A History of Ilixa

Ilixa is not a single galaxy or universe, but the collective name for the immense structure of realities known, or believed, to exist beyond the boundaries of any one world. Some realities contain a single inhabited planet, while others encompass extensive star systems, moons, artificial habitats, spirit domains or environments that do not behave according to ordinary physical law. What unites them is not geography but the possibility of connection, and the most important of those connections are the Pathways.

A Pathway does not function like ordinary space travel. A spacecraft moves through space within one reality; a Pathway crosses from one reality into another. A civilisation might therefore colonise dozens of planets and still remain confined to a single reality if it possessed no functioning Pathway, while a much less industrial civilisation could step through an ancient surviving gate and encounter a society capable of interstellar flight. For this reason, Ilixan history has never followed one technological line: medieval kingdoms, magical city-states, industrial empires, star-faring republics, spirit domains and god-ruled worlds have all existed at the same time.

Pathway travel does not produce meaningful differences in the passage of time between realities. Worlds may have different day lengths, seasons and orbital years, but elapsed time remains effectively consistent for travellers and observers, and clocks can be synchronised across a stable connection. A person can therefore travel repeatedly between realities without accumulating strange age differences, which is one of the practical foundations that made interworld civilisation possible.

During the great Connected Ages, Pathways carried not only people but vehicles and ships. The smallest, sometimes called Waydoors, admitted travellers, animals and modest cargo; larger Road Pathways could accommodate wagons, cavalry and machinery, while Great Pathways supported mass migration and substantial vehicles. Above these stood the immense Crown Pathways, whose engineering systems could receive starships and other enormous structures, and the rarest strategic installations later became known as Fleet Gates because entire military formations could pass through them.

The difficult problem was never simply making an opening large enough. A vessel travelling through one star system carries momentum, orientation, gravity and velocity appropriate to that location, so passing directly into another reality without correcting those values would be catastrophic. Ancient Crown Pathways therefore incorporated vast systems of magical and physical engineering known as translation crowns, which reconciled the conditions on one side with those on the other. The eventual loss of the knowledge required to construct and maintain such systems became one of the defining absences of modern Ilixa.

Concordance Reckoning

Modern historians normally date Ilixan history using Concordance Reckoning, abbreviated CR, while events before the beginning of the system are conventionally marked PC, meaning Pre-Concordance. The system originated in ancient Mervaine, which, long before the poisoning of its surface, stood among the foremost intellectual and diplomatic centres of connected civilisation.

Before the Concordance, chronology had become increasingly difficult to standardise. One state might date treaties according to a ruler’s reign, another according to the orbit of its home world, a third by a religious calendar, and a fourth by magical cycles that did not correspond neatly with astronomical years. Once hundreds of worlds were trading and negotiating with one another, these differences became more than an inconvenience; they could complicate contracts, military agreements, inheritance law and even the dating of historical events.

The solution emerged from the Mervainic Concordance, sometimes remembered poetically as the Great Measure. It established a standard chronological unit that could be translated into the local calendars of participating worlds. Although its first definition was based largely on Mervainic astronomy, later scholars converted it into a fixed physical standard that could be reproduced independently of any one planet’s rotation or orbit.

For practical purposes, one Concordance year is close enough to one Avaran year that the two can be treated as approximately equivalent in most historical discussions, making the modern Avaran year 2026 roughly 8742 CR. No ordinary person on modern Avara knows this. That is one of the great ironies of Ilixan history: the calendar created by ancient Mervaine survived long after Mervaine itself had been devastated, while worlds such as Avara forgot the wider civilisation that had once used it.

The Age Before Maps

Before approximately 32,000 PC

The oldest history of Ilixa is not really history in the conventional sense, but a mixture of archaeology, mythology and argument. Every major religious tradition possesses an explanation for the first worlds: some claim that the gods created reality, others maintain that gods arose only after conscious beings began worshipping them, certain draconic traditions describe dragons as older than stars, and several spirit traditions hold that the first gods formed around places, ideas or natural forces long before mortal civilisation existed. None of these accounts can be conclusively proved.

Archaeology has established something more unsettling, however, because civilisation appears to be considerably older than the oldest culture currently claiming to be first. Across widely separated realities are cities, machines and monumental structures whose builders cannot be identified, including sites that contain elements comparable to later Pathway architecture even though no accepted chronology places them within the known history of Pathway construction. Historians group these remains under the deliberately vague term Precursor Works, a label many scholars dislike because it implies a single civilisation where there may have been dozens.

The most mysterious of these structures are the Silent Rings, seven enormous black constructions scattered across different realities. Their material has never been successfully reproduced, they bear no decipherable inscriptions, and their internal geometry does not correspond to any known Pathway system. Nothing has ever opened one, and no consensus exists about whether they were intended as gates, machines, monuments or something for which modern Ilixa has no useful category.

The First Doors

c. 32,000–18,000 PC

The earliest period of recognisable interworld civilisation begins with a culture later scholars called the Auliri. Whether the Auliri were a single people, an alliance of several peoples, or simply a later scholarly name applied to a collection of related archaeological sites remains disputed, but the surviving evidence strongly suggests that they learned how to stabilise naturally weak boundaries between realities.

These weak places were known in surviving translations as Seams. Earlier cultures had occasionally encountered them, but such events were unstable, unpredictable and dangerous; the Auliri achievement was to make the connection repeatable, so that a route opened on one occasion could reliably be made to lead to the same destination again. The result was the first confirmed Root Pathways, and with them geography ceased to end at the edge of a single universe.

The traditional starting point of interworld history is the First Crossing, conventionally dated to around 29,400 PC, when seventeen travellers entered a Root Pathway on the world later known as Othara and returned successfully from a second reality. The expedition was brief, difficult and primitive by later standards, but it demonstrated that living travellers could cross a stabilised boundary and return without any difference in elapsed time between the two sides. Later generations embellished the event with legends of monsters, divine omens and miraculous discoveries, but the historical importance of the crossing lies in something simpler: it proved that an interworld route could be used, measured and repeated.

