was the nearly two centuries in which Elegor tried to live again after the Second Apocalypse, and learned that the world beyond the Barrier had never stopped pressing back.
Funding Period (0–106 P.A.)
When the doors of Kaelimur closed, three gods were dead, a fourth exiled, Gishurr imprisoned, and the Rift held sealed by the magical Barrier. Survivors of the Second Apocalypse began again, slowly and unevenly, over generations. Communities formed around whatever still remained: defensible valleys, reclaimed fields, the memory of what Elegor had been. The Emissaries remained as keepers of the gods’ last instructions, lending aid where the work outran mortal hands, and spending their strength with care so the Barrier would hold.
Life Under an Unstable Nexus
Under an altered Nexus Field, the quiet never quite settled. Strange disturbances rose and faded across the recovering lands: sudden overgrowths, mutating beasts, elemental ruptures, maladies that took a town in a day and vanished as fast. Scholars wrote them down. People called them Nexus Anomalies.
Among those records, in 45 P.A., a graver kind of event began to appear. The first Nexus Fractures opened like raw tears in the air, loosed a small assembly of Darukin, and sealed within hours, faster than any army could be raised to meet the enemies before they spread fear and death. For a population who had buried the Second Apocalypse and raised children who had never seen the Daru’umai’s war, those brief breaches brought the old terror back into the present: if the enemy could still tear its way into Elegor, then the Barrier’s peace was thinner than anyone had dared believe.
Perfect Squares of Ruin
Each Fracture also left something behind once the fighting ended. At its heart, all the breach’s energy had drawn together into a single Luminal Shard, a perfectly squared stone of Nexus energy, potent beyond any craft the age possessed and violently unstable in untrained hands. Scholars and mages tried to cut them, bind them, or draw on their power; every attempt ended the same way, in a deflagration that spared nothing nearby. The grimmest proof came in 51 P.A., when a Shard was roughly manipulated within the village of Doitar in Erhum, wiping the place off the map, leaving only a crater where a market town had stood.
After Doitar, the Emissaries took the matter into their own hands. They began gathering loose Shards wherever they surfaced and carrying them off to a keeping they named to no one, judging the artifacts too perilous to leave within mortal reach. The confiscations helped keep Elegor alive, and they planted a resentment toward the Emissaries that would only deepen once the Shards, in time, became something worth owning.
A Presence in the Hollowdark
From the grim halls of the Hollowdark, a new humanoid species emerged and disrupted the work of restoration. The Zaergarai, born from an infected wound Paymon suffered beyond the Rift and cast out by the Arcane God, were alien in body, closer to Darukin than to Elegorians, and divided into strains whose differences ran through biology and society alike. Each strain, led by a single Primal, gathered around a single zeal: a creed that promised, in time, a return to Paymon’s side. The Dominion Strain raided the surface, becoming a standing threat to the settlements above, certain that conquering Elegor would prove their worth. The Greed Strain hoarded treasure and wealth, feeding and profiting from Elegor’s black markets, believing that stockpiled resources to sustain Paymon’s war against the Daru’umai would earn them a place beside him. In the fungus-choked warrens of the Hollowdark, each strain held its own belief and pursued it without pause. Within a few generations of the first sightings, Zaergarai societies were entrenched across much of Elegor.
Nexus Upheaval Period (106–181 P.A.)
Thresholds of the Nexus
In 106 P.A., Elegor changed forever once again. A tiny fissure opened near Frostholm, and people took it for a malformed Nexus Fracture. They waited for it to seal. Instead, it widened, season after season. The same kind of wound appeared at Tidehaven, then at Dunevale by 112 P.A. The world named them Nexus Points: locations where the Nexus became visible and, in some way, tangible. The warning left by the gods about the shattered nature of the Nexus resonated once more, and the need to understand it better drove scholars from all over Elegor to study the first stable anomalies.
