Overview | The Worlds | Pathways | Magic | Divine & Other Beings | History | The Present Age
The Present
Age
Ilixa Now
The old Connected Order vanished. In the millennia since, new civilisations have grown across what remained.
The modern connected worlds do not form a single empire, republic or federation. There is no government of Ilixa.
Instead, thousands of societies exist inside overlapping political, economic and cultural systems linked by surviving Pathways. Powerful states dominate some regions. Elsewhere, merchant leagues, dynastic houses, academic institutions, religious orders, city-worlds and independent gate communities exercise influence far beyond their territorial size.
Some realities contain interstellar civilisations. Others remain technologically comparable to medieval or early industrial societies. Some are governed by elected assemblies, others by monarchs, clans, corporations, councils, religious institutions, artificial intelligences, gods, hereditary houses or political systems for which no convenient cross-world comparison exists.
The modern connected sphere is nevertheless highly integrated in its central regions.
Trade crosses hundreds of realities. Students travel between worlds. Diplomatic missions maintain permanent foreign enclaves. Wealthy families own property under several legal systems. Corporations operate across Pathway chains. Religious movements span realities. Migrant communities may have existed away from their ancestral worlds for thousands of years.
What distinguishes the Present Age from the High Connected Age is scale and continuity. Modern civilisation occupies a smaller, fragmented network whose surviving routes connect societies that have spent more than three thousand years developing along very different paths.
The Surviving Network
Roughly one reality in ten from the old Connected Order remains reachable through functioning Pathways.
At the height of the old Connected Order, approximately forty thousand realities possessed functioning access to the Pathway network.
Today, approximately four thousand remain connected.
They are distributed across large surviving webs, regional clusters, isolated chains and individual routes. Some worlds possess many connections. Others reach the wider system through a single Pathway.
The largest continuous network contains roughly two to two-and-a-half thousand realities. Several secondary systems contain hundreds more, while dozens of smaller clusters range from a few dozen worlds down to two or three realities linked primarily to one another.
Power in Modern Ilixa
There is no single measure of strength.
A civilisation with extraordinary technology may still depend upon one strategic gate to reach the wider network. Another may possess a smaller population and less advanced industry while controlling several routes through which enormous volumes of interworld trade must pass.
Population, wealth and military strength matter, but so do route geometry, historical archives, magical expertise, diplomatic influence, control of industrial infrastructure and the ability to understand or maintain ancient systems.
The result is a genuinely multipolar order.
Some powers dominate fleets. Others dominate finance, scholarship, Pathway engineering, divine relations, manufacturing, information or transit. Governments that dislike one another may remain economically dependent upon one another because no single civilisation controls every field required for modern interworld power.
Major Powers
Ancient centres remain influential, but many of the most powerful societies in modern Ilixa were transformed or created after the Severance.
Mervaine
Mervaine never recovered the overwhelming prestige it possessed before the Breaking, but its floating cities remain among the most influential centres of diplomacy, law, finance and historical memory in the connected worlds.
Its power rests less on conquest than on institutions. Major treaty conferences still convene there, Mervainic legal traditions underpin large parts of interworld commercial law, and its financial houses help settle transactions between societies whose currencies and economies are otherwise incompatible.
Serathiel
Modern Serathiel retains perhaps the strongest surviving claim of continuity with an ancient great power. Its ruling and administrative traditions preserve records extending back thousands of years, and Serathi law still recognises obligations originating before the Breaking.
This gives Serathiel immense prestige and endless diplomatic problems. Other states frequently reject ancient Serathi territorial or treaty claims as relics of a vanished order.
Kharad Voss
The forge moons, orbital manufactories and industrial habitats of Kharad Voss remain among the greatest centres of heavy engineering in connected Ilixa.
Kharadic institutions are especially important because fragments of Crownwright and translation-crown engineering survived there. Every serious programme investigating large-scale Pathway technology eventually encounters Kharadic expertise.
The Vaelkhar Successor Powers
Vaelkhar never regained the political unity of the ancient Dominion. Several powerful states now claim different pieces of its military, dynastic and cultural inheritance.
Together they remain one of the greatest concentrations of fleet power in modern Ilixa. Rival Vaelkhar governments sometimes cooperate against outside threats while simultaneously contesting one another's claims to old titles, bases and military traditions.
The Nine Houses of Ossara
The Houses survived the fall of empires because their power never depended entirely upon territory.
Modern Ossaran institutions operate banks, trading houses, insurers, private archives, intelligence networks and diplomatic services across hundreds of worlds. Governments that distrust the Houses often remain financially dependent upon them.
Zifira
Zifira is not the largest military or industrial power in Ilixa. It may nevertheless be one of the most indispensable.