The Age of Voyages

c. 18,000–9,000 PC

Once Pathway travel became increasingly reliable, connected settlement expanded in thousands of separate directions rather than through one coordinated wave. Merchants crossed in search of new markets, religious communities founded colonies, refugees fled warfare, adventurers sought wealth, rulers established distant dependencies and entire peoples migrated through the growing network. The result was not a single civilisation spreading outward, but a dense web of overlapping expansions.

This was the period in which many familiar ancestries became distributed across worlds that could not possibly share a normal evolutionary history. Elven populations founded colonies across several realities, dwarven communities became strongly associated with mineral-rich worlds, moons and industrial settlements, halfling trading communities became common along important commercial corridors, and dragonborn populations spread through military and dynastic expansion. Orc communities appeared on worlds separated by impossible cosmological distances, eventually making any simple single-world origin theory difficult to defend.

Tiefling history became even more complicated because populations that resembled one another could trace their ancestry to entirely different contacts with fiendish, divine, infernal or spirit beings. Human origins proved harder still to identify: by the later Age of Voyages, human populations were already so widely distributed that no universally accepted homeworld could be established, and modern scholars continue to argue over at least nine plausible candidates.

The Age of Voyages therefore created one of the fundamental realities of Ilixan society: species, culture, nationality and world of origin became separate identities. An elf might be culturally Mervainic, nationally Serathi, born on a moon in another reality and descended from ancestors who had migrated through six different Pathway networks, without any of those facts being contradictory.

The Age of Crowns

c. 9,000–2,100 PC

Interworld settlement eventually produced interworld states, but these early empires did not resemble terrestrial kingdoms occupying continuous territory. A single monarchy might rule one city on a planet, three moons in another reality, a fortress orbiting a distant star and an agricultural colony reached only through a Pathway hidden beneath an ocean. Political geography became a network rather than a map, and the states best able to understand that fact became the dominant powers of the age.

The Serathi Throne, centred on Serathiel, developed into one of the oldest durable imperial systems in recorded history. Its institutions were strongly associated with elven dynasties, although its population was never exclusively elven. The Kharadic Forge Communion, built among dwarven and gnomish industrial communities around Kharad Voss, became famous for large-scale magical infrastructure and early experimentation with Pathway machinery, while the dragonborn-led Vaelkhar Dynasties controlled several strategically vital military corridors.

The Nine Houses of Ossara followed a different model and accumulated extraordinary wealth without building a conventional territorial empire. Their influence rested on finance, trade arbitration, information brokerage and transport insurance across entire chains of realities. During the same period, Mervaine became increasingly important as a neutral meeting place between powers that trusted one another only slightly more than they feared one another, laying the foundations for its later diplomatic importance.

The Blood Courts of Nyr

One of the most important political systems of the Age of Crowns developed on Nyr, where the Blood Courts were ruled by death-altered dynasties that later histories would describe broadly as vampiric. Blood itself became part of the tax system, with subject communities required to provide measured quantities to the ruling houses; biological dependence therefore became intertwined with class, citizenship and political authority in a way that shaped Nyr for centuries.

The system changed under Queen Saravel Nyr, who did not overthrow the vampire aristocracy from outside but inherited its throne and then turned against many of its founding privileges. Once crowned, she abolished hereditary blood obligations, restricted predatory feeding and recognised the civil status of populations that had previously been treated largely as sources of tribute. Her reforms provoked a civil war against members of her own extended family and permanently divided the political culture of Nyr.

Later vampire communities remembered Saravel in sharply different ways. To reformers she became the Liberator, while traditionalist houses condemned her as the Kin-Traitor who had broken the obligations of blood and dynasty. Her reign nevertheless established one of the first major interworld arguments over whether supernatural biological need could ever justify political domination over another population.

The Seven Marriages of Yssara Tal

The Age of Crowns also produced Empress Yssara Tal, perhaps the most famous diplomatic ruler of the ancient period. She inherited a minor and politically vulnerable state, yet through seven marriages, several annulments, dynastic adoptions, complex inheritance arrangements and carefully constructed treaties she created an alliance spanning seven major Pathway regions without conquering a single capital.

Later romantic traditions reduced Yssara to a seductive schemer, but modern historians generally regard her as one of the most sophisticated political strategists of antiquity. Her sixth husband attempted to have her murdered, while her seventh helped her expose the plot and remove him from power, an episode that became central to the enormous body of plays, songs and historical romances later written about her life. What made Yssara extraordinary was not simply that she accumulated territory, but that she understood marriage, law and succession as instruments capable of achieving what armies often could not.

The Wars of the Twelve Crowns

c. 2,100 PC–1 PC

The dynastic order of the earlier Age of Crowns eventually broke apart, leaving twelve major political systems locked into almost two thousand years of intermittent war. The conflicts were not continuous, but peace rarely lasted for long because dynastic claims overlapped with religious disputes, merchant houses financed competing states, gods sponsored rival rulers, military orders acquired independent political influence and strategically important Pathway cities changed hands repeatedly.

The most infamous organisation to emerge from the period was the Black Veil, an assassin order whose exact origins remain uncertain. Its reputation was secured during the Banquet of Three Kings, when three monarchs were assassinated at the same diplomatic dinner. Each murder had been commissioned by a different ruler, and none of the three clients knew about the other contracts; the resulting succession crises spread through several realities and helped ignite conflicts that killed millions.

The episode left a permanent mark on Ilixan political language. To “invite the fourth king” came to mean creating consequences that none of the participants fully understands or controls, an expression still used thousands of years later when a supposedly clever intervention threatens to destabilise an entire system.

The Mervainic Concordance

0–1120 CR

By the end of the Twelve Crowns period, exhaustion created the conditions for a settlement that no single victor could have imposed. Representatives from 173 recognised states and political entities gathered on Mervaine, including kingdoms, republics, merchant leagues, independent Pathway cities, priesthoods, vampire states, industrial federations, nomadic fleets and several divine or semi-divine powers. Some gods sent representatives, while a small number attended the negotiations personally.

