The Modern Age frames the years when the ultimate Nexus menace takes shape, while orders and institutions rise to become global powers.
Foremost among them stood the Sentinels of the Apocalypse. From their fortress-cities at Frostholm, Tidehaven, and Dunevale, they kept a permanent watch over the Nexus Points and the Pyramids that held each breach in check. Karadara’s pact at Namyra had secured them a majority stake in the shipyards that built Combsail Ships, and that industry became one of the central pillars of their financing.
Yet the Sentinels’ predominance would be challenged by both old and emerging orders, each rising to answer the new crises.
The Second Covenant of Kaelimur and the Kael
Karadara’s death loosened old rivalries within weeks, and the Emissaries feared the situation would begin to slip incontrollably. In 182 P.A., they summoned the Second Covenant of Kaelimur, calling rulers to the Great Hall of Akharel and placing themselves beside mortal powers for the first time in history. Enmar, Emissary of Anaar, held the chair. Where grief still carried weight, Enmar kept the table on obligations, on restraint, and on the shared labor of keeping peace when every realm could feel the old fear returning.
With the Shard market on a rampage, the Covenant also returned to the proposal forwarded by Empress Jorelai Dolith of Mardolith at the previous gathering: the adoption of a unified coin. Under Enmar’s seal the Kael was adopted and first struck at Kaelimur, with the Emissary keeping the dies and seals that authorized each minting. The purpose was both practical and political. Luminal Shards had become rare enough to serve as treasure, leverage, and threat, and the Kael offered a measure nations could price trade in, settle debts with, and pay service through without putting a Shard in anyone’s hand.
The Nadaspar Order and Luminal Resonance
The second pillar of the age was the Nadaspar Order. As the oldest order in Elegor, it had long studied spellcraft and tracked Nexus phenomena, and the advent of the Luminal Shard drew its scholars in at once.
In 189 P.A., Nadaspar achieved a feat that changed the age: Luminal Resonance, a ritual that attuned two Luminal Shards to each other and carried sound between them across any distance. Nadaspar sold those attuned pairs, named Nekura, and the trade widened the Shard race beyond the costly Combsail Ships. The success carried an uncomfortable implication. An institution devoted to careful study had shown how quickly a Shard-based technology could spread across the world before anyone agreed on its consequences.
Two currents hardened within the Order. One, faithful to Nadaspar’s history, held that arcane innovation remained its mandate, provided it was pursued with rigor and care. The other argued that the Concord of the Barrier demanded restraint before discovery and treated the Shard market as a threat to global order and Nexus stability, aligning with the Emissary’s view. They called themselves ARC, for Arcane Research and Containment, holding that containment served as a condition of research, never its rival. Neither current overcame the other, and the split would define Nadaspar’s internal politics for the rest of the age.
The Dimming of Frostholm
While the world’s hunger was aimed at the Luminal Shards, the Asharils slipped into the background, recalled more as antique relics than active artifacts. Kept inside the three Sentinels’ Pyramids, they stayed out of sight, and most scholars drifted away from their study. Their role was too critical, and any close research carried the risk of disrupting the ritual that held the Pyramids as containers for the Nexus Points’ expansion.
In 198 P.A., Frostholm’s Asharil returned to the center of attention. Without warning, its usual glow faded, and the constant orange-to-teal flow of energy dimmed until it almost stopped. Karadara’s original ritual was attempted, but it proved useless: the crystal behaved as if its charge had been spent. The Pyramid shuddered, ice stone fell from the inner arches, and the Nexus Point widened by a few meters in seconds.
Panic spread through Frostholm. A Bane pushed through the breach, tall as a four-story building, with a massive tail, twelve legs, and a horned head whose mouths opened in every direction. Annals recorded it as Nakrathar, and in fifteen minutes it tore down surrounding buildings, slaughtered two dozen Sentinels, and dismantled a large portion of the Pyramid. When the crisis ended, four Emissaries reached Frostholm and aided the reconstruction.
A council of Sentinel scholars proposed a remedy to recover the Asharil: return it to the Labyrinth. Twenty Sentinels took the mission and carried the crystal back to where it had been found. Almost at once they observed two things: the Asharil stabilized the Labyrinth around it, and its glow began to return. They held their ground for four hours, fending off two smaller Banes, before withdrawing with the crystal. Sentinel ritual experts repeated Karadara’s rite, and it held, stabilizing the Nexus Point and the Pyramid once more.
Through their Nukurai, Frostholm shared its findings with Tidehaven and Dunevale, and both repeated the dangerous recharging process. From that year forward, the Sentinels adopted it as standard practice, repeating it every two years as a precaution.
The Race for the Shards
The advent of the Nekurai made the versatility of Luminal Shards undeniable. Those otherworldly relics could power the Combsails, enable long-range communication, and empower advanced spellwork, carrying many of the same dangers posed by Occult Magic. Demand spread, and the relics’ scarcity rekindled greed, outpacing every attempt at regulation.
