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The Great Chronicle is intended as an overview of Aereth’s history. More detailed guidebooks may expand upon the subjects below without burdening the Chronicle itself.

• The Ddraig
• The Drakeri and the Morrighan
• The Aes Sídhe
• The Ley and Aereth's Solar System
• Timekeeping on Aereth
• The Church of Ceros
• Carthmoor and the Nations of Brydd
• Claen Gael and the Elder Lands
• Ys, the Shadowborn, and the Drakhmar

The old wars are not over. They have merely changed their shape.

The current Turn is Waxing. The Ley brighten, and the world moves away from the long darkness of Obscura. The seasons are gentler than they were in the deepest years of Shadow, though the ancient cycle continues and no Magister mistakes a favorable age for permanent peace.

The Ddraig and Drakeri remain strongest in the volcanic mountains of Claen Gael. The Sídhe hold their own ancient lands. Humanity dominates Brydd and the great eastern reaches, while trade, diplomacy, suspicion, and old grievance bind all peoples together whether they wish it or not.

Relations between humans and the Elder Races remain uneasy. Commerce and embassies exist, as do friendships and blood ties, but old fears endure. Travelers brought legends of monstrous dragons from Earth. Murian traditions remember the collateral horrors of ancient wars. The Church of Ceros has often taught distrust of magic. And the Shadow has never required armies alone when rumors, fear, and division serve just as well.

The last notable conflict between the western peoples and Carthmoor was the Salt War, fought little more than a lifetime ago by human reckoning. Its peace still holds.

Beyond the known lands, much remains uncounted. Humans sometimes speak of the Elder Races as dwindling remnants of a vanished age. The Magisters advise caution with such assumptions. Aereth is vast, and neither map nor census has ever contained all that lives upon her.

Nor has the Shadow vanished.

Ys still stands.

The Drakhmar still endures.

And when the Ley darkens again, the world will remember why the first Ddraig became guardians.

Twelve and a half centuries ago, High Lord Maedar Jordayne of Great House Carthmoor began the campaign that would change the political history of Brydd.

Backed by the Houses of Kheldish Riding, mercenaries from Falcor, and the Knights of the Temple of Ceros, Maedar conquered the Five Marches and united them beneath his crown. His attempts to extend that conquest farther did not bring all Brydd beneath his rule, but the kingdom he created endured.

The Kingdom of Carthmoor was born.

In return for the Church's support, D'Hassa received formal recognition as an autonomous city-state, and the Faith of Ceros became Carthmoor's official religion. Heresy laws followed. Many were softened or repealed by later rulers, though their legacy remains. The Church itself does not recognize the repeal of the Heresy Laws, and they remain in its books.

After Conquest

Maedar's victory also established a new reckoning of years. The year of the Conquest became 0 AC - After Conquest - and the calendar gradually spread through Carthmoor's trading partners.

The present year is 1250 AC.

The Age of Steel is the age of written kingdoms.

Across the known world, human nations grew in number and power. E'Terra remained the great eastern homeland of humanity, while successive migrations carried Murians and Travelers westward into Brydd and beyond.

Cailleach endured as the western heart of the Elder Races: Claen Gael, Tír Ceilte, and Tír an Aigéan retaining roots in the ancient foundation of the world. The Ddraig maintained their sieges, the Drakeri their strongholds and Morrighan citadels, and the Sídhe their courts.

Farther west lay the remnants of catastrophe: the Obsidian Islands and Ys. Sailors still ventured toward those dangerous waters for obsidian and trade, but few traveled farther. What lies beyond the charted world remains largely unknown.

The Church of Ceros

Approximately four thousand years before the present era, a new faith arose in the far east and spread rapidly among the human nations.

The earliest history of Ceros is uncertain. Most traditions hold that Ceros began as a mortal man whose deeds in a time of great peril led to his elevation as the champion - or embodiment - of the One True Light. Over generations, the Church of Ceros displaced many older human faiths.

Its teachings varied from land to land, but suspicion of magic and of magical people became common. That suspicion placed the Faith increasingly at odds with the Drakeri, Sídhe, and Ddraig.

D'Hassa

Roughly twenty-five centuries ago, the Church established a great western center on Brydd beside the blue waters of Lake Jahassa. The city-state became D'Hassa, and its central temple complex Elysia.

In time, D'Hassa became the acknowledged heart of the Faith for much of the known world, though not every nation accepted its authority.

The fall of Gaia and the rising of Ys shook the entire world. Volcanoes erupted, seas crossed old boundaries, and a new age of cold settled over Aereth.