The resulting agreement became the Mervainic Concordance, whose significance extended far beyond ending the wars. It standardised interworld chronology, diplomatic recognition, commercial arbitration, Pathway transit law, the legal status of neutral gate cities and the rights of recognised sapient peoples, while also establishing some of the first internationally accepted restrictions on strategic magical weaponry.

Mervaine did not become the ruler of connected civilisation; instead, it became its principal meeting place, a distinction that allowed Mervainic influence to grow without requiring direct imperial control. For thousands of years, states that disagreed about almost everything else continued to recognise Mervaine as the place where disputes could at least be argued before they became wars.

The Argent Wardens

One of the most enduring institutions created under the Concordance was the Argent Wardens, an interworld peacekeeping and protective order recruited from across connected civilisation rather than from Mervaine alone. Its members included fighters, wizards, sorcerers, monks, investigators, engineers, paladins, diplomats and specialists drawn from many peoples and worlds.

Their original mandate was deliberately narrow: protect neutral Pathways, arbitrate transit disputes, pursue criminals whose actions crossed multiple realities and prevent local conflicts from spreading through the network. Success brought prestige, prestige brought authority, and authority gradually drew the Wardens into the political disputes they had been created to stand above. They survived for millennia, but the organisation that emerged from the Mervainic Concordance would not always remain faithful to the ideals under which it had been founded.

The Roads of Ten Thousand Lanterns

1120–2260 CR

The millennium after the Concordance became one of the great periods of Ilixan prosperity. Trade expanded through a loose network known collectively as the Lantern Roads, a name that referred not to one physical route but to hundreds of Pathway corridors, ports, markets and waystations connecting different realities.

Control of the Lantern Roads belonged to no empire. Much of their administration was handled by the League of Lantern Ports, a confederation of merchant cities whose power rested on shipping, law, credit and infrastructure rather than territorial conquest. The League could influence states far larger than any of its individual members because so many governments depended upon its routes, contracts and financial institutions.

The consequences reached far beyond commerce. Religions travelled with merchants, languages mixed, foods migrated between worlds, artistic techniques crossed species boundaries and new communities formed around transit points where no single culture dominated. Many societies later regarded as ancient and traditional were themselves products of this cosmopolitan age.

The Birth of the Pathway Fleets

Around 1638 CR, engineers associated with the Kharadic tradition developed the first reliable translation crown capable of transporting an intact starship through a Crown Pathway. Before this breakthrough, large vessels generally had to unload passengers or cargo near a gate, which limited the strategic value of interworld naval power.

The new technology transformed warfare and commerce because a ship could now enter a Pathway in one reality and emerge fully operational in another. The first true Pathway Fleets followed, and from that point onward control of a Crown Pathway could matter more than possession of an entire planet, since whoever controlled the gate could determine which fleets, goods and armies were able to move between realities.

The Vaelkhar Expansion

2260–3080 CR

The next great transformation came from the dragonborn world of Vaelkhar, where a military commander named Tarakhos Vael, later remembered as the Ash Rider, unified a collection of rival successor states. His conquests were extraordinarily violent, but what distinguished him from earlier rulers was his understanding that interworld empire depended less on occupying every piece of territory than on controlling the infrastructure that connected them.

Tarakhos therefore concentrated on gateways, relay stations, translation crowns, fuel depots, communications hubs and shipyards, using logistics as the foundation of imperial power. Within forty years he controlled the largest interconnected political system Ilixa had yet seen, and millions died during the campaigns that created it. Yet the peace that followed produced a set of consequences that later historians have struggled to judge cleanly: routes became safer, trade expanded, scholars travelled more freely, craftspeople moved between worlds, religions spread and forcibly relocated populations eventually created new hybrid cultures.

The Vaelkhar Empire thus became one of Ilixan history’s great moral problems, because a civilisation built through conquest also produced centuries of unprecedented exchange. Tarakhos was remembered simultaneously as a destroyer and a world-builder, and later political movements would invoke whichever version best suited their own purposes.

The Four Successor Thrones

Tarakhos died without naming an uncontested heir, and his four children divided the empire before their descendants turned on one another. Within three generations, the unified dominion had fractured into four major successor systems: the Eastern Flame, the Orrian Khanate, the Crown of Gates and the Vaelkhar Heartlands.

Although the empire disappeared, much of what it had created survived. Its roads and administrative systems remained in use, its languages continued to be spoken, and its military traditions influenced later states long after the original dynasty had collapsed. The episode became another enduring lesson of Ilixan history: political systems could vanish while the cultural and infrastructural worlds they created continued for centuries.

The Divine Wars

3080–3820 CR

By the early fourth millennium CR, mortal civilisation had become powerful enough to challenge forms of authority once regarded as unassailably divine. The critical event occurred on Aeshra, where Emperor Caldras of Aesh attempted deliberate apotheosis and, for a brief period, succeeded. His transformation appears to have drawn power directly from the Domain of an existing god, destabilising the relationship between divine identity, worship and metaphysical territory.

The resulting conflict became known as the War of the Empty Throne. Some gods defended the established divine order, others supported the principle that mortals should be permitted to ascend, and a third group regarded the entire struggle as an abomination that threatened both mortal and divine civilisation. Mortal armies fought one another, gods fought gods, divine powers intervened on behalf of mortal allies and several Domains fragmented entirely.

The wars changed Ilixan theology because they demonstrated that divinity was neither politically neutral nor metaphysically untouchable. They also forced mortal states to confront a question that had previously been left largely to religion: if a god could rule, die, lose power or be opposed, what exactly made divine authority legitimate?

Telessa, Lady of Thresholds

The most famous divine figure of the conflict was Telessa, Lady of Thresholds, who initially refused to participate in the struggle over divine sovereignty. Instead, her temples became neutral sanctuaries for refugees regardless of allegiance, turning her cult into one of the largest humanitarian networks of the Divine Wars.