Once Frostholm’s Nexus Point had widened enough, the first expedition ventured inside, hoping to find a new kind of treasure, such as the Luminal Shards. What they found, instead, was a maze of sand-like matter that took shape one moment and unraveled the next, taking anyone still inside with it, dissolving into nothingness. The Nexus Labyrinth (simply called The Labyrinth) took most of the parties who dared to journey inside it. Any attempt to backtrack one’s path inside it proved useless: ropes vanished into dust as soon as a chamber dissolved, and no spell could hold its position without something to be stuck upon.
A Fragment of Nexus
In 136 P.A., Karadara Emberfall of Frostholm and her party brought out of the Labyrinth an orange, irregular crystal, as large as a giant watermelon. Scholars called it an Asharil: a fragment of the Labyrinth’s own matter, stable enough to be held and studied, yet still beyond ordinary craft. It was saturated with Nexus energy; its reverb carried for meters and was felt on the skin across Frostholm. With the memory of Doitar still raw, the Asharil was kept under strict vigilance, and every experiment was conducted under the scrutiny and assistance of Shatal, Emissary of Set’Sin.
As the three fissures kept widening, the settlements near them became sites of Nexus research, with Frostholm leading the effort through its newly discovered artifact. Soon, the lives of those settlements would change once again.
A Second Invasion
Frostholm learned that the Nexus Points worked both ways. A year after the Asharil’s discovery, a small contingent of Darukin came through the Nexus Point. Frostholm was unprepared, and the blow landed hard. Scholars first debated whether the Asharil drew them in, yet a few months later a second wave appeared in Dunevale, and the claim lost weight. The pattern made one thing clear: the Labyrinth connected Elegor to the wider universe, and the Daru’umai had learned to use it, first through volatile Fractures and now by letting the Darukin navigate the Labyrinth itself to reach Elegor. Frostholm, Tidehaven, and Dunevale hardened into defensive frontiers.
Research into the Nexus Points intensified, and the realms surrounding the three sites began funding both study and defense. The danger was clear: Fractures were small and volatile, allowing only a limited Darukin force, while the Nexus Points were wider and still expanding. Left unchecked, they could admit a larger army and, in time, swallow nearby settlements and possibly the entire planet.
The Bounding Pyramids
The answer to this Nexus’ crisis came from Karadara Emberfall herself. After retrieving the Asharil, she halted the Labyrinth explorations and, with Shatal, turned to studying the crystal. They both understood the artifact’s potential, and they began experimenting with binding enchantments meant to draw on its Nexus energy. The first attempts were small, careful, and dangerous: circles of stone laid near the margin of the Nexus Point, spells shaped to pull the crystal’s pulse outward, measurements taken while the air around the Nexus Point bent and shook. More than once, the experiments failed. In one of them, the Asharil overloaded so violently that Shatal ordered the work halted, warning that another push could drive it into a deflagration large enough to level Frostholm and possibly disrupt the Barrier. Those failures clarified what they lacked: a permanent anchor built around the Nexus Point, large enough to bear the strain without letting it tear loose.
In time, they found an answer in a permanent structure built around the Nexus Point. Shaped from the surrounding ice and snow, the first Pyramid rose within months, with Shatal spending her power more freely and with the aid of Tukam, Igall’s Emissary, to speed the work. Through a ritual Karadara refined across repeated trials, the Asharil was bound to the Pyramid, and a steady flow of Nexus energy was drawn into the structure. The pyramidal form proved ideal for both strength and containment, suppressing the Nexus Point’s spread and holding it to its measure.
With this success, Karadara, Shatal, and Tukam sailed to Tidehaven, launched several expeditions into the Labyrinth, and brought out a second Asharil. They raised a new Pyramid and repeated the binding ritual. In the meantime, they sent word ahead to Dunevale, where an adventuring party undertook precise expeditions into the Labyrinth. By the time Karadara and Shatal arrived, the third crystal had already been found**. T**hey carried out the process one last time, saving Elegor from the menace of the Nexus Point.
