The Contemporary Age begins in 387 P.A., after the war against the Dominion Zaergarai fixed the last boundary of the Modern Age and left Elegor with a familiar burden: survival had been secured, while resolution remained beyond reach. The cities still stand, the Pyramids still hold, the Barrier still keeps the Rift closed, and the institutions raised across the previous centuries continue their work. Yet none of these safeguards has ended the deeper instability that shaped the world after the Second Apocalypse.
For that reason, this age is best understood as an age shaped by accumulated pressures, founded in slow convergence rather than a single initiating event. The Modern Age was defined by the rise of global powers under pressure: the ARC Syndicate, GUARD, the Heralds of a New Dawn, the weakened but enduring Sentinels of the Apocalypse, the expanding Mardolith Empire, and the many powers drawn into the race for Luminal Shards. The Contemporary Age inherits all of them at once. Their rivalries, compromises, and uneasy dependencies form the political structure of the present.
The Nexus remains the central fact of contemporary life. Its Fractures still open without warning, carrying Darukin into the world and leaving Luminal Shards behind when they collapse. These Shards have become both relic and currency: necessary for ritual, travel, communication, military response, and the prestige of those who can claim them. Every Fracture therefore draws Riftbreakers, local militias, adventuring companies, private agents, and opportunists of every kind. The danger posed by each breach is often contained quickly, yet the contest around the Shard can outlast the breach itself.
This contest has given the age one of its most visible professions. Adventurers, once treated as irregulars at the edge of armies and expeditions, have become part of the world’s ordinary machinery. They answer bounties on Banes and stray Darukin, descend into ruins left beneath the crust by the Great Sundering, enter the Hollowdark in search of relics and records, and sometimes attempt passages through the Nexus Labyrinth despite Sentinel warnings. Their work is dangerous, unevenly regulated, and often driven by necessity as much as courage. It remains one of the few paths through which people outside the great institutions can still change their station quickly.
The old powers watch that movement closely. The ARC Syndicate, through its GUARD Division, continues to define the lawful limits of enchantment across the realms that accept their authority, while Mardolith rejects that authority and presents its prosperity as proof that another course remains possible. The Heralds of a New Dawn retain their monopoly over the ritual that saves children from the Curse of the Nexus Children, and their temples bind families, courts, and treasuries to Usurthar through gratitude, fear, and need. The Sentinels, reduced in influence but still indispensable at the Nexus Points, maintain Frostholm, Tidehaven, and Dunevale with fewer outside finances than their task deserves. Fortunately for them, the revenue from the Namyra Shipyard’s Combsail ship construction remains substantial enough to offset some of the funding they lost to GUARD and the Heralds. Around them, alliances shift without settling into open war.
The Gods remain absent from Elegor and from any direct contact with mortals, and the Emissaries continue to carry the weight of that absence. The Bindings endure because people still believe in the Gods’ work, arguing with fear about what would happen if the Barrier weakened. Kaelimur and Akkalmur still draw pilgrims, scholars, and petitioners from every continent. To some, this proves that the divine order still holds. To others, it shows how much of the world depends on powers that choose distance over presence. The Contemporary Age has inherited that argument as firmly as it has inherited the Barrier itself.
Beneath the surface, the Zaergarai remain a second world inside the first. Their strains hold territories in the Hollowdark, governed by laws few surface powers understand, and feed markets that respectable courts deny using. On the surface, Dominion control in northern Adanurr endures as a scar left by the last war of the Modern Age. Surrounding nations watch it, fortify against it, trade around it where they must, and accept that erasing it would demand a cost no coalition has yet chosen to pay.
Elegor has grown skilled at containing disasters before they become endings, but that skill should not be mistaken for peace. The world of 387 P.A., the year in which I write this guide for potential newcomers into our world, is connected by Shards, roads, rites, pilgrimages, black markets, Combsail routes, and shared fear of the Rift. It is stable enough for daily life to continue, and strained enough that every institution lives by watching the others.
For now, Elegor stands in the long aftermath of its catastrophes, held together by vigilance, compromise, necessity, and the stubborn labor of people who build lives beneath powers they can neither fully trust nor afford to lose.