly identified.
The Truth of the Marathat
The Marathat were the Daruner, the same people whose mixed descendants make up one of the seven Thuim lineages today. The pure-blooded Daruner disappeared when their life forces were consumed by Yndryr to resurrect another Yndryr. This is not publicly known. The conspicuous absence of Thuim remains in the ruins is a clue that no one, so far, has followed to its correct conclusion.
Recent History
Section titled “Recent History”The Eventide Brigade
Section titled “The Eventide Brigade”In Year 587 P.M., a mercenary company called the Eventide Brigade formed and began operating across the Remnant Continent. Its founders are still alive. The Brigade’s combined strength is sufficient that the larger nations have found it more practical to contract them than to confront them. They maintain presence in every nation, neutral in none of the ways that matter, and remain the only organization with consistent cross-continental reach that is not attached to a government.
Ren Exerters
Section titled “Ren Exerters”In Year 620 P.M., a Janim scholar named Gresin Orin, working out of the Gate of Zerathrain, developed a device capable of firing Ren abilities without a Rennim to produce them. He called it a Ren Exerter. The technology is not yet widespread. In the hands of ordinary people, it struggles to compete with an actual Rennim. What it means in the hands of one has not yet been worked out.
The Gate of Zerathrain has not made public how the device functions.
The Terima Gate
Section titled “The Terima Gate”A deep-shaft kerim excavation by House Diramesh near Terima, in the northeastern mountains of Dosharen, uncovered a Marathat gate of significant scale buried beneath the mountain. It has not been opened. Both the Gate of Zerathrain and the Eventide Brigade have sent representatives to the site and are quietly contracting Rennim with Shadow, Secrets, and Truth polarities to study it. The terms are generous. The details are not public.
What lies on the other side is unknown.
Timeline
Section titled “Timeline”Calendar uses P.M. (Post Migration), with Year 0 marking the Migration itself — the arrival of the Nyl, Elkyr, and surviving Janim on the Remnant Continent following the Shattering. It is a shared calendar, not exclusively Nylvish.
| When | Event |
|---|---|
| Unknown antiquity | Fall of the Marathat |
| Year -981 (981 years Before Migration) | Earliest Nylvish records on the Shattered Lands. Claims of previous dynasties that go back thousands of years (Janim scholars dispute reliability). |
| ~Year -423 B.M. | Elkyrian Arrival in the Shattered Lands. Some unknown disaster forced the Elkyr from the Continental region of Kyr to the lands of the Nyl and Janim. |
| ~Year -358 B.M. | Nylvish Lydirian Empire begins colonizing the Wild Continents with the help of the Elkyr (now the Remnant Continent). Many Janim follow independently, fleeing the memory of Nylvish subjugation. The Erbaune Empire takes shape on the Wild Continents. |
| Year 0 | The Shattering and the Migration. Two spirits fight — one descends to rule, another is summoned to drive it out. The conflict destroys the Shattered Lands. The Elkyr transport the Nyl and remaining Janim to the Remnant Continent. |
| Early P.M. (Post Migration) | Five nations establish themselves. Spirits go quiet. Period of relative stability. |
| ~Year 430 P.M. | Erbaune Empire fractures through corruption and lack of a unifying threat. Splits into Dosharen (north) and Shejara (south). |
| Year 587 P.M. | The Eventide Brigade founded. Spreads across the continent. |
| Year 620 P.M. | Gresin Orin (Janim scholar, Gate of Zerathrain) invents Ren Exerters. Not yet widespread. |
| Year 621 P.M. (Now) | Spirits stir again. Marathat ruins discovered. Technological revolution imminent. Continental tensions at tipping point. |