By 139 P.A., Frostholm, Tidehaven, and Dunevale stood as fortress-cities around the three Pyramids. The nearby realms kept funding study and defense, and from among the people who had held those walls, Karadara founded the Sentinels of the Apocalypse, an order charged with maintaining the Pyramids, coordinating the three cities, advancing the study of the Nexus, and keeping watch for whatever still waited to emerge.
The Dunevale Scourge
As soon as Elegor could breathe again after halting the Nexus Points’ spread, the Nexus responded once more, as if it were a living entity. In 140 P.A., Dunevale’s Pyramid ignited for a few seconds, and moments later a towering monstrosity coalesced right before it. It resembled a monkey, yet it bore Pixie ears and a snake-headed tail, assembled into a horrific, almost mocking shape. Dunevale’s defenses staggered, and sixteen Sentinels died protecting the fortress-citadel. The creature smashed the outer wall and four buildings as it tried to tear down the Pyramid. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it dissolved into fading teal particles.
This was the first Bane attack. In the following months, other such monstrosities emerged from the Nexus Points at Tidehaven and Frostholm. The Sentinels’ armed branch fortified the cities and enrolled new volunteers, while Karadara secured additional funding to sustain the defense against these new terrors.
A New Alliance
In 144 P.A., Dunevale received another unexpected visit from the Nexus Point. An army of alien-looking people stepped through and met the swords and shields of the posted Sentinels. Menacing in aspect, the newcomers made no attack. Instead, in clear Elegorian, they announced themselves as Asarkai, a sibling species of the Zaergarai, descended from Paymon. Unlike their counterparts, cast out by the Arcane God, they had been cleansed of Daru’um influence and were therefore accepted. They explained that they lived on Asarion, the barren planet where Paymon had chosen to spend exile while studying how to wage war and vengeance against the Daru’umai without endangering the Barrier.
Eventually, word reached Frostholm, and Karadara Emberfall rushed to meet them. A series of scholarly exchanges followed, and several discoveries emerged. First came confirmation that the Nexus Labyrinth connected different worlds across the universe. Second, the ritual performed on the Nexus Points had become visible inside the Labyrinth even from great distances, which is how the Asarkai had found Dunevale’s. Third, the Asarkai explained that their study of the Darukin had led them to knowledge of the Aether, a particular organization of the Nexus that allows life. While the living species native to Elegor and Asarion shared an Essence-based Aether, like the gods, the Darukin were instead driven by a Mayhem-based Aether.
Enthralled by the Asarkai’s discoveries and astonished, in turn, by what Elegorians had achieved in halting the Nexus Points, Karadara agreed to travel back to Asarion to share further findings and help the Asarkai build their own Pyramid. Shatal and Tukal declined, unwilling to leave Elegor or to stand near Paymon. The Asarkai accepted this, since they too had their Masters, descended first from Paymon himself, and therefore as mighty as the Emissaries.
The Luminal Shard Revolution
Following the success in taming the Asharils, research turned back to the Luminal Shards. In 142 P.A., the first successful attempt to stabilize one succeeded. With this newfound stability, the Emissaries refrained from hoarding the Shards for safekeeping and left Elegorians to manage them, while still preaching patience and temperance, since even a stabilized Shard could unleash enough Nexus to endanger both its surroundings and the Barrier.
The most remarkable use of a Shard emerged in the coastal town of Namyra, on the eastern shore of Erhum, some hundred miles north of Tidehaven. In 150 P.A., the first Combsail Ship sailed from Namyra’s shipyard. Its design employed and distributed the Nexus energy of a Luminal Shard through its sails, allowing the vessel to outpace any other even in still air. A year later, the inaugural voyage crossed Elegor from west to east in just under three weeks, opening a new era of travel. Karadara offered an undisclosed sum to acquire that first ship for the Sentinels, establishing a continuous route linking their three fortress-citadels and enabling the steady movement of people and goods necessary for their survival. The decision drew mixed responses from regnants and politicians and later became a source of further distress.