When three divine powers violated those sanctuaries and attacked people under her protection, Telessa destroyed them and inherited enormous power from the collapse of their Domains. She then did something almost unprecedented by relinquishing much of what she had gained rather than claiming the territories and worshippers left behind. Her refusal became foundational to later religious thought, and some traditions still regard her as the greatest example of divine restraint in Ilixan history.

Whether Telessa herself survives in the modern era remains uncertain. Her temples, symbols and legal traditions endured long after her direct appearances ceased, and later claimants who said they spoke in her name were accepted by some communities and rejected by others.

The Covenant of Domains

The Divine Wars ended with a diplomatic settlement later called the Covenant of Domains, which did not attempt to abolish religion or prohibit gods from advising rulers and maintaining sacred territories. Its central principle was narrower but revolutionary: divine status did not automatically confer a right to rule mortal states.

The doctrine was frequently violated, yet it changed political expectations across much of connected civilisation. A god could still become a sovereign, but legitimacy could no longer rest solely on the assertion of divinity; mortal law, treaty, consent and political institutions increasingly mattered as well. The distinction between divine power and political authority became one of the most enduring achievements of the age.

The Second Concord

3820–4490 CR

The Divine Wars exhausted both mortal and divine powers, and Mervaine once again became the place where a broken political system was reconstructed. The Congress of Thirty Doors created a new interworld order designed to prevent any one state from achieving overwhelming control of the network.

No power was permitted to dominate more than a defined share of the major Crown Pathways, strategic gate cities received protected status, inspection regimes were established and the Argent Wardens were formally returned to a position of neutrality. The system did not attempt to eliminate rivalry, which its architects considered impossible; instead, it sought to manage competition within rules that made total domination difficult.

For several centuries, this balance held. It was imperfect, frequently hypocritical and dependent upon the willingness of powerful states to restrain themselves, but it provided enough stability for a second great period of interworld prosperity.

The High Connected Age

4490–4930 CR

Later generations romanticised the High Connected Age more than any other period because interworld travel, scholarship and prosperity reached unprecedented levels. Mervaine’s universities became the most prestigious centres of learning in known Ilixa, Zifira developed the mountain academies that would later survive the Severance, and Pathway Fleets linked worlds whose populations increasingly regarded travel between realities as ordinary rather than miraculous.

Large cities contained communities drawn from dozens of worlds and ancestries, medical magic extended lifespans, constructed people gained legal recognition in several major states, and some vampire and therianthrope communities emerged openly into political life. The Ash Courts, a collection of fiendish and infernal states, maintained formal embassies, while dragons served as political leaders, scholars, investors and military officers; in some universities, gods themselves appeared as lecturers, patrons or subjects of study.

Among the wealthy, interworld tourism became normal, and a culture emerged that increasingly regarded the old wars as problems of a less enlightened past. The belief that connected civilisation had finally solved the central problems of history became widespread, which made the catastrophe that followed all the more shocking.

The Five Powers

By the end of the High Connected Age, political influence had consolidated around five enormous systems. The Mervainic Commonwealth was scientific, diplomatic and extraordinarily wealthy, deriving much of its influence from institutions, finance and research rather than territorial conquest. The Serathi Imperium, centred on Serathiel, possessed immense administrative continuity and the prestige of one of the oldest surviving dynastic traditions.

The Kharad Foundry League, descended from older Kharadic systems, dominated industrial infrastructure and much of the engineering surrounding Crown Pathways, while the Vaelkhar Dominion inherited the martial traditions of the ancient dragonborn empires and maintained the largest mobile fleet. The Concordat of Aesh united mortal states, spirit powers and divine interests in a complex political coalition whose internal diversity made it both influential and difficult to predict.

The Nine Houses of Ossara possessed wealth comparable to several of the great powers but lacked equivalent strategic military infrastructure. For that reason, historians spoke of the Five rather than Six, even though Ossaran finance and diplomacy could sometimes determine whether the Five were able to act at all.

The Deep Arms Race

4930–5500 CR

The High Connected Age ended not through poverty or cultural decline, but through technological success that outpaced political restraint. Research into Deep Magic moved beyond ordinary spellcraft and began to manipulate structures on which ordinary magic itself depended, including Pathway topology, divine Domains, planetary magical fields and the boundaries between realities.

No lone practitioner could simply cast a Deep working. The largest operations required hundreds or thousands of interconnected spells, teams of practitioners, magical reactors, computational engines, specialised artefacts, orbital structures, divine agreements and years of preparation. The resulting strategic systems became known collectively as Thousand Spell Weapons, not because every device literally contained one thousand spells, but because each weapon was an entire magical infrastructure rather than a single act of casting.

This distinction mattered politically because Deep Magic shifted strategic power away from individual heroes and toward states, institutions and industrial systems capable of sustaining enormous projects. It also meant that once the great powers committed themselves to the technology, dismantling it became far more difficult than simply disarming a handful of dangerous sorcerers.

The Great Strategic Systems

Each of the Five Powers developed different strategic capabilities, all of which were justified as answers to weapons already possessed or suspected elsewhere. The Mirror Spear was designed to propagate an attack through linked Pathways, while the Black Anvil could permanently collapse a Crown Pathway and sever a strategic route. The Ash Choir was a self-propagating magical contamination system capable of destroying ecosystems, and the Godchain was designed to sever a divine being from its Domain.

Mervaine’s most important system was the Quietus Lattice, officially presented as a defensive network capable of disabling enormous sections of the Pathway system during an emergency. In theory, it could deny an attacker the routes required to launch a strategic assault; in practice, its existence terrified other powers because the same capability might also be used to blind or isolate them before an attack.

Every power claimed that its arsenal existed only because the others possessed theirs, creating a political system in which nobody wished to strike first but everyone feared being unable to respond if somebody else did. By the middle of the sixth millennium CR, peace depended increasingly on the assumption that no government, commander, god, faction or technical system would ever make a fatal mistake.