No one in Elegor could really predict with certainty where the next breach would appear. Each one carried a single Shard, and whoever reached it first and survived the Darukin contingent gained a prize no treasury could reliably procure. Every Fracture therefore became both an emergency and a contest of claims, with local militias, private expeditions, and opportunists converging before the breach could be closed.
Responding to the growing accidents tied to the Shards’ retrieval, the ARC current within Nadaspar, working alongside the Sentinels and acting on Karadara’s last advocacy, founded the Riftbreakers in 206 P.A., a joint division trained to answer Fractures, retrieve the Shard, and close the breach before anyone could be harmed.
Nations granted the Riftbreakers broad logistical support, receiving either a retrieval fee or possession of the Luminal Shard in return. Resentment rose as unauthorized groups came to be treated as criminals, driving more and more of the trade into the black market. Alongside it, a shadow economy in sightings, forecasts, and local reports (each claiming to predict where Fractures would open next) began to bloom. Open violence against Riftbreakers stayed broadly condemned, yet clashes at the edges of Fractures became an unspoken feature of the age.
The Curse of the Nexus Children
For years, births had grown scarcer across Elegor and Asarion alike. The decline came undetected, uneven from one region to another, and most records treated it as a consequence of famine, migration, poor harvests, or the long strain left by the previous age.
In 238 P.A., Paulani Longwind, a Sapmir child who had recently reached his seventh year, after weeks of malady, dissolved into motes of light. Other reports followed within months, first from distant households, then from whole regions, until the accounts formed a pattern too strong to be ignored: children around their seventh year vanished, leaving no body for burial and no wound to study.
The origin was studied and debated in every institution of the world. Physicians found no trace of illness, poison, or bodily curse. Mages and scholars recognized the light itself: the same scattering of motes seen when a Bane dissolved. By the end of the first year, most courts, temples, and scholarly circles had converged on that explanation, and Shatal, Set’Sin Emissary, later confirmed it: the deaths were another consequence of the Nexus’s fracture.
The disaster gained the name that would define the future of the known universe, for similar reports came from Asarion as well: the Curse of the Nexus Children.
Records accumulated, and the pattern showed that three children out of four were struck by the Curse. Some blamed the rising abuse of Occult Magic; others, the Nexus's growing instability; others, the spread of Luminal Shards through daily life. The explanations changed from court to court and temple to temple, while children continued to vanish.
The Third Covenant
The search for a triggering cause soon fractured the fragile union that had formed around Karadara’s fall. Every realm arrived with its own accusation, and the old ghosts of the Heresy War moved again beneath the debate: Occult abuse, Shard traffic, Nadaspar experimentation, Sentinel failures, and the recklessness of rival courts were all named in turn. The Emissaries present at the Covenant could give no answer that satisfied the hall. They confirmed the scale of the disaster, and little more. For many rulers, that silence opened a distance that had not been there before, because grieving people had asked the Emissaries for protection and received only useless confirmations.
From that anger came Geraldine Kolikar’s proposal. ARC, still a faction within the Nadaspar Order, would be raised into a transnational Order with authority to investigate magic use, punish its abuse, and regulate enchantment across accepting realms. The argument found purchase because it offered a course of action where the Covenant had offered only uncertainty and debate. If magic disturbed the Nexus, then even those who rejected magic as the Curse’s only cause could accept that abuse made the world more dangerous. Most realms signed agreements granting ARC legal standing on their soil, while a smaller number withheld judgment and others rejected the mandate outright.
The new authority also required an armed division. Under the name Global Union for Arcane Regulation and Defense (GUARD), ARC formed the force that would carry its investigations, arrests, prison transfers, and field interventions into accepting realms. GUARD gave nations a framework for acting before fear turned into violence, and most territories accepted it quickly, embedding its detachments beside local militias as the practical arm of arcane regulation.
The refusals mattered as much as the signatures. Mardolith Empire denied ARC any authority within imperial borders, and the Sentinels of the Apocalypse refused to place their work under an Order born from Nadaspar’s internal struggle. Funding followed the new arrangement. Realm after realm redirected money once given to Sentinel operations toward ARC detachments, investigations, trials, prisons, and GUARD detachments. The Riftbreakers, initially strained by divided command, passed fully into ARC management, and the partnership that had created them broke in all but memory.
Nadaspar paid the other cost of the Covenant. Scholars who favored containment crossed into ARC in growing numbers, and the new Syndicate absorbed the founding Order it had once been part of. Nadaspar survived as a smaller scholarly division inside ARC, useful for research and legitimacy, but increasingly set aside when policy, enforcement, and judgment were decided. The Covenant had been called to recover a common answer. It ended by giving the age a new power, and by proving that the old union of interests had already failed.
The Heralds of a New Dawn
The Third Covenant gave the realms a new institution meant to temper magic use, treating it as the source of the Curse of the Nexus Children; the malady struck with the same indifference.
