History

The Golden Age of the Gods

The gods, newly born, each made a people to call their own: "the Guardians of Nu's domain." The Omari for the sea, the Irugaine for the living land, the Thojar for cliff and cave, and the Alverians for the sky. These are the Greater Four, made by divine intent rather than by engineering.

The Silver Age of Magic

The age is named for the Alverians, and it begins with a meal. An Alverian is an inch of air jellyfish and nothing else. The bodies came out of somebody else: the jellyfish burrowed into Irugaine brains and drove them, the Irugaine built machines out of ancient magical materials, and the machines grew flesh constructs twenty feet tall. The gentler account, the one the surface still tells, calls it trust: "In an age of trust, the Irugaine moulded and created for the Alverians new bodies to possess," using the Holy Grail. Both are true, in that order, and the Irugaine were the hands of their own enslavement.

Three hundred Alverians ascended into those constructs, and they did it by consuming the rest of their own kind. Hundreds of thousands went into the making of three hundred bodies. Those three hundred became the lords of Alveria and brought the Age of Alveria, and the founding act of the empire is commemorated nowhere inside it. Any account that calls this a golden age of learning is describing a cannibalism.

Then they took the world. They enslaved the Irugaine and scourged their forests. They built new peoples out of stolen genetic material: first the Lesser Four, "the Greater Species of Alveria," to run an empire, and beneath them the WildKin, bred by the thousand for specific jobs, thirty two peoples of them in the record as it stands. Every one of the Lesser Four carries a strain of Alverian, because the first designs came out too perfect to control and had to be lessened before they could be used. The Alverians catalogued their own creations in their own tongue, and their words for them are still the names the classes carry.

Every one of those peoples began the same colour. "All beings began blue white, the colour of their inner vein networking system. The Alverian's would blast them with acclimatising rays of atmos, depending on where they wanted to send them, and their bodies within minutes would start changing colour and form, based on the climate they would be transported to."

The Collapse

The empire fell in a single night. Alverian power was astral power: the stars went dark, every enchantment in the world failed at once, and the machines ran on borrowed time.

Then the High King of Alveria went to Vaeyar claiming amends, and the Alverians tried to bind their own mother and take her godhood. She broke out, became a storm, and took the ninth air out of the sky. The lesser and kinder Alverians, the ones who had never joined the cult of the three hundred, choked in the open air or fled downward. The lords went into bunkers, sealed them, and turned on machines that replicate the old atmosphere off banks of trapped souls. "They await the day they return to the surface realms and seek their vengeance."

They did not go underground in clay. There were no clay suits and no cracking clay masks, and the nine and ten foot figures of the old surface accounts were servants and lesser vessels. The lord's body is twenty feet of grown, translucent flesh, and the only living part of an Alverian is the inch inside it. Seventy two are alive on Nu today: fifty six lords sealed in bunkers under the rock, and sixteen in the Inner Realm. One of the three hundred got no bunker at all. The Lord of Alveria was locked out by the rest and betrayed, and escaped in the mind of a Nu'uman slave, whose bloodline is the one the world now calls Pendragon.

Into the vacuum came the things that were never planned. The Hybrids, infertile crossings between peoples that were never meant to meet, and out of the dark afterwards the five classes of monster and abomination.

Excalibur and the Pendragon line

The sword was made by the gods to kill Aezithis, each god giving a part of himself to it, and the Alverians helped. They convinced their mother's siblings that killing Aezithis required a part of each of them, and the gods, who had known no evil but Aezithis, had no reason to distrust the children of the purest of them. The old surface claim that the Omari were the first wielders of Excalibur is an Omari claim to the honour and nothing more.

Its true wielder is the King of Alveria. The sword corrupted him, and he has been in the brain of every Pendragon since the Collapse, which is the only reason a Nu'uman boy can lift it. The record also says that Alvod Vanyor, the Lord of Alveria, received Excalibur from Vaeyar and was corrupted by it, and that it was the Lord of Alveria who was locked out of his bunker and escaped into the Nu'uman slave whose line became Pendragon. Whether the Lord of Alveria, the King of Alveria and the High King of Alveria are one Alverian under three titles, or two, or three separate lords, is not written anywhere, and the Codex does not decide it.

The name itself comes off a kill, and it is older than the crown. The Pendragon of the Penwood was "the only true dragon in the world," three headed and rotten, slain in the Penwood by Gaius' father, and that kill gave the line its name. The record counts it among the Great Shattered. Older material calls it the Wyrm of the Penwood and a foul Remoulded, and that reading is set aside, though the Penwood itself remains a Remoulded site and something else has the run of it now.

After the fall

The Imperial Diet belongs to this age and not to the empire that fell. It seats thirteen Electors, better than three hundred Imperial Princes, about a hundred Free Cities, some forty tribes, and, as its Sixth Estate, roughly a hundred monster dens, beside the nobility, the gentry, the clergy, the peasantry and the autonomous tribes. What the Diet publishes concerns the hundred dens. What it does not know is that the dens answer upward to a court of their own.

The far west went its own way. The Dead Continent is the homeland of the Mekuhlian and a necromantic society where necromancy carries no shame, and in the first age after the fall a reader of the house of Mahl went to the void for room and came back holding the High Throne of the Lich. Its great rite was the Ashen Reach: twenty million sacrificed to the void in one act, to open the door the Throne still keeps. Mahlbar the Lich King is a Mekuhlian and not a Nu'uman, whatever the surface stories say.

The age of the Crimson

Since his heart was pulled, the blood of Aezithis has leaked from the crust. The Crimson mutates everything it touches, and it has since developed a consciousness. Most of the fantastical creatures of the modern world are Crimson mutations, and a great many people regard the blight as a gift from the gods. This is the world PyreTale is set in.