The Glass Meridian Crisis

5438 CR

The closest approach to catastrophe before the Breaking came during the Glass Meridian Crisis, when a Vaelkhar fleet moved through a disputed Crown Pathway and Serathi intelligence interpreted the movement as possible preparation for attack. Serathiel began preparing a Mirror Spear, Mervaine detected the activation, and Kharad Voss began mobilisation; for forty-two hours, several strategic systems moved close to launch conditions while governments struggled to determine whether they were responding to an attack or merely to one another’s fear.

The crisis ended largely through the work of an Ossaran diplomat named Letha Marr, who constructed a stand-down that allowed every major participant to retreat without publicly admitting defeat. She received the Mervainic Peace Laurel and became one of the most respected diplomats of her generation. Thirty-seven years later, however, she would secretly join Orren Vey, believing that the Glass Meridian Crisis had demonstrated how little control the great powers actually possessed over the system they had created.

The Last Peace

5500–5515 CR

The Glass Meridian Crisis frightened the great powers into renewed arms negotiations, producing new treaties, inspection systems and public commitments to restraint while secret programmes continued behind them. Every power believed the others were cheating, and in most cases they were correct; the resulting atmosphere made even genuine attempts at disarmament difficult because each concession could be interpreted as an opportunity for an adversary.

Deep practitioners were monitored constantly, the Argent Wardens became increasingly entangled with intelligence work, gods aligned themselves with competing geopolitical blocs and wealthy vampire houses quietly moved assets and dependants away from worlds considered strategically vulnerable. Civilian governments prepared shelters, while popular literature became obsessed with annihilation and the fragility of connected civilisation.

The political order therefore remained technically at peace while becoming increasingly incapable of surviving one serious mistake. It was within this atmosphere that Orren Vey, a respected figure from inside the Mervainic strategic establishment, concluded that the system itself had become the danger.

Orren Vey

Orren was not a rebel from the margins but a Mervainic Deep mathematician, former Pathway strategist and adviser to senior security institutions who had helped design elements of the very strategic order he later sought to destroy. His expertise gave him an unusually clear view of the assumptions on which deterrence depended, and over time he reached a conclusion that many of his colleagues considered intolerable.

In Orren’s view, deterrence could not remain stable forever because the system required too many governments, commanders, gods, intelligence services and technical networks to behave correctly for all time. A commander would eventually misread a signal, a government would eventually collapse, an extremist would eventually gain access to an arsenal, or a frightened ruler would eventually act on incomplete information. If the Deep arsenals survived indefinitely, Orren believed that catastrophic war was not merely possible but inevitable.

His solution was therefore not to negotiate another treaty but to destroy the technological and mathematical capacity required to rebuild the most dangerous systems. The idea was radical enough to amount to treason against every great power, including his own.

The Thirteen of the Last Measure

Orren assembled a conspiracy later remembered as the Thirteen of the Last Measure, bringing together figures from several worlds and political traditions whose reasons for joining were not always identical. Among them were Letha Marr, the Ossaran diplomat who had helped end the Glass Meridian Crisis; Dhuram Pell, a Kharadic engineer specialising in translation crowns; Rhava Korr, an admiral of the Vaelkhar fleets; and Prince Elaith Serath, an heir within the Serathi imperial system.

The group also included Naeva Nhal, a vampire intelligence broker; Senn of Sable Ith, associated with the shadow-born courier and infiltration traditions of Sable Ith; Ghor Ulan, an orc magical physicist; Mira Quell, a halfling smuggler whose knowledge of hidden routes proved invaluable; Mother Anessa Venn, a cleric and peace activist; Keth Var, a former Argent Warden commander; and a being calling itself Telessa-of-the-Door, whose relationship to the ancient threshold goddess remains uncertain.

Orren himself formed the twelfth publicly identified member. The identity of the thirteenth conspirator was deliberately erased from surviving records, and no reliable explanation has ever established whether this was done to protect someone, conceal a betrayal, preserve an institution or hide a person whose continued existence would have altered the accepted history of the Breaking.

The Plan

Orren did not intend to destroy connected civilisation; his plan was to destroy the Deep military architecture while leaving the wider Pathway network intact. For seventeen minutes, the strategic network would be blinded while insiders inside the Five Powers disabled the master targeting systems of the largest weapons and Kharadic mechanisms destroyed mathematical keys and engineering protocols required to reconstruct several categories of strategic system.

Once the sabotage was complete, the ordinary network was supposed to restart, allowing trade, diplomacy and travel to continue while making another Deep arms race vastly more difficult. The plan depended on secrecy, synchronisation and the assumption that the great powers would remain unaware until the operation was finished. It was arguably the most ambitious act of sabotage in recorded history, and it failed not because its architects intended catastrophe, but because the strategic system reacted to partial information faster than they could control it.

The Breaking

5516–5524 CR

There is no single accepted account of what happened next, and different worlds still remember the Breaking through their own political and cultural traditions. Some histories place primary blame on Orren, others on Mervaine, Serathiel, the gods or the entire Five-Power structure, while many modern historians argue that responsibility cannot be reduced to a single decision because the catastrophe emerged from decades of fear, secrecy and mutually escalating weapons programmes.

The most widely accepted reconstruction suggests that part of Orren’s conspiracy was discovered shortly before the operation began. At least one major power interpreted the preparations for a strategic blackout as evidence of an imminent first strike, prompting military systems to move toward activation. Orren initiated his plan early, the Quietus Lattice partially fired, several Crown Pathways collapsed and Vaelkhar commanders concluded that Mervaine had attacked them; the Ash Choir was then deployed, Serathiel retaliated, Kharadic forces activated the Black Anvil and the Concordat of Aesh brought a Godchain system online.

The Pathway network began failing under loads and stresses its ancient creators had never intended it to endure. Warfare destroyed infrastructure, the loss of infrastructure disrupted trade, shortages drove refugee movements, communication failures caused further military miscalculations and magical contamination spread into systems already damaged by weapons. Governments collapsed and local conflicts widened into interworld wars, so that by the time leaders understood the scale of the disaster, much of the machinery capable of coordinating a response had already been destroyed.

