Before there was matter, there was A•OM’s own division: the POINT splitting the VOID, one dimension become eleven, one identity stretched into a cosmos. Deepest among those eleven, curled tight at the smallest possible scale, sits the Elemental Plane, a torus of substance and temperature where Water, Fire, Earth, and Air first stood apart from one another. From those four, all else was born.

Water shed a daughter, Hydrogena;

The son that Fire did sire was Helios;

Earth had given birth to one called Lithos;

The heiress of Air was Beryllia.

Boros, and Carbos, and Nitrogena,

Oxygena, Fluorina and Neos…

When all are counted, one hundred twenty

Elements in Urthe’s alchemical sphere.

This is the study of that inheritance, matter’s own family tree, sorted by shell and by kind:

Basic Elements

The first thirty, mythic and elemental, from Hydrogen’s first spark to Zinc’s soft close, the substances every smith, cook, and hedge-alchemist already knows by hand. Here matter is still close enough to its Elemental roots that the old genealogy holds, Water and Fire and Earth and Air, coupling and coupling again into the ten that build a body and the twenty that build a world around it. Dragons breathe these elements raw and unrefined; smiths forge with them exactly as found.

Atypic Elements

The next thirty, rarer and stranger, where common metallurgy gives way to the first true reagents of detection, transmutation, and craft. This is the shell where alchemy stops being mere smithing and starts becoming a discipline in its own right, elements too scarce for every village forge, too particular in their properties to waste on anything but a purpose-built working. The first hints of true Mantic sense appear here, in Lanthanum, Cerium, Prodymium, and Neodymium, four senses awakened before the family that carries them is even fully arrayed.

Attic Elements

Thirty more, crowned by the Mantic elements, eleven metals, eleven senses, each one a different way of perceiving what would otherwise stay hidden, thought and undeath, poison and lies, direction and curse, nothing left unclaimed. Beneath them runs the platinum group, elements so resistant to ordinary reaction that they endure as catalysts rather than being consumed, present at a working without ever being spent by it.

Exotic Elements

The final thirty, orphic and legendary. This is the shell where the table stops answering to what’s been discovered and starts answering to what’s been imagined, physics carried past its own edge and into the territory of metaphysics. Elements here are catalysts and curiosities more often than building blocks. The orphic elements themselves run the gamut from patient to volatile, some decaying so slowly they outlast dynasties, others so fleeting they’re gone before an alchemist’s hand can close around them, each one trading stability for power in its own private ratio. Their eccentric neighbours answer a different question entirely, not how long a substance lasts, but what a smith can build from it while it does, the hardest edges, the lightest armour, and the strangest alloys the whole table has to offer.