TIMELINE
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Rym's recent history has been full of violence and struggle as the Spiral's stranglehold tightens. This has not been the first time, however, that the fate of the planet has swung in the balance. Other great wars have come and gone, and left behind the ruins of a once-great civilization. There have been times of healing and renewal, death and darkness, and all have left their mark on the ancient world. The following timeline encompasses five past ages, and details the recent events of the sixth, and current age. The terms PC (Pre-Collapse) and AC (After Collapse) are divided by the most significant event in Rym's history - the Twilight War.
The Age of Tranquility (???? - ????): There was a time when Rym was a silent, peaceful place. This was the Age of Tranquility, when the old gods first emerged into a new world covered in warm ocean and endless mist. This was a period of experimentation for Rym's divine parents, a time without time when the laws of reality were still under construction. The old gods infused the world with magic and the foundations of life, and took the form of elemental forces to watch over their young world. During this time, only the most basic life existed on Rym; simple plants and animals spread throughout the seas, or clinging the small shingles of land that rose above the primordial mist. It is impossible to know just how long this age lasted, for time was still an uncertain thing, meaningless to ageless beings. Rym's first inhabitants were elementals - the labor force that shaped the land and the sea, and protected the fragile new life.
The Age of Awakening (???? - 12000 PC): As countless eons had passed, life on Rym was refined like a complex, working machine. Establishing this balance between elemental forces and ecosystems was a long and arduous process, even for beings of divine power, and when at last all things were in working order, a fully self-sustaining environment had been created. This was truly a rare and wonderous accomplishment; a veritable life form all its own, a wellspring of energy manifesting itself in countless shapes and sizes. These manifestations of life were shaped and re-shaped by the elemental forces, making the machine ever more complex, ever more diverse, until at last, the gods recognized a flaw in their designs. That flaw was sentience.
The Age of Reason (10000 PC - 1000 PC): As Rym's ecosystems grew more complex, some of its previously unintelligent life forms started to develope self-awareness. They began to question their reality and transform instinct into cultural patterns, establishing the first foundations of civilization. This era spanned thousands of years, and saw the rise of many nations. The gods were unprepared to deal with beings that sought such mastery over their own fates, and for a time, the mortals did as they pleased. More and more, they broke away from nature, bending it to their will, overturning every stone in their desperate persuit of understanding. This frightened the gods, who believed that there might come a time when their mortal creations would seek to usurp them, and so they set about an attempt to restore the balance. They tried many subtle measures, and showed their growing displeasure in the form of droughts, storms, and other natural phenomena, but the unrelenting curiosity and need for advancement that sentience had instilled made the mortals nearly immune to discouragement.
The Twilight War (140 PC - 0 PC): After eons of tension between mortal and maker, Rym's fragile, perfect balance began to disintigrate. One civilization became supreme, conquering and assimilating all others, until at last the whole of Rym was theirs. They called themselves the Creators, a race of beings who sought exactly what the gods had feared. They wanted to hold the reins of fate, to control the destiny of their world. They sought the reason for their own existance. When the gods refused, the Creators resolved to build their own deity, an artificial being of pure thought and reason, contained within a great machine they called the Perfect Mind. This was a being composed of the combined intelligence and ambition of their entire race...an avatar of mortal civilization capable of confronting the angry gods on their behalf. With its nearly-infinite intellect, this mechanical god unlocked countless terrible secrets, and gave to the Creators a power that was as great as it was corruptive. With the aid of their Perfect Mind, the mortal empire waged war on its divine parents, armed with weapons the likes of which Rym had never known. They called it the Twilight War, for it was believed to be the end of the world.
The Age of Endless Snow (10 AC - 1160 AC): The Creators could not have known the power of the weapons the Perfect Mind had given them. So great was the devastation that for a thousand years, the planet was shrouded in atmospheric dust belts that choked off the light of the sun. This was the Age of Endless Snow, a time of darkness and suffering for the few that had survived. The gods were dead, and it seemed that the world itself would soon follow as the Twilight War's atmospheric fallout and electromagnetic storms reduced the planet's life force to a feeble flicker. Blackened war machines stalked the frozen battlefields, among the remains of slain deities and their celestial armies, heedless of the massive devastation. In a sense, the City Mind had won, though in doing so it had sacrificed not its own makers, but the world itself. Throughout this age, Rym existed in a state of perpetual darkness, without even the light of the stars and moons. Those races once enslaved by the Creators had been set free, though few survived the time that followed. The ones that endured did so by hiding beneath the earth, and civilization went through a massive regression, reduced to primative levels over the course of a few generations.