The Breaking was therefore not one explosion or one weapon. It was a cascade through an interdependent civilisation whose greatest strength—its extraordinary degree of connection—became the mechanism through which failure spread.

The Eight Days of Fire

Later tradition compressed the beginning of the Breaking into the Eight Days of Fire, although the collapse itself continued for years. The phrase became a symbolic shorthand for the events remembered as the moment the old order ceased to be recoverable.

The Burning of Mervaine

The Ash Choir reached Mervaine and began destroying the ecological and magical systems on which its surface life depended. The contamination did not simply kill immediately; it spread through interconnected biological processes until large areas became incapable of supporting ordinary life, forcing billions to die, flee or move into emergency habitats.

The first permanent aerial refuges were constructed during this period and gradually developed into the ancestors of modern Mervaine’s floating cities. The world that had once hosted the Great Measure and served as the meeting place of connected civilisation survived, but only by abandoning much of the surface that had made its earlier civilisation possible.

The Black Orbit of Kharad Voss

A Crown Pathway collapsed while a combined military and evacuation fleet was moving through it, destroying or trapping thousands of vessels and permanently altering Kharadic strategy. The disaster demonstrated that fleet-capable gates, once considered the most secure pieces of the network, could themselves become catastrophic vulnerabilities when the wider system was destabilised.

Later legends claimed that some ships survived in hidden space or an inaccessible reality, but no credible evidence has ever established that the fleet escaped. Modern historians generally treat those stories as grief legends created around one of the largest single disappearances of the Breaking.

The Silence of Serathiel

The Serathi imperial communications lattice failed during the early stages of the war, severing the court from large parts of the Imperium and creating competing claims of legitimate authority. For months, many provincial governments did not know whether the imperial centre had survived, while several rival administrations issued orders in the name of the same throne.

Some records suggest that the court survived much longer than later histories assumed, while others imply that more than one government claimed to be the authentic Imperium at the same time. The resulting confusion contributed to the political fragmentation of Serathiel and remains one of the most contested areas of Breaking-era scholarship.

The Godfall at Aeshra

Three major divine Domains collapsed within hours during the fighting around Aeshra, killing two gods, rendering another mortal and causing a fourth to disappear from all reliable records. The consequences were theological as well as strategic, because millions of worshippers were forced to confront the possibility that divine beings could be destroyed by political decisions and engineered weapons.

The Godfall permanently changed relations between mortal governments and divine powers. Even communities that rejected the Covenant of Domains came to treat Deep weapons capable of attacking Domains as a threat not simply to states but to the metaphysical order on which their religions depended.

The Last Convoy

Admiral Rhava Korr, one of the Thirteen, organised the evacuation of civilians through a failing Road Pathway while the surrounding military situation collapsed. She remained with her fleet to protect the route until the final evacuation ships had crossed, after which the gate failed and contact with her command was lost.

No confirmed trace of Rhava or her fleet was ever recovered. She became a hero even on worlds whose governments had previously declared her a traitor, and the phrase “hold the last door” entered several languages as a description of remaining behind so that others could escape.

The Closing of Avara

Avara’s custodial lineages responded to the wider collapse by activating emergency sealing systems around its surviving major Pathway, cutting the world off from the network before the conflict could spread further through it. The institutions that carried out the closure survived in altered form across the following centuries, preserving fragments of procedure long after the broader historical context had faded.

Modern Avara’s Custodial Collegium descends from those traditions, although almost nobody on Avara now understands the full history behind them. The great irony is that the people guarding the surviving Pathway remain heirs to a civilisation whose existence their own world has largely forgotten.

The Purges

5525–5700 CR

After the immediate catastrophe, surviving states faced a problem that seemed impossible to ignore: Deep weapons had nearly destroyed connected civilisation, and as long as the knowledge required to build them remained available, somebody might eventually reconstruct the arsenals. The response became known as the Purges, a prolonged campaign against the institutions, archives and specialists associated with Deep Magic.

Research centres were dismantled, archives were destroyed, engineers and practitioners were imprisoned, and entire fields of knowledge vanished within a few generations. Some specialists surrendered voluntarily because they agreed that the weapons should never return, while others fled or hid their work; at the same time, governments frequently used the Purges to eliminate political enemies whose connection to strategic magic was doubtful or entirely invented.

Scientific necessity and political vengeance therefore became almost impossible to separate. The reason modern Ilixa cannot simply reconstruct the old fleet gates or Thousand Spell systems is not that every record was lost accidentally during the Breaking, but that much of the surviving knowledge was deliberately destroyed afterward by people who believed forgetting was safer than remembering.

The Order of the Last Door

The Argent Wardens fractured during the Purges because their members could not agree on how far the destruction of knowledge should go. One faction actively participated in eliminating Deep research, while another argued that destroying everything would leave future civilisation unable to understand or defend itself against the surviving remnants of the old system.

From this dispute emerged the Order of the Last Door, whose founding doctrine was expressed in a sentence that became famous across the surviving connected worlds: “Keep what must be remembered. Destroy what must never be used.” The Order maintained hidden repositories, destroyed dangerous artefacts, preserved selected histories and sometimes smuggled researchers away from states that demanded their execution.

Later generations therefore judged the Order in contradictory ways. To some it preserved enough knowledge for civilisation to survive; to others it was an unelected institution that decided, in secret, which parts of history humanity and other peoples were permitted to inherit.

The Fate of Orren Vey

Nobody knows with certainty what happened to Orren after the Breaking. One tradition claims that he was captured and executed, another that he killed himself after learning what his intervention had helped unleash, while a third maintains that Mervainic authorities secretly kept him alive because his knowledge was still required to stabilise surviving parts of the network.

Other stories claim that Orren escaped through a Pathway before it was sealed, although there is no credible evidence that he survived beyond the immediate post-Breaking period. Several religious traditions place him in hell, while revolutionary movements in different eras have treated him as a martyr who recognised a truth that governments refused to face.