The Shayen Crossing
In 151 P.A., Frostholm welcomed a new species. The Shayens reached Elegor by following the faint glow of the Pyramid. They fled a homeworld already being ravaged by the Daru’umai, and the Labyrinth became their last resort. More than a thousand attempted the crossing, and only a few hundred survived; the rest were taken by Banes, or by the chambers and corridors of the Nexus Labyrinth as they dissolved.
The Shayens met suspicion at first, yet they learned to communicate in Elegorian, and they offered two pieces of knowledge. Their world had no gods, and no other entities of comparable might, so the Daru’umai’s arrival struck them as an incomprehensible display of power. They also practiced their own form of magic, drawing Nexus energy from the surrounding environment in a slow, steady, controlled flow. The Nadaspar Order named this practice Natural Magic, and from then on, it stood alongside Divine and Occult as the safest of the three traditions.
An Attack on Stability
With the Luminal Shard market blooming, the hunt for the relics grew fierce. Companies of adventurers stationed themselves in every village, ready to fend off the Darukin and seize the Shard inside a Fracture before it sealed. The work was lethal, and the body count forced the Emissaries to pay closer attention.
At the same time, the prospects opened by Shard use, especially through the Combsail Ships, drew ambition no counsel could temper. Namyra became the epicenter of the trade, while other shipyards tried to copy its design and still fell short of its craft. Wealth poured into the city, and envy followed. The nearby Kingdom of Tharyon had spent decades trying to bring Namyra under its aegis through diplomacy. The city council refused each time. When the first Combsail Ship sailed, King Vaelric pressed the negotiations with renewed force. As the years passed, the relationship soured, and Vaelric began massing troops near the borders, letting the threat of invasion speak for him. In that climate, Karadara made a move no one expected: she committed a vast share of Sentinel funds to buy a majority stake in Namyra’s shipyard, securing preferential access to the fast vessels and a steady stream of revenue. With that stake in place, any attack on the city would have drawn a Sentinel response, and with it a call to arms for every realm aligned with their cause.
The King answered with a rash gamble. He sent a handpicked cadre of the Tharyon Royal Guard to Frostholm with orders to kill Karadara. In 155 P.A., after weeks of watching her routines undetected, the three guards slipped into her chamber and wedged themselves among the ceiling beams, waiting for her return. Unbeknownst to them, that night Karadara carried a Luminal Shard for study. When they dropped from above, her first reflex was to hurl the Shard at them. It struck one assailant’s dagger and splintered. The detonation flung Karadara back down the corridor, and her chamber, along with the three stories beneath it, dissolved into smoke and fire.
The Covenant of Kaelimur
The attempt on Karadara Emberfall shook the world. Half of the Emissaries rose to investigate the attack, while the others tended to the Barrier and to any strain the explosion might have placed on Nexus stability. Karadara was hospitalized for a month, and the attempt on her life cost her right arm. During her recovery, the rubble yielded a fragment of a handkerchief bearing Tharyon’s symbol, along with six corpses: the three assailants and three Sentinels resting in the room below Karadara’s.
With that proof, blame fell on Tharyon at once, and multiple realms demanded that its king be put in chains. King Vaelric refused and mobilized the kingdom’s full army along its border. Nearby realms answered in kind, and within a few months the Erhum continent stood on the brink of war, and both alliances and the fear of a conflict spread to all other continents as well.
Still weak from her wounds, Karadara rose again. She sent letters to every ruler, summoning them to the Covenant of Kaelimur. The Emissaries granted her the Great Hall of Akharel, where the Last Council of the Gods had convened almost two centuries earlier.
