Origin-Time
The First Age
The world the Drevari remember is not the world that exists now. The continents were differently arranged. The languages were different. The climate was different. What remained constant was the stone: the deep mineral beds, the mountain ranges, and the living rock threaded through with kallite.
Most modern histories do not acknowledge the First Age. Aldenmere dates civilization to roughly two thousand years before the current era. Elvish scholarship reaches further, into what it calls the Pre-Collapse Period. Neither account reaches far enough.
What existed before was older than the elvish record by a factor of ten.
The Drevari call the First Age vel-thal — origin-time. For thousands of years, the younger races knew the Drevari openly. They understood a Drevari’s memory as a gift: unbroken witness, freely offered to those who asked respectfully.
Vel-thalThe Drevari name for the First Age: origin-time.
KalliteThe luminous stone that has glowed at the same frequencies since before the first Drevari opened their eyes.
The Wound Begins
The First Betrayal
The change did not happen quickly. It never does.
Over the last thousand years of the First Age, the younger races discovered that Drevari memory was not merely accessible. It was extractable. The first attempts were academic: scholars seeking to draw out more than the Drevari offered freely. This was already a violation.
When questioning proved insufficient, researchers discovered that kallite could be removed from a Drevari body if the Drevari was held in sustained stillness. A restrained Drevari could be mined. The pieces carried fragments of memory — incomplete, decontextualized, difficult to read, but present.
The Drevari called this vel-iss: origin-absence, the removal of what was first. Removing kallite removed portions of inherited memory permanently. A Drevari from whom enough had been taken became not dead, but hollow.
They did not do it out of cruelty. They did it out of hunger. This is not a distinction that made it better.
Memory in the First Age was not simply history. It was one of the binding laws of the physical world. Tear enough of it from its rightful vessel, and the world loses its ability to hold its own past.
The Severing
The Collapse
The Collapse did not end the world. That is what makes it difficult to understand.
It severed the world’s relationship to its own past. The civilizations, languages, knowledge, and geography of the First Age did not disappear in fire or flood. They disappeared the way a word disappears from a language: gradually, without drama, until one day no speaker remains who knows what it meant.
Within three hundred years, the First Age was no longer remembered. Within five hundred, most of the languages in which it had been recorded could no longer be read. Within a thousand, the ruins it left were no longer understood as former things — only as mysteries.
The five known races rebuilt. Humans built empires. Elves built archives. Dwarves descended and carved memory into stone. Wrenfolk kept to their islands. Orcs preserved, through land-reading and oral tradition, a form of connection others had lost.
The Drevari withdrew. Not fled: withdrew. To flee is to leave under pressure. To withdraw is to make a considered decision to be elsewhere.
After the Collapse
The Known World
The world of the Sundered Age comprises three main landmasses and a body of water that shapes how all of them relate to one another.
Valdenmoor
The western continent: largest, most politically complex, and the setting for much of the early series. Its interior is dominated by the Aldenmere Empire. To the northeast, near the Karath foothills, sits Vel Tharun — the seat of elvish scholarship and the Grand Linguistic Archive.
The Karath Range occupies the far north of Valdenmoor. It is older than surrounding terrain by an order of magnitude modern geologists have not satisfactorily explained. Its valleys do not always match their maps. Its interior is warm, which is not something mountains usually are.
Thurak
The eastern continent: older in character, more eroded at the coasts, drier in the interior. The three great dwarven stonehalls occupy its southern regions, with Kharanor — called Ironfast in common speech — the southernmost and most accessible.
The orc steppes stretch across the eastern interior. The land itself is old there, and orc shamans have been reading it longer than any other race has held written records.
The Sunderwater
The Sunderwater separates Valdenmoor from Thurak. It is wider than it was in the First Age, and its currents make some crossings reliable and others dangerous. Its name dates to the aftermath of the Collapse. What widened it is one of the questions made difficult by the First Age’s disappearance from memory.