The Age of Faith was the first great age of Elegor’s recorded history: the long span in which the gods remained close to the world they had shaped, and mortals learned to live under the weight of that presence.
The Awakening
Our known history began with the Awakening. The gods touched Elegor and, with their might, brought sapient life unto the First Humans, the species inhabiting the world. Through the divine touch, they became Awoken, stirring into consciousness in a world already ancient, and under the gods’ guidance, they learned the Speech. But the gods did more than teach our ancient language, the Ardaik. They taught Domains: the governing principles by which each deity expressed power over an aspect of existence, from the turning of the cosmos to the shaping of stone, from the architecture of community to the hidden logic of dreams. Aiding them in spreading their word were the Emissaries, the gods' own children, who walked among mortals and carried their parents’ work across the world.
From the closeness between mortals and gods emerged the Binding, a ritualistic communion between mortal aptitude and divine domain. Through the Binding, the Awoken received access to the chosen gods’ domains in a form that could be practiced, refined, and taught.
In that sense, Paymon’s Arcane was the first domain through which incantations were drawn from raw potential and shaped into stable forms, and his restless drive to refine and expand the language of spellcraft gave mortals tools of increasing precision and power. Pazil, his firstborn daughter and Emissary of the Arcane domain, carried that knowledge across the world, farther than Paymon himself could remain. Paymon’s ambition was to understand and to perfect, and he pursued it with his fellow gods, widening the range of possible enchantments and touching every domain. In time, the Gift of Divine Magic spread beyond any single god’s domain, and the world entered an era in which knowledge traveled as reliably as trade.
The Damareth Period
For a millennium after the Awakening, the Damareth Period carried this growth to its height, and the Age of Faith reached its splendor. Mortals lived in the closest company of the gods that our records preserve, studying beside the powers that had woken them and joining them in the long labor of understanding the world. The gods traveled throughout Elegor, carrying their word from one settlement to the next, and where their visitation had passed, their Emissaries stood behind to turn astonishment into craft and craft into institution.
All of this set the world in motion. Drawn by the trail of the gods and by the steady succession of things being built, discovered, and devised, the peoples of Elegor began to travel and to settle wherever the work and the wonder led them, until coastlines, river valleys, and deep interiors held their first lasting communities and Elegor had grown into a settled and connected world.
The Nadaspar Order
The Nadaspar Order emerged within this environment as a scholarly discipline. Its members gathered testimony from practitioners, compared accounts across settlements, and treated the Divine Gift as a body of knowledge that required a method for its preservation. They understood that everything the gods taught might be easily twisted by word of mouth or forgotten entirely. And with power growing at scale, precision was required at scale.
The Citadel of the Gods
For centuries, the gods had wandered Elegor, walking its roads apart and gathering only rarely, in small numbers and amid constant fanfare. Kaelimur, the Citadel of the Gods, was Igall’s answer to that restlessness: a permanent home where the pantheon could finally settle, and a seat grand enough to hold their council when they gathered. She found the perfect place in the Narukhulud mountain range, where a hot spring welled up through a column of rock at the heart of a high clearing and a geyser threw steam and spray above it, its mist drifting across the whole clearing and hanging over it as a permanent rainbow. Kursiq raised the ground into the geometry Igall’s plans required and left that column standing at the center, so the citadel grew around a living spring at its core.
What rose over the next sixty years of construction reached a scale mortals had only imagined. Eleven statues of the pantheon emerged from the living rock, each one taller than anything raised before it, arranged in a circle and with their arms lifted overhead so that the citadel rested on their upturned palms. Channels carried the spring’s flow up through the peak and out along the slopes, dividing it through the eleven temples that rose on the citadel’s ground until it spilled as eleven waterfalls, one between each pair of statues, and gathered in lakes at the mountain’s foot.
At Kaelimur’s feet, a new settlement took shape without plan or decree: Akkalmur. Many of the workers who had raised the Citadel of the Gods stayed on once it was finished, held there by the wonder they had built, and their camps hardened into streets and quarters around the lakes. Trade gathered around them to serve the pilgrims, who came from every corner of Elegor to make the climb and stand within Kaelimur, and who needed lodging and food and rest while they waited their turn.