The western coast of Cailleach was transformed when the Bassilith super volcano erupted and collapsed. Seawater rushed into the caldera, forming the Burning Sea and reshaping Claen Gael.

Elsewhere, rifts widened. Islands separated from older shores. The lands that had once seemed eternal became the Shattered Lands of later maps.

Yet the cold eventually loosened its hold. Kingdoms rose again, trade returned, and the peoples of Aereth entered the long era now called the Age of Steel.

By the dawn of the Age of Dreams, the world had taken a shape closer to that known today. Human civilizations flourished in the east, while the western lands of Cailleach remained the ancient heartland of the Ddraig, Drakeri, and Sídhe.

Sieges, Morrighan citadels, Sídhe courts, human kingdoms, and trading cities rose and fell. There were wars, as there were in every age, but for a time Aereth's people could aspire to more than survival.

It was an age of building, discovery, art, and memory.

It did not last.

The Return of Ys

Far to the west, the land drowned at the end of the Desolation Wars rose again from the sea: black, volcanic, and glassed with obsidian.

Morrighan patrols from Siege Azdiel were among the first to see it. Their Empress, Xorayss, carried warning to the High Court of the Sídhe, but the ancient tales of the imprisoned Shadow had become legend, and the warning was dismissed.

The vaults beneath the risen land were failing.

The Shadow Wars

As their seals cracked, the Dark Hordes returned. The Shadow spread outward from the west, and the wars that followed destroyed lands that had endured for uncounted ages.

Siege Azdiel fell. Its Ddraig were destroyed and remade as Drakhmar, terrible remnants of what they had once been. Xorayss, once an Empress of the Ddraig, became the first and greatest among them.

Gaia itself was shattered by eruptions, earthquakes, and great tsunamis. When the sky cleared, much of the old continent was gone. The Obsidian Islands, Amber Islands, Cold Rocks, and the Island of Serpents, collectively known as Yle, remained as fragments of what had been.

Upon the newly surfaced black land, a city grew around the ruins of Azdiel. The old name returned with it: Ys.

And in Ys dwelt Baara, Lord of Shadows and earthly servant of Dral'gath.

So ended the Age of Dreams.

The Desolation Wars left Aereth wounded. Arcane upheaval, volcanism, and the rifting of continents darkened the world and ushered in the Long Winter. Ice claimed vast regions, and survival became the first concern of every people, creature, plant and tree.

A southern fragment torn from Gaia drifted toward the polar reaches. In later ages it would be called Lemuria. There, far from the great centers of the Elder Races, another lineage was quietly changing.

The Murians

From small primates native to Lemuria arose the ancestors of Aereth's indigenous humans: the Murians. As their homeland grew colder, they migrated north and east, eventually spreading through the lands that would become E'Terra.

Their numbers increased far more quickly than those of the Elder Races, who aged more slowly and reproduced at far slower rates. Their oldest traditions also preserved fear: memories of fire in the sky, monstrous battles, and powers they could neither name nor control. Whether those memories record Ddraig, Drakhmar, wyverns, or merely the chaos of ancient wars is now impossible to know.

In rare instances, Drakeri or Sídhe formed unions with Murians, passing a measure of their magical heritage to their descendants.

The Travelers

The broken gates left by the Tuatha Dé Danann created another human lineage upon Aereth. At unpredictable intervals, damaged portals opened into another universe and drew people from a distant world called Earth.

These Travelers did not come willingly, nor could they reliably return. Many perished. Others were absorbed into Murian communities, and over long ages the bloodlines mingled.

The same gates sometimes opened in the opposite direction. Thus, creatures and legends passed between Aereth and Earth, leaving each world with stories whose origins neither fully understood.

For ages the balance held. Then it broke.

The wars remembered collectively as the Desolation Wars raged for hundreds of thousands of years. Dral'gath, the Lord of Shadows, opened ways from the Dark Realm and sent his creations upon Aereth. Some were monsters without reason. Others wore forms disturbingly close to those of the people they hunted.

The conflict divided even the Tuatha Dé Danann. Old rivalries became wars, and some fell wholly to the Shadow, turning against the Ddraig, Drakeri, and even their own kin. In later ages these fallen ones would be remembered as Dark Lords - Shadowborn beings whom modern people might call demons. The Shadow found fertile ground wherever distrust took root.

The First Morrighan

Out of that devastation came one of the most enduring alliances in Aereth's history: the Morrighan. Ddraig and Drakeri joined in flight, combining dragonfire and strength with the speed, weapons, and arcane gifts of a mounted warrior.

Together with the remaining powers of the Tuatha Dé Danann and those Sídhe who chose to fight, they drove the Dark Hordes back.