In year 156 P.A., Karadara presided over the Covenant and urged all present to pull their armies back and deescalate. She publicly forgave King Vaelric and asked the gathered rulers to do the same, focusing her speech on unity in the common defense against the cosmic horrors. The room agreed to sign a mutual pact that bound every signatory to sustain the Sentinels, financially and with resources. In exchange for his freedom, King Vaelric had to renounce any claim on the citadel of Namyra for a thousand years. Empress Jorelai Dolith of Mardolith also proposed adopting a unified coin to avert economic strain from the emergent Shard market, yet the proposal was judged too harsh to implement and was dismissed. With that, the first Covenant ended.
Refugees of the Labyrinth
Seven years after the Covenant, Dunevale’s Nexus Point flared again, and a group of alien humanoids stumbled out, chased by a Bane. The Sentinels drove the creature back, then turned to the newcomers, who had collapsed, trembling and visibly suffering in the open air. Through gesture, one of them begged to be taken to the sea.
The request was granted at once. When the strangers reached the shore, they spread salted water across their skin, and strength returned to them almost immediately. Only then did the Sentinels understand that these people, soon known as the Nymms, depended on the sea for their survival.
Their story emerged slowly. They had entered their own Nexus Point to escape a civil war, as a last resort before succumbing to the hostile forces. The Labyrinth broke their order, scattered their numbers, and delivered only a wounded remnant to Elegor. Karadara Emberfall eventually received them without demand, giving them shelter along the coast while the Sentinels learned enough of their needs to keep them alive.
In 176 P.A., Frostholm received another people. A lone stone-skinned figure crossed the Nexus Point, repeating one word in a voice like struck rock. Phenex, Asark Master of Science, was in the city that day and recognized a pattern in the visitor’s tone. Through marks, stones, and patient exchange, he learned that the stranger was a Drath, fleeing a homeworld already invaded by Daru’umai forces, just like it happened to the Shayens years prior. Phenex and his entourage entered the Labyrinth with her and returned with hundreds more.
Together with the Shayens, the three alien species came to be called the Elikimai (the Ones who Crossed). After this brief succession of crossings, the Labyrinth fell silent again. No further people have reached Elegor through the Nexus Points since the Draths, and scholars still debate what changed within those shifting corridors, and why three lineages arrived within a single generation.
The End of an Era
After the Draths’ arrival, Elegor knew five years of uneasy quiet. The three Elikimai peoples began to settle beyond the dangerous fortress-cities that had first received them, following coastlines, trade roads, mountain holds, and river ports into many corners of the world. Their dispersal unfolded while the market for Luminal Shards grew sharper around them: rare beyond measure, costly beyond reason, and contested wherever a Fracture opened.
Old pressures returned with that trade. The same ambitions that had once driven Tharyon toward Namyra gathered again around the Shards, and Karadara Emberfall spent her final years urging restraint. She argued that the hunt for Shards had become too dangerous for scattered companies, rival treasuries, and opportunistic adventurers, and she pressed for the founding of an independent order charged with answering Fractures and retrieving the relics before greed turned each breach into a battlefield.
In 181 P.A., that fragile balance finally broke. Karadara was found dead, killed by an unknown assailant. Suspicions rose at once, carried by every old resentment and every interest threatened by her proposals, yet no culprit was ever proven. Her death remained a mystery without a name.
The Sentinels first held a closed funeral for her, reserved to the order that had been the closest thing she had to family. Three weeks later, the public ceremony was held in Akkalmur, at the foot of the holy city. The Emissaries themselves presided over the rites, and Combsail routes were organized to carry those who secured passage, while others came by slower roads and ships, until the gathered mourners filled the approaches beneath Kaelimur.
There, before a crowd drawn from every corner of Elegor, the Emissaries granted Karadara an honor no mortal had received before and no mortal has received since. Her remains were carried into Kaelimur, past the threshold of the City of the Gods, and the final salute to Karadara Emberfall marked the end of the Age of Resurgence.