The Warmongering Era
Outside Kaelimur, the Age of Faith churned with the familiar rise and fall of civilizations. Despite its splendor, this age also bore the turmoil of wars fought for survival and growth. Borders were drawn and contested to access vital resources. Cities were burned and then rebuilt to host more people. Through it all, the gods drew steadily back into Kaelimur and walked among mortals less and less. They witnessed the wars and, for the most part, let them run their course, since even conflict still fed their Domains through the Courts of the gods, the institutions and orders raised around each deity's work. Garu's gymnasia, the training halls where fighters were drilled before the march and tended after the return, filled with every campaign, while the displaced and the newly gathered were taken in by Anaar's Hearthens, her stewards of mortal life and society. A few of the pantheon never withdrew so far: Naabnit, the God of Nature, still moved through the wild, in the turning of the seasons and the breaking of storms, and Xasatur, the Goddess of Healing, still went out to tend the wounded and those the fighting left grieving. But they were the exception. The Age held flourishing and violence side by side, and as the gods' physical presence thinned from the world, so did the mediation it had once provided. With fewer gods walking among them, people began to stray from their teachings, bending incantations once devised to heal, build, and stabilize toward conquest and annihilation, in the service of rulers' pride.
The Warmongering Era was six centuries of declining diplomatic relations, increased warfare, with a growing sense of cruelty, and magic employed as a means to harm in unbearable ways. Across the continent, powers waged war in cycles that answered to pride, doctrine, and habit as often as to need, fueled by growing access to powers they were not really meant to handle.
Amid this churn, a group of Nadaspar scholars started a new settlement in the north-east of the continent, called Mardolith. As scholars of the Gift of Divine Magic, they employed their arcane knowledge for survival: food, shelter, clean water, preservation, and the reduction of suffering. Even its name, “the place that feeds,” carried the plainness of a principle, and the founding principles drew a growing number of people to escape war and join Mardolith, allowing the small settlement to grow into one of the era’s superpowers in a short time.
Over those six centuries of warfare, the gods still acted, though now from within Kaelimur, no longer at the side of the powers they sought to restrain. More than once they moved to settle disputes before they could erupt into war, working through proclamations and through the Emissaries who carried their counsel from one ruler to the next: they pressed rulers to renounce claims that would have led to bloodshed, and warned against incantations grown too powerful to be loosed on a battlefield. Most prominently, they issued a decree asking the peoples of Elegor and their rulers to cool their tempers, to pursue diplomacy over war, and to restrain their enchantments, or they would risk a total breakdown of the Bindings and the magical system.
Their call went largely unanswered. Each ruler feared an adversary would break any treaty and annihilate them with a new spell, so the research of arcane warfare never slowed and never stopped being used on the battleground.
The Great Sundering
The Age of Faith ended as violently as the wars had become. Centuries of magical strain, of power bent toward conquest until it forgot any other purpose, had accumulated beyond what the world could hold. What the gods had been preaching for years eventually came true.
On a day in Nupem of the year -1517 (B.A.), the earth rose, cracked, and broke open. Fire and flood, storms, volcanic activity, and earthquakes battered the land, and after a week of elemental rebellion, the single, unified continent that had once been Elegor was divided into scattered coastlines and isolated interiors. Most of Elegor's inhabitants did not survive to see what remained. The event came to be known as the Great Sundering, or the First Apocalypse.
Kaelimur and the city of Akkalmur, defended by the gods’ presence, were the only places left wholly unscathed. Elsewhere, survival was possible but cruel: scattered communities endured across a shattered world, their settlements reduced to whatever their people could carry through the catastrophe and raise again on the other side of it. For seven years, the gods wandered through Elegor to quiet the planet’s elemental forces, and to mend and rebuild whatever structure possible. But the accounts of the time tell of a visible disappointment on the gods’ faces: they had warned for centuries that Divine Magic was an instrument of creation and understanding, and the world had turned it toward conquest until the ground became consequence. After they cauterized the planetary wounds, there was nothing left to say. On the 6th of Kismar of year -1510, the gods convened one last time in Kaelimur and decided to depart Elegor. They left their Emissaries behind to tend the survivors and keep what knowledge remained intact, and withdrew from a world that had broken itself. What remained of Elegor began the long, quiet work of piecing itself back together.