The Sealing of the Abyss

Victory did not mean destruction. Some beings of the Shadow could not be slain by any power then known. The Tuatha Dé Danann therefore built arcane vaults beyond the ordinary world, prisons within the void that became known as the Abyss.

Most were hidden beneath a remote western reach of Gaia. The land above them was torn apart and drowned beneath the sea, and the surviving wards were intended to hold forever.

When their work was done, the surviving Tuatha Dé Danann departed Aereth through their gates, save those who remained as the divine guardians of the Elder Races. Those who had fallen to the Shadow remained as well, though they were no longer counted among their kin. Some of the ancient passages left behind were damaged and unstable.

They would trouble two worlds for ages to come.

The first great change came from beyond Aereth.

The Tuatha Dé Danann, fleeing catastrophe in another realm, crossed into Aereth through magical gates of their own making. They sought sanctuary from Ydholth the Black, Empress of the Ddraig, and were permitted to settle upon the eastern reaches of ancient Gaia.

They were warned against reckless meddling with the powers of the Ley. They did not heed that warning.

The Awakening of the Shadow

Seeking knowledge of the beings that governed the First Realm, the most powerful druids of the Tuatha Dé Danann performed the ritual remembered as the Naming of Names. They believed that to know a true name was to gain mastery over it.

Instead, they awakened Dral'gath.

The ritual ended in dark supernatural fire. Then Erais, the Arcane Light, appeared in the form of a great ice dragon and quenched the flames. The frozen remains of the druids shattered, and the Gaotha - the Four Winds - scattered their fragments across Aereth.

Where those fragments fell, the earth shook and the great stone circles called cylchs rose from land, riverbed, and sea floor. So deep were their foundations that none has ever succeeded in moving them.

The Gifts of Erais

Erais understood what the awakening of Dral'gath would bring. Against laws older than any mortal kingdom, the Arcane Light gave Aereth new defenders.

From the blood, bone, and essence of Ddraig slain in battle she fashioned the Drakeri, the Dragonkin, and touched them with dragonfire. They inherited strength, an affinity for fire, wind, and storm, and - most important - the ability to hear dragonsong and form the profound bonds that would one day unite dragon and rider.

From the elements of Aereth and the power of the Ley she fashioned the Aes Sídhe, binding them to the living heart of the world. The Sídhe followed their own path, seldom willing to call themselves allies of either dragon or Drakeri, yet no less a part of the balance Erais sought to preserve.

From that age onward, the histories of the Ddraig, Drakeri, and Sídhe could no longer be separated from the struggle between Light and Shadow.

Before there were kingdoms, there was silence.

Before there were dragons, there was only possibility.

Aereth was born, changed, and endured through ages beyond reckoning. Unlike Earth, no great extinction swept away its ancient giants. Megafauna endured beside their smaller descendants, and from the oldest draconic lineages arose two destinies: the reptilian Wyvernis and the warm-blooded Ddraig, sole survivors of the family Draconidae.

Long before humanity raised its first cities, the Ddraig became guardians of Aereth's living balance. They understood a truth every generation would later rediscover:

To wound the balance of the world is to wound oneself.

Thus began the Age of Dragons.

The Age of Dragons

The oldest dragonsongs do not reckon time as mortals do. They remember mountains before their names, seas before their shores, and the slow brightening and darkening of the Ley across countless Turns.

As the ages passed, the great terrestrial dragons grew in intellect as well as size. They gathered in volcanic highlands, where the heat of the earth warmed their nests, and their scattered aeries became the first great sieges. They possessed the wit to devise written language yet chose instead to preserve memory in dragonsong: histories carried from one generation to the next in voice, image, emotion, and living remembrance.

The Ddraig also learned to read the rhythms of Gwydion's luminous rings. When the Ley brightened, life flourished and the influence of the Light strengthened. When the rings darkened, creatures of the Shadow became bolder and the boundaries between worlds seemed less certain.

Thus, the eldest people of Aereth became more than hunters and rulers of the sky. They became watchers. In time, they became guardians.

For Jorah, Lord Silver Eyes.

Who reminded me that true greatness is measured not by strength alone, but by quiet wisdom, enduring kindness, and the light carried within one's eyes.

May all who Cross Beyond the Veil find such peace.

Foreword

Every people keeps a record of its beginning.

The oldest records of the Magisters speak of a world that learned to remember. This Chronicle gathers songs preserved by the Ddraig, histories entrusted to the Elder Races, and writings carried across countless generations.

Aereth is older than kingdoms, older than the Elder Races, older even than the first songs.