The Age of the Moon—The Age of Refuge—The Age of the Crab

8600 BCE: The Catastrophe

Mortem, the Power of Death, touched the strings sometime in the last age, and a distantly drifting stone in space began falling to Urthe. As the asteroid grew nearer, it gained momentum. Much smaller than the planet Urthe, the shooting star was immense nonetheless.

As the meteor hit the atmosphere of Urthe, there was a great flash of light. A thunderous boom, and a shockwave, descended instantly to the surface of Urthe, utterly destroying the land of Knod. Quakes rippled forth throughout the entire globe, and the lands of Urthe fractured and began to drift apart. Urthe itself begins to spin, and the cycle of day and night as we know it begins.

The massive impact melted much of the frozen wastes, raised the oceans, and caused an epic event known as “The Great Quake.” Forests died, lakes and rivers dried, and lands turned to desert. The landscape, until then one large continent, has now rent itself from the force of the impact, forming separate landmasses. The surface of Urthe is torn asunder.

The great stone itself, however, did not crash into the surface of Urthe, but somehow was repelled, and came to be locked in an orbit around the planet. The young Urthe was struck by a primordial celestial body half the size of Ferrus, its iron-rich core wrapped in a separate shell of nearly pure elemental selenium, brittle and black. The impact tore the ruinous remnant of Knod out into the void as debris, while the impacting body itself burrowed deep into Urthe, only to rebound.

Yet escape was out of the question. The core of the celestial body, rich in iron, was swallowed by the much heavier Urthe and sank to its centre. The selenium shell surrounding it, far more fragile than the iron beneath, was largely vaporized in the same instant, its remnant scattered outward together with vast quantities of debris from the land of Knod, the whole cloud flung out to space rather than following the iron down.

8600 BCE — The Nameless Dead. In the chaos of the Catastrophe, as the Great Quake tears the continent apart and buries whole peoples beneath collapsing stone, Magica’s own corruption, loosed only one age before, finds its first true purchase among the countless unburied dead. The first skeletons rise from crushed rubble, and the first zombies shamble from flooded lowlands, neither remembering anything of who they were, mindless in exactly the way a disaster too vast for grief allows.

8595 BCE: The Moon Rises

An unnamed Power, perhaps some aspect of a Cardinal Power, perhaps a lesser power in its own right, sets the displaced, lifeless ruins of the former Orc lands into safe orbit as the moon above, relieving the utter blackness that had descended over the land. Another such Power, one of darkness, continues to contend against both sun and moon for control of the world, and the two still do battle over Urthe, high in the heavens above, where the moon lies lifeless still, barren outside whatever power of nature yet touches it.

8594 BCE: The Selenium Fall

The scattered remnant of the impactor’s shell, vaporized on impact and cast into the high atmosphere alongside the debris of Knod, does not remain aloft forever. Cooling and recondensing swiftly as it descends, the vapor settles back to Urthe not as the black, brittle solid it had been, but as a fine, blood-red dust, the amorphous red form selenium takes when it forms this way, drifting down across the animal populations of the era in the weeks following the Catastrophe. In a small number of creatures, it alters their biology at the deepest level: a lasting, heritable sensitivity keyed to the exact narrow band of reflected light the newly formed moon, itself flung into orbit from the very same impact, now casts upon Urthe each month. These are the first natural lycanthropes, their condition inherited cleanly through their bloodlines ever since, distinct from anything since attributed to a hexed or bite-cursed affliction.

8580 BCE: Waters Rising, Peoples Turning

As the raised oceans swallow the old coastlines, some Ogre tribes, threatened and isolated by flooding, evolve into an aquatic breed known as Merrow. One small Ogre group of elite Ogre kings becomes isolated on a small island, but rather than turn to the sea as the Merrow had, their descendants remain on land and evolve into the rare breed known as Ogre Magi.

8550 BCE — The Starving Ones. Among survivors driven underground by the flooding, one isolated band, having eaten what the dead could no longer object to, finds the taste never truly leaves them. The first ghouls emerge from this camp, their hunger outliving whatever guilt might once have stopped it.

Kobolds descend from a cousin line to the dragons themselves: a wingless branch of the same ancient polypod stock that gave rise to the proto-dragons, one that lost its wings early and turned to a purely terrestrial life, giving rise in time to the felldrakes. Kobolds emerge from that felldrake line only later, much as true dragons themselves only later emerged from the proto-dragons, a shared ancestry expressed on two very different timetables. Their survival through the Catastrophe owed only to the same instinct for deep, sheltered burrows that has kept their kind alive since felldrakes first turned to ground and stone.

8520 BCE: The Goblin Diaspora

Some surviving Goblins, driven underground by the devastation, begin to diverge along separate lines. In one subterranean population, larger and fiercer individuals emerge as the first Hobgoblins, organizing the scattered survivors into disciplined warbands. In another, isolated deeper still, a hulking, feral strain arises: the first Bugbears.

8500 BCE — The Wandering Confusion. Not every soul touched by the Catastrophe rises hungry or hollow. Some simply cannot find their way onward at all. The first visitants are recorded in this age, gentle, lost, remembering neither the disaster that claimed them nor the lives that came before it, wandering the ruined lowlands in search of something they can no longer name.

8300 BCE: Voices in the Deep Stone

The seas are still rising from the Great Melt of the First Age. The Dwarves feel the quaking of Urthe, and do not venture out of their caverns, but explore the depths of their mountain homes, as the Elves had explored the surface world before them. Deep in these long-dark passages, the Dwarves at last find the messages of friendship the Elves had left carved in stone generations before, and decide to carve their own messages of friendship in turn, back to the unknown Elves who first reached out to them.

8200 BCE: Retreat to High Ground

Meanwhile, the Elves begin to form permanent cities as they retreat from tumultuous coastal areas, towards high ground, the sea having proven itself an unreliable neighbour. Many Powers are active upon Urthe in these years, giving rise to new races and new inspirations alongside the old.

8000 BCE — The Grudge of an Unpaid Debt. A minor merchant prince of the early trade routes, cheated by a partner in his final hour and dead before he could set the ledger right, refuses to let the matter rest. The first poltergeist begins its long, petty haunting of a counting-house that no longer stands, hurling whatever objects remain rather than words no one is left to hear.

7950 BCE: The Elves at Peace with the Land

The Elves master agricultural principles in these centuries, though they still rarely “farm” in the manner of later ages, preferring to let nature run its own course with their loving assistance. They have by now domesticated some animals, mainly pigs, goats, and bees, for their products, and some animals for companionship, breeding cooshee, training birds, and teaching a few Hsing-sing apes to walk upright.

7600 BCE — The Broken Vow. As the first cults and shrines take shape among scattered human tribes, one priest, having secretly abandoned his own god’s rites years before his death, dies still wearing the vestments of a faith he no longer kept. The first huecuva rises from this hollow devotion, its mind-touched malice the exact shape of a vow broken rather than simply ended.

7500 BCE: The First True Word

Knowledge has, until now, been passed down through oral traditions alone, but the Elves begin to write in earnest in this century, creating the legendary works of lore that stand as classic tomes to this very day.

7200 BCE: The Sundering of the Elven Line

In the closing centuries of this age, the Elven line begins to diverge into the main distinct ethnicities known today: the High Elves, Grey Elves, and Wild Elves. While the Grey Elves build walled cities of stone, the Wild Elves focus on the natural land and its creatures, and the High Elves develop crafts and handiworks, advanced pottery, trade, and seafaring during this time. Some of the great ships first launched in this age remain in use by the Elves even now.

A•OM looked on…