The Age of Communication—The Age of Trade—The Age of the Twins

6450 BCE: Black and White

At the dawn of this age, the Queen of the Grey Elves bears twins: a son with white skin and black hair, and a daughter who is white-haired and black-skinned. The son is named heir to the throne, while the daughter is tasked to serve as an emissary to the Dwarven people. Since the Grey Elves chose the mountains for their cities, they are the first of their kind to encounter the Dwarves face to face. By now, the Dwarves have built their own civilizations under the highest stony places of the world, developed a written tongue of their own, and established their own high kings and leaders.

6350 BCE: The Dark Princess’s Disappearance

After a century of serving both races with the nobility and grace befitting a Grey Elven princess, the Black Elf disappears during her travels, never to be seen again. Some sages say it was this legendary Dark Princess who begat the entire Dark Elven race, though no Elves discuss such matters with outsiders.

6200 BCE: Tongues Exchanged

In the generations following the princess’s disappearance, both Elves and Dwarves learn each other’s written languages, and trade grows between the two peoples, forging friendly relations and strong alliances. Both societies begin minting coins in this age, the first true currencies to pass between two distinct peoples on Urthe.

6000 BCE: The Wheel Turns

Most sages say the Dwarves, inspired by the pottery wheels of the Elves, develop the first wheels for transport in this age, for use especially on mining carts. This revolutionary technology spreads fast, and soon carriages and chariots of great variety are seen about Urthe by all manner of intelligent peoples.

5400 BCE — The Drowned Threshold

Deep within the Ethereal foam bordering the Negative Plane, a traveler caught between worlds during an ill-fated planar working is claimed neither fully by death nor fully by life. The first shadow is recorded here, a being of Prime flesh reduced to little more than its own silhouette, the rest of it already surrendered to the dark it now serves.

5100 BCE — The Sudden Betrayal

A minor noble of standing and ability, struck down without warning by an assassin’s blade at the height of her own ambitions, leaves behind an image rather than a body. The first phantom appears at the site of her death, a visual echo with no more substance than a memory, seen only by those who knew her well enough to recognize what they’re looking at.

5000 BCE: The Rising of the Dakon

The Grey Elves have begun to notice that their prized pet dakon apes, bred from earlier Hsing-sing, have become so intelligent, developing tools, and even wheels, as to nearly deserve to be considered a “people” too. The Grey Elven societies cautiously begin to free their pet apes back into the wild.

4900 BCE: Waters and Warbands

Some hobgoblin tribes, isolated and threatened by flooding, evolve into an aquatic breed known as Koalinths. Meanwhile, in the same troubled years, Bugbear and Goblin mating is thought to have given rise to the new race of creatures known as Gnolls.

4800 BCE: New Seeds of Baramin

More Powers are acting upon Urthe in this age, sowing their own Seeds of Baramin. The first Gnomes and Halflings come into being, created by an unnamed Power of Invention and an unnamed Power of Agriculture respectively. Their seeds are planted with industrious abundance, in small sheltered spaces too modest to appeal to the Elves or Dwarves. The Gnomes and the Halflings that spring forth from the soil are likewise industrious and abundant themselves, and are friendly with the other races during this Age. But mostly, the Gnomes and the Halflings, keenly aware of the dangers of the larger world, keep to their own kind in this Age, much as they do now.

4700 BCE — The Unfinished Work

A great engineer of the early Dwarven deep-cities dies mid-project, his final work left incomplete by a cave collapse he did not see coming. The first haunt is bound within sixty yards of that unfinished chamber, and remains there still, waiting for hands willing enough to let it finish what it started.

4400 BCE: The Turn to the Soil

Across the scattered peoples of Urthe, settled agriculture and the pastoral raising of livestock take root in earnest in the final years of this Age, a monumental change from wandering hunt and gather, laying the ground for permanent settlements and the first true civilizations still to come.

By the end of this age, so many Powers of Urthe’s Pantheon are established in their realms, influencing events on the young Urthe, that the how and whys of each are obscure matters for specialist scholars of those faiths. Sages disagree whether omens concerning this so-called “Age of Twins” refer most particularly to the legendary children of the Elvish Queen, the creation of the Gnomes and Halflings, the diminutive “twins” of Dwarves and Elves, as some sages say, or are symbolic of the multiplicity of Deities of the age, though several scholars would insist it refers to all these, and perhaps other unaccounted facets, too.

A•OM looked on…