Modern Mervainic education often summarises his legacy with a deliberately uncomfortable judgement: Orren Vey helped prevent complete annihilation and helped cause the greatest catastrophe in recorded history. The two claims are not mutually exclusive, and the refusal to reduce him to either hero or villain remains central to how the Breaking is taught.

The Severance Centuries

5700–6300 CR

The end of the great war did not end the collapse of the Pathway network. Across the following centuries, routes were deliberately sealed because governments feared renewed conflict, abandoned because the specialists capable of maintaining them had been killed, destabilised when neighbouring infrastructure failed or destroyed in smaller wars that continued long after the Five Powers had ceased to function as coherent systems.

The loss of one connection often placed pressure on several others, so a Pathway city that had once linked twelve realities might fall to five routes, then two, and finally none. Families were divided permanently, refugees arrived in worlds they had expected to visit only briefly, and entire peoples became diasporas because the door behind them closed before they could return.

For later historians, the Severance is therefore remembered less as one dramatic disaster than as thousands of local endings. A city might survive materially while losing every relationship that had made it important, and a culture might continue on one side of a sealed Pathway while disappearing completely on the other.

The Loss of Vireza

Vireza’s remaining Pathway became increasingly unstable during the Severance centuries until the final known route disappeared beneath the ocean. Modern Virezan traditions preserve only fragments of the older connected age, and much of what survives has been transformed into legend, religious memory or misunderstood archaeological evidence.

Some scholars suspect that parts of the old route still exist deep below the sea, but nobody has established whether the surviving structures remain functional or are merely ruins. The possibility is important precisely because Vireza developed for millennia without direct knowledge of the wider worlds, making any rediscovery of the route potentially transformative.

Zifira

Zifira was more fortunate because several of its connections survived the Severance, allowing its mountain universities to preserve fragments of older knowledge and maintain limited relationships beyond their own reality. It never recovered the reach or wealth of the High Connected Age, but it retained the intellectual idea that civilisation extended beyond individual worlds.

That continuity later made Zifira important in the era of reconnection. Scholars there possessed records that elsewhere had become myth, and its institutions could compare modern discoveries with archives preserved across centuries of isolation.

Mervaine

Mervaine also remained technically connected, but that did not mean that most Mervainians continued to live as citizens of an interworld civilisation. The floating cities became increasingly inward-looking as survival, reconstruction and management of the poisoned surface consumed political attention, while knowledge of surviving routes became restricted to specialised institutions.

For ordinary inhabitants, other realities gradually became distant rumours rather than everyday destinations. The civilisation that had once standardised Ilixan history therefore survived in one of the most paradoxical forms imaginable: physically suspended above the poisoned remains of its own past, still carrying the calendar and institutions of a world order that had vanished.

Avara

Avara became one of the most thoroughly severed worlds. Its major Pathway remained sealed, while smaller ruptures occasionally allowed beings, objects or magical effects to cross weak points without restoring anything resembling ordinary interworld travel.

Magic itself never vanished; what disappeared was the context that explained where much of it had come from and how it fitted into the wider history of Ilixa. Knowledge fragmented into mythology, religion, family traditions, folklore and stories of monsters, faeries, demons, spirits and impossible worlds.

Over thousands of years, Avara reached its modern condition: a society capable of openly acknowledging that magic exists while knowing almost nothing about the interworld civilisation from which parts of its oldest magical history emerged. The world retains a guarded Pathway, surviving practitioners and scattered anomalies, but the larger story has been lost almost completely.

The Long Isolation

6300–8500 CR

The Long Isolation is sometimes described as an Ilixan Dark Age, but that description is misleading because the period was extraordinarily productive within individual worlds. Without constant interworld contact, political systems diverged, technologies developed independently and cultures that had once been regional variations became distinct civilisations with their own assumptions about history, religion, science and power.

Avara developed its modern nations, Mervaine rebuilt itself among floating cities, Zifira expanded its university culture, Vireza evolved in isolation and Harrowmere followed its own history. Some surviving connected regions continued to trade, while others regressed technologically after losing infrastructure they could no longer repair; elsewhere, societies advanced far beyond the old empires in fields unrelated to Deep Magic.

This divergence means that there is no meaningful single Ilixan technology level. One world may possess interstellar spacecraft but no functioning Pathway, another may retain limited Pathway travel while remaining technologically pre-industrial, and still others may be ruled by dragons, parliaments, ancient vampire houses or systems that no longer recognise gods as politically relevant. The Severance did not freeze civilisation; it destroyed standardisation.

The Second Opening

c. 8500 CR–present

During the last two centuries, evidence has begun to suggest that the long pattern of isolation may be changing. Old Pathways have produced signals after millennia of silence, interfaces previously believed completely dead have reacted to magical activity, ruptures have appeared in locations considered stable and ancient route maps have begun corresponding to phenomena that should no longer exist.

Surviving connected worlds have quietly increased research, but no consensus exists about the cause. The change may reflect a natural cycle in Ilixan structure, gradual self-repair of ancient infrastructure, deliberate interference by an unknown actor, increasing magical activity in separated worlds or some process that modern scholars have not yet identified.

This period is increasingly called the Second Opening, and it is the age in which the current stories of Ilixa occur. For the first time since the Severance, separate worlds may be moving toward one another again, which means that histories preserved in isolation are beginning to collide with one another as living political realities.

Important Worlds of the Old Connected Order

Several worlds recur repeatedly in the ancient record because they played unusually important roles in the old network. Serathiel was the centre of the great Serathi imperial tradition and remains famous for its extraordinary archival continuity, while Kharad Voss contained forge moons, industrial habitats and engineering traditions that made large-scale Pathway transport possible. Vaelkhar produced the dragonborn dynasties and fleet culture that reshaped interworld warfare, and Ossara became a centre of banking, espionage and merchant diplomacy.