In 266 P.A., as courts and orders searched for answers, two spouse scholars appeared on the streets of Akrados: Ionluk Mesaruk and Fransin Rotzal. Both had trained within the Nadaspar Order and served among the Sentinels before defecting, and they claimed they could defy the Curse through a secret ritual dependent on an Asharil. They traveled as an itinerant caravan, transporting their own Nexus Crystal (acquired by mysterious means), and offered the rite in public, presenting their twin sons as proof of its success. They began by serving children already showing signs of sickness, asking no payment, and when the recoveries held, they set a substantial fee for their work. Crowds gathered wherever they arrived, their wealth rose quickly, and they hired more hands each season, until the caravan consolidated into the most controversial order of the age: the Heralds of a New Dawn.
The ritual’s method remained known to the founders alone, and it passed only to their descendants. Families paid what they could, and nations built programs so low-income households could afford the ritual. Demand soon exceeded what a single Asharil could serve, and the Heralds refined their practice: by attuning multiple Luminal Shards to their Asharil, they could transmit the ritual’s effect across distance, reaching more children without moving the crystal itself. The Heralds entered the race for Luminal Shards with an advantage no guild or institution could match, because nations desperate to protect their children stood behind them, redirecting support once given to the Riftbreakers toward Herald temples.
Success gave them a monopoly, and the monopoly grew into sovereignty. Their influence reached every corner of Elegor’s politics, and their unchecked wealth enabled them to establish Arxeterna, their own citadel on the island of Usurthar, purchased by paying each resident of the small archipelago a high sum to leave. They defended Arxeterna with vast military force and a single, brutal announcement: any attack on the citadel, or any attempt to infiltrate its chambers, would be answered by the destruction of their Asharil, unleashing an explosion capable of tearing apart the area and carrying the ritual’s secret into nothingness.
The founders’ successors, the twins Serira and Caleth, the first children saved by the ritual, added ruthlessness to the control already exerted over Elegor. Once they appointed themselves Dawnbringers (the title reserved for the Heralds’ leaders), they made executions and persecutions visible, targeting rivals and anyone who tried to steal the ritual’s secret.
They clashed hard against the Asarkai. When Asarkai spies were discovered in Arxeterna’s halls, their execution became a display of horrors that reverberated through Elegor and Asarion alike. Some Asark anticipated war, yet the Asarkai Masters judged it impossible, because the two Dawnbringers stood ready to destroy Arxeterna and the ritual with themselves inside. Years of diplomacy de-escalated the crisis, restoring access to the ritual for Paymon’s descendants.
Controversy clung to the Heralds from the beginning. Their secrecy, the cost of their rites, and their political pressure drew constant criticism from scholars, temples, and courts, while the Veiled Custodians, their armed division, gained a reputation for ruthless protection of Herald property, leaders, and secrets. The Whisperers' Network, their group of disinformation and misdirection, posed a different kind of danger: every accusation against the Heralds could be met with rumor, counter-rumor, paid testimony, and carefully planted doubt, until even truthful claims blurred into manufactured fear. The Sentinels challenged them on multiple occasions, criticizing their secrecy and, most prominently, claiming that the Heralds' Asharil had been stolen from the hidden Tidehaven vault, yet no realm acted on the charge. The ritual saved too many children, and too many rulers had already built their policies around it.
The War Against the Dominion Zaergarai
In the cold north of Adanurr, the Dominion Zaergarai had spent decades preparing the ground, seeding a wide and sparsely inhabited region near the northern sea with the spores of the fungus that allowed them to breathe underground. The first attempts failed countless times, until Nexus instability gave the spores the conditions they needed to take hold above the surface.
The fungus mutated enough to survive in open air while still releasing the nutrients the Zaergarai needed to breathe with ease. Within a few years, Dominion spread it across the region, raised infrastructure and buildings among the growths, and colonized the north as permanent territory. Their war machine surfaced with them. Their expansion was devastating, and once they gained ground, they covered it in the mutated fungus, making every lost stretch of land costly to retake and easy to lose again.
For eight years, a coalition of surrounding nations resisted the advance, burning the fungus where they could and retaking the same terrain more than once. The final clash came at Kaer Thalyss. The city’s defenses held longer than the Zaergarai Generals had expected, though they ultimately subdued it. News of Dominion's advance had traveled through Nekurai across the world, drawing adventurers, survivors, and soldiers from many nations into a spontaneous convergence around the city.
The improvised coalition re-entered Kaer Thalyss and claimed it back. Dominion's Primal Idyara intervened in person, and her power exceeded anything the defenders had prepared for. The joined forces of the assembled fighters slowed her advance long enough to keep the city from falling again, until Idyara, impatient and enraged, unleashed a violent spell that tore down half the city and broke much of the resistance. The spell backfired into an equally violent Nexus Anomaly, severely injuring her and slaying most of her forces.
Idyara withdrew as the Anomaly expanded. Rashar, Emissary of Naabnit, joined the fight and risked their life to attune the Anomaly down until it naturally dissipated. The retaking of Kaer Thalyss marked the end of the war, though Dominion's presence in north Adanurr endured.
The Modern Age ended with the last massive war the world had known, bearing the marks of a population that had learned to survive without ever quite learning to rest.