Its mountain universities, magical institutes and archives survived the Severance with unusual continuity. Zifiran scholarship now underpins fields ranging from Pathway theory and comparative magic to archaeology, divine studies and interworld law.
Orisel
Orisel was a comparatively minor transit world before the Breaking. Its importance came later.
Several surviving Pathways converged there during the Severance, drawing refugees, merchants, governments and industries from dozens of collapsing regions. Over three millennia the world became a nearly continuous planetary metropolis surrounded by orbital industry and artificial habitats.
Orisel is wealthy, populous, culturally mixed and politically impatient with ancient powers that still equate historical prestige with modern importance.
The Surnai Accord
The Surnai reality contains a mature interplanetary civilisation spread across numerous inhabited planets, moons and orbital settlements.
Its industrial capacity, population and conventional technology rival or exceed many of the old central powers, yet its relationship with wider Ilixa depends heavily upon a small number of strategic Pathways.
Surnai politics therefore combine immense internal scale with intense concern over transit security and interworld access.
Aeshra
Aeshra remains one of the places where the boundaries between mortal society and divine Domains are unusually thin.
Modern Aeshra contains republics, temple-states, divine territories and secular institutions existing beside one another under complicated constitutional arrangements shaped by memories of the Divine Wars.
The Ash Courts
The Ash Courts remain a family of fiendish and infernal states rather than a single empire.
Their governments maintain treaties, embassies and commercial relationships with mortal worlds while pursuing rivalries of their own. Some Courts are authoritarian and predatory; others operate through elaborate legal systems in which contract, oath and obligation carry extraordinary weight.
Worlds & Centres
The connected worlds range from planetary cities to ocean realities, stellar civilisations, ancient kingdoms and places where geography itself is unstable.
Zifira
Mountain cities, ancient universities, magical observatories and restricted archives make Zifira an intellectual centre of the modern connected sphere.
Mervaine
Vast aerial cities survive above a poisoned world whose surface still bears the scars of the Breaking.
Orisel
A near-continuous urban world of layered cities, transit towers, vertical agriculture, industrial depths and orbital districts.
Kharad Voss
Forge moons, artificial habitats and colossal industrial complexes produce ships, machinery, magical infrastructure and specialist gate components.
Serathiel
Ancient palaces and archival cities coexist with modern institutions inside one of Ilixa's oldest continuously documented civilisations.
Namaris
A world dominated by oceans, floating states, submarine settlements and maritime cultures whose political geography bears little resemblance to continental worlds.
Tharos
Extreme gravity shaped its architecture, physiology, engineering and military traditions. Giant and goliath populations remain unusually common, although its major cities are highly mixed.
Edratha
Landscape, political territory and magical ecology sometimes shift in response to agreements, seasons or supernatural conditions.
Istrava
Ghosts, revenants, inherited memories and the legal status of the dead are built directly into its courts and civic institutions.
Quellon
Famous for legal and philosophical traditions surrounding constructed people, artificial minds and the boundaries of personhood.
Sable Ith
A centre of courier traditions, covert movement, intelligence work and shadow-born cultures whose expertise is valued by states that rarely admit using it.
Vel Anor
Home to the remains of one of the largest Crown Pathways ever constructed, making the world strategically important even though much of the ancient installation remains unusable.
Institutions & Orders
In modern Ilixa, institutions can survive states, dynasties and even worlds.
The Order of the Last Door
Descended from the post-Breaking struggle over forbidden knowledge, the Order preserves information it considers necessary and suppresses technology it believes could recreate the conditions of the Deep Arms Race. Admirers call it civilisation's memory. Critics call it an unelected censor with extraordinary reach.
The Red Archive of Zifira
One of the greatest surviving repositories of dangerous pre-Breaking knowledge. Governments, scholars and intelligence services compete constantly for access to records whose contents may include lost route maps, Pathway engineering, divine history and fragments of prohibited Deep research.
The Nine Houses of Ossara
Financial dynasties whose influence extends through banking, insurance, trade arbitration, information brokerage and diplomacy. Modern Houses contain people from many ancestries, cultures and worlds.
The Custodial Houses
Families, orders and institutions descended from traditions responsible for maintaining particular Pathways. Their authority varies sharply by world: some are respected technical bodies, others hereditary elites, ceremonial orders or politically marginal communities guarding systems they only partly understand.
The Children of the Measure
A broad political and intellectual movement advocating renewed interworld cooperation and restoration of lost connections where it can be achieved safely. Their opponents accuse them of romanticising the civilisation that ultimately produced the Breaking.
The Pilgrims of Telessa
Religious and humanitarian networks preserving traditions of sanctuary, safe passage and aid to refugees. Telessan sites are recognised as neutral ground in many regions even where belief in Telessa herself has faded.