Other worlds were important for very different reasons. Aeshra possessed an unusually thin distinction between mortal and divine Domains, Nyr became the home of the Blood Courts and the first great vampire political reforms, Orra-Keth developed powerful therianthrope traditions, and Sable Ith became associated with shadow-born peoples, couriers and covert travel. Namaris was a vast ocean world dominated by maritime civilisations, while Tharos possessed extreme gravity and became strongly associated with giant and goliath cultures.

Quellon became famous for the legal and philosophical traditions surrounding constructed people, Pelith served as one of the great agricultural crossroads of the Lantern Roads, Othara is traditionally associated with the First Crossing, and Istrava developed extensive legal systems governing ghosts, revenants and the dead. Vel Anor contains the remains of one of the largest Crown Pathways ever constructed, Caith Meridian was a diplomatic world destroyed during the later arms race, and Edratha was a fey-influenced reality where physical landscape and political territory could sometimes literally shift.

The Ash Courts were not one world at all, but a collective name for several fiendish and infernal realities whose rulers maintained formal diplomatic relations during the High Connected Age. Their inclusion in ordinary diplomacy was one of the clearest signs that the old connected order did not divide the universe neatly into mortal civilisation on one side and monsters on the other.

The Great Orders

Several institutions survived longer than the states that created them and therefore became carriers of historical continuity in their own right. The Argent Wardens began as neutral Pathway guardians and peacekeepers before becoming increasingly entangled in great-power politics, while the Order of the Last Door emerged from the Purges and dedicated itself to preserving knowledge judged necessary while destroying knowledge judged too dangerous to survive.

The Black Veil became the most notorious assassin tradition in recorded history, whereas the League of Lantern Ports demonstrated that trade cities could become major political actors without forming a conventional empire. The Nine Houses of Ossara dominated finance, diplomacy and information for millennia, while the Custodial Houses preserved specialised traditions for maintaining particular Pathways.

Other organisations were primarily scholarly or religious. The Red Archive of Zifira became one of the most important repositories for material considered too dangerous to circulate openly but too valuable to destroy, the Pilgrims of Telessa inherited the sanctuary tradition created during the Divine Wars, and the Ash Envoys specialised in diplomacy with fiendish states. The Crownwrights were the engineers who once maintained the great fleet-capable Pathways, while the Deep College represented the apex of pre-Breaking Deep scholarship and became one of the principal targets of the Purges.

In the modern age, the Children of the Measure advocate renewed interworld cooperation and, in some cases, restoration of parts of the old connected order. Their opponents consider that ambition dangerously naive, arguing that the civilisation the Children idealise eventually produced the very systems that caused the Breaking.

The Great Historical Stories

The scale of Ilixan history matters most when it produces stories about particular people rather than only institutions and dates. The Seventeen of Othara could dramatise the First Crossing and the political, religious and personal consequences of proving that stable interworld travel was possible, while The Seven Marriages of Yssara Tal offers a dynastic drama of diplomacy, murder, political marriage and state-building.

Queen of Thirst could tell the story of Saravel Nyr and the vampire civil war over the abolition of blood obligations, while The Banquet of Three Kings becomes an assassin thriller in which three perfectly successful murders destroy the political order their clients were trying to manipulate. The Ash Rider would follow Tarakhos Vael from warlord to conqueror and then to architect of the roads that outlasted his empire, with The Four Heirs continuing the story through the family that broke apart what he had built.

The Divine Wars offer The God Who Gave Up Heaven, centred on Telessa and the politics of sanctuary, while The Lantern Roads could follow one merchant family through several generations and realities during the height of connected civilisation. The Glass Meridian is a political thriller set during the forty-two hours in which Ilixa nearly entered strategic war, and The Thirteen of the Last Measure could explore the conspiracy behind Orren Vey’s attempt to end the Deep arms race.

The collapse itself contains multiple stories. Eight Days of Fire could follow characters on several worlds as the old order comes apart, The Last Convoy could centre on Rhava Korr’s evacuation effort, The Purger and the Librarian could follow two former friends who take opposite positions over whether forbidden knowledge should survive, and The Last Door could tell the story of a city that learns its Pathway will permanently close within days.

A particularly strong modern campaign premise is The Fleet Behind the Door. During the Severance, a Vaelkhar-aligned military colony and its fleet were cut off when their only Crown Pathway was sealed, leaving the surviving population to develop for more than three thousand years in isolation while preserving far more pre-Breaking military technology than the outside worlds realised. When the route is finally reopened during the Second Opening, the people on the other side do not emerge from the past untouched; they are the descendants of that lost fleet, shaped by centuries of their own history, still claiming legal continuity with institutions that no longer exist and possessing technologies every modern power wants to understand or control.

That premise preserves the shock of an ancient military culture returning to Ilixa without introducing any time displacement at all. The conflict comes from historical continuity, ideology, technology and incompatible political memories rather than from people somehow skipping thousands of years.

The Great Unanswered Questions

Ilixan history should never become completely solved, because the oldest layers of the setting are more powerful if even the best historians possess only fragments. The first great question is straightforward: who actually invented the first Pathways? The Auliri may have created them, but it remains entirely possible that they only learned to operate structures or principles inherited from something older.

The second question concerns the Silent Rings. Structures resembling no known civilisation predate every accepted chronology of interworld travel, yet they do not behave like ordinary Pathways and have never been successfully activated. Their existence suggests either that the accepted history of interworld civilisation begins too late or that the oldest builders were doing something very different from the societies that followed them.

The third question is the most disturbing: were Pathways created only for travel? Certain ancient structures behave less like roads than locks, although no surviving evidence explains what they might have been intended to contain or exclude.

None of this means that the Breaking was secretly caused by some hidden monster or external enemy. The catastrophe is stronger if it remains fundamentally the result of intelligent peoples who created dangerous systems through fear, rivalry and failed attempts to preserve peace. Yet if the oldest network was partly designed for a purpose that later civilisations never understood, the tragedy becomes greater rather than smaller: Ilixa destroyed its common civilisation before it understood why the oldest parts of that civilisation had been built, and now, after more than three thousand years of isolation, some of the doors are beginning to move again.