The Age of Rebirth (1200 AC - 2300 AC): Gradually, over the course of ten centuries, the dust began to settle, and the sun returned, touching the surface of the frozen planet with its warming glow. The descendants of the great war emerged from their caves as the deadly storms began to recede, and returned to a slowly-recovering landscape of lichen-lined craters and eerie, blood-red sunsets. The snow and ice began to melt, and the rain that followed brought new life to the scarred surface of the healing planet. Kij, the sun, infused the elements with the power to restore the planet's life force, an enegy called 'quintessance'. This bright energy brought sentience to the four elements, fire, air, earth, and water, and allowed them to manifest in the form of elemental titans. These elementals worked to restore the world to what it once was, reshaping the rivers and mountains, the forests and plains. For close to seven hundred years, the elemental titans labored, ignorant and immune to the mortals around them, who didn't dare interfere with the geographical reconstruction. As life gained a new foothold on Rym, however, a new threat had begun to take shape.
The Rise of the Spiral (2400 AC - 2800 AC): When the upper atmosphere finally cleared, and the very last of the dust belts had settled, Rym's inhabitants could see a new phenomenon in the night sky, one that even their ancestors couldn't have imagined. It was a vortex, a great spiral of dying stars as beautiful as it was terrifying, dominating nearly a quarter of the night sky. None knew what to make of it, though countless explanations came and went before it's nature finally became clear. It was a doorway, a great portal to another plane, and from its inky depths emerged horrors the likes of which Rym had never seen. They had come to feast on the remains of the gods, drawn to the decaying divine energies like vultures. Hideous things they were, born of a darkess corruptive to living creatures, and their invasion manifested first as a form of radiation the people of Rym came to call the 'Wasting'. Shrouded in auras of this destructive enegy, the first physical invaders descended from the dying stars in order to establish their own foothold on the recovering world. The Spiral Order has come to Rym.
The Siege of Arborat (2876 AC - 2885 AC): Shortly after their arrival, it became clear to Rym's inhabitants that the newcomers has no intention of leaving. They set about spreading their corruptive energies to the four winds, killing off all living things around them as they established a sort of colony. It was obvious from the outset that they had nothing in common with mortals, encasing their mummified alien forms within suits of gothic breathing armor just to endure the light and air that living beings took for granted. What they appeared to be doing was establishing an atmosphere that would sustain their growing colony, one without light and the quintessant life energy that repelled the Wasting. They became the enemy of every mortal nation, destroying good and evil alike as they spread and expanded. Using quintessant life energy as combustable fuel, the Spiral began to drain the undefended world of its very soul, drawing forth the spirits of the dead and consuming them. The mortal nations attempted to band together, to unite themselves in order to face down this new threat, and for a time, many banners were unified under an order of knights known as the Solinar. Empowered with quintessance by Kij herself, these knights fought alongside elementals and nature spirits in what became known as the Siege of Arborat, a conflict that lasted two decades and once again brought Rym close to the brink of destruction.
The Age of Oblivion (2999 AC - Present): There was hope, for many years, that the Solinar would overcome the Spiral and drive its wretched minions back through the doorway of stars. The decade-long siege saw the destruction of the first great Spiral fortress, Arborat, and its master Ir'Heon, but in the end, the alliance between mortal nations collapsed in a terrible betrayal. The cepn allied themselves with the Spiral, and assassinated the Solinar King and his entire family, co-ordinated with a siege on the capital of Savagnos. The Solinar Order fell, and six hundred years after the siege of Arborat, Rym's future looks bleak indeed. Now, there are few left to resist the alien invaders. Those changed by its power lose hope and identity, the color draining from their lives and reducing them to gaunt, pitiful shells known as 'wastrels'. Those races that still resist the new way of things have been enslaved, either by the Spiral or by those who sided with them near the end of the war. And yet, there is a single shard of hope that still burns in the sky - the goddess whom the dark invaders revile. As long as Kij remains, so too shall the spark of life.
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