The Ash Envoys
Specialists in diplomacy with infernal and fiendish states. Their work combines law, magical contract theory, cultural interpretation and an unusually detailed understanding of entities whose promises may be literally binding.
The Black Veil
The oldest name in interworld assassination. Whether the modern Black Veil is truly continuous with the ancient order or a collection of later groups using its reputation remains disputed.
Peace, War & Diplomacy
Modern Ilixa is broadly stable. It is not peaceful everywhere.
Armed stability
The major powers have enormous reasons to avoid a general war.
Every serious government knows what happened when the old strategic system collapsed. Damage to Pathway infrastructure can isolate entire civilisations, and memories of the Breaking continue to shape military doctrine thousands of years later.
That restraint does not prevent conflict.
At almost any moment, wars are being fought somewhere across the connected worlds: succession disputes, border wars, revolutions, interventions, religious conflicts, corporate conflicts, colonial struggles, Pathway disputes and clashes between rival regional powers.
What the major states attempt to prevent is escalation into a war capable of spreading through the central network.
Diplomacy is therefore unusually focused on containment. A war between two worlds may be tolerated by outside powers if it remains local. The moment either side threatens a major transit route, calls in larger allies or deploys prohibited strategic magic, the conflict becomes an interworld crisis.
Much of the central connected sphere operates under overlapping treaty systems governing transit, gate neutrality, extradition, commerce, refugees, divine sovereignty and restrictions on Deep Magic.
These arrangements do not constitute a world government. They are a negotiated framework powerful states obey when cooperation remains preferable to the alternatives.
Recent History
The Present Age has its own wars, settlements and political memories.
The Wars of the Seven Gates
A series of conflicts over control of several strategically important Pathway junctions drew Serathi, Vaelkhar and smaller regional powers into repeated war. The conflicts never became another general Ilixan war, but several regions were temporarily isolated when routes were sabotaged or closed.
The Mervain Settlement
The exhaustion created by the Seven Gates conflicts produced a major diplomatic settlement on Mervaine. Modern principles of gate neutrality, civilian transit and collective response to deliberate Pathway destruction developed from these negotiations.
The Red Archive Crisis
A coalition of governments attempted to compel Zifira to release restricted pre-Breaking engineering records after evidence suggested that the Archive possessed material relevant to Crown Pathways. The confrontation nearly produced military intervention before a negotiated inspection system was established.
The Ash Court Succession Wars
A succession crisis inside several infernal states spread through treaty obligations into neighbouring mortal worlds. The eventual settlement strengthened the role of the Ash Envoys and permanently changed modern diplomatic law surrounding magically binding treaties.
The Nyr Compact
A major constitutional settlement in Nyr curtailed several surviving aristocratic privileges of the old Blood Court families and expanded citizenship protections across vampiric and non-vampiric populations. Conservative houses continue to contest parts of the settlement.
The Pathway Recovery Race
Several major powers and institutions are investing increasingly large resources in the recovery of lost Pathway engineering. The central challenge is to reconstruct enough ancient knowledge to open, stabilise and navigate routes whose original systems have been lost for thousands of years.
The possibility of recovering access to lost realities now influences diplomacy, intelligence work, archaeology, academic research and strategic planning across much of the connected sphere.
Magic & Technology
There is no single modern technological or magical level.
Stellar Technology
Some realities possess mature spaceflight, planetary engineering, orbital industries and artificial habitats while relying upon Pathways for travel between realities.
Magical Engineering
Kharadic and related traditions integrate spellcraft with machines, materials science, computation, warding and infrastructure.
Ritual Civilisations
Some societies possess comparatively modest industrial technology but extraordinary ritual, spirit, divine or ecological magic.
Divine Systems
Worlds such as Aeshra integrate active gods, Domains and divine phenomena into legal, political and scientific institutions.
Hybrid Worlds
In many advanced societies the distinction between magical and technological infrastructure has become largely administrative rather than practical.
Deep Magic
Strategic manipulation of Pathway topology, Domains and other deep structures remains heavily restricted. Every major power nevertheless has strong incentives to understand what its rivals may be researching.
Peoples & Ancestries
Species has not mapped neatly onto territory for tens of thousands of years.
A person's ancestry, culture, religion, citizenship, class and world of origin are separate identities. Major central worlds are intensely mixed, while more isolated regions may retain stronger demographic majorities, clan traditions or ancestry-linked historical identities.
Humans exist across thousands of worlds and possess no universally accepted homeworld.
Elven populations are distributed across ancient imperial centres, industrial worlds, fey-linked societies, modern cities and isolated colonies with radically different cultures.
Dwarven and gnomish communities are historically prominent in some engineering and mining traditions, especially around Kharad Voss, but modern populations are found throughout the connected worlds.
Dragonborn communities preserve particularly strong historical associations with Vaelkhar, although dragonborn populations have lived far beyond those regions for millennia.
Orcs, goblinoids, halflings and many other widely distributed peoples possess regional cultures, states, diasporas and mixed communities across Ilixa.
Tiefling populations may descend from entirely different infernal, divine, spirit or magical ancestries and therefore do not constitute one single historical people.
Vampires exist as citizens, aristocratic lineages, hidden communities, altered persons and political groups depending upon region and history.
Therianthrope traditions vary enormously, with Orra-Keth remaining one particularly important historical centre.
Constructed people are recognised as legal persons across much of the central network, although definitions of personhood remain contested in some states.
Dragons may be rulers, scholars, soldiers, business owners, religious figures or private citizens rather than creatures standing outside civilisation.
Spirits, revenants, shadow-born peoples, fey-descended populations and other supernatural beings participate in modern life under highly variable legal and cultural systems.
Religion & Divinity
The reality of divine beings has produced theological diversity rather than theological agreement.
Telessan Traditions
Communities descended from the cult and sanctuary movement of Telessa, Lady of Thresholds. Modern traditions emphasise refuge, safe passage, hospitality and protection of people crossing boundaries.
Domain Religions
Faiths centred on divine beings associated with particular metaphysical Domains. Their followers may disagree sharply over whether divine power implies moral or political authority.
Ascension Traditions
Philosophies and religions shaped by historical accounts of mortals attaining divine status. Some seek transcendence; others regard deliberate ascension as dangerous or sacrilegious.
Draconic Cosmologies
Several ancient traditions maintain that dragons predate the stars or possess a relationship to reality older than ordinary mortal civilisation.
Spirit Traditions
Religions centred on landscapes, ancestors, concepts, natural systems and local intelligences remain widespread, particularly in worlds where spirit phenomena are visibly active.
Secular & God-Sceptical Traditions
Many people accept the existence of beings described as gods while rejecting claims that divinity alone establishes moral authority or creates an obligation to worship.
The Lost Roads
Tens of thousands of destinations recorded by the old Connected Order now lie beyond the surviving network.
Ancient maps record realities whose modern condition is completely unknown.
Some may have been destroyed during the Breaking or the centuries that followed. Others may have survived for more than three thousand years without meaningful contact with the wider connected sphere.
Ancient records can tell modern scholars where a route once went. They cannot tell them what has happened there since.
A lost reality might now contain an advanced stellar civilisation, an isolated kingdom, a dead world, a surviving divine state, descendants of an ancient military colony, a civilisation that no longer remembers Ilixa, or a society that remembers the old Connected Order perfectly.
Pathway recovery is therefore never only an engineering question. Archaeology, diplomacy, intelligence, historical research, ethics and strategic planning all become involved before a lost connection can be treated as an ordinary route.
Current Fault Lines
The connected sphere is stable enough to prosper and divided enough to remain dangerous.
Major powers compete for ancient engineering, route maps and surviving expertise. Cooperation exists, but every major state understands the strategic value of being first to recover a significant lost route.
Serathi, Vaelkhar and other successor states sometimes invoke treaties, titles or territorial claims dating from before the Breaking. Modern states frequently reject them.
Control of a single gate may determine access to dozens of worlds. Transit disputes can therefore become international crises with astonishing speed.
Zifira, the Order of the Last Door, Kharadic engineering institutions and private archives possess material that governments desperately want.
Officially taboo and heavily regulated. Quietly investigated by states unwilling to assume that every rival is exercising the same restraint.
The Covenant of Domains remains influential, but modern societies still disagree over how much political authority divine beings should be permitted to exercise.
Ancient dynasties possess prestige and historical memory. Post-Severance powers possess populations, technologies and fortunes created during thousands of years in which the old empires were no longer dominant.
Smaller networks frequently resist political and economic domination by the central connected sphere, particularly where local cultures developed for millennia with limited outside contact.
The Shape of the Future
The old network still defines the horizons of modern politics even thousands of years after its collapse.
The Connected Order once linked approximately forty thousand realities. Modern civilisation reaches only a fraction of them.
The inaccessible remainder represents lost histories, unknown peoples, forgotten technologies, ancient political claims and possibilities that no living government can accurately calculate.
For scholars, engineers and political movements such as the Children of the Measure, recovering those connections is one of the great projects of the age.
Governments view the same project through more complicated lenses.
A recovered route can create a trade corridor, reveal a forgotten population, destabilise an alliance, expose dangerous technology, revive an ancient dispute or introduce an entirely new power into modern politics.
The question is therefore not simply whether a route can be recovered, but what happens after contact becomes possible.