A world that has buried its gods does not stop praying. In the long recovery after the Years of Ash, the survivors raised new faiths over the silence the Elders had left — and those faiths, more than any king, would shape the next thousand years. This is the Age of Faiths.
The first of the great new religions rose within a century of Year Zero, built upon the memory of the Ancient Deity and her final sacrifice. The faith of Radiant Light holds that the Deity gave her life to save the world from her sister's evil, and that her radiance endures as a holy fire of purity, law, and righteous monarchy. It found its great power in the north, in the Shining City and the royal line that wields the Deity's inherited light — a faith as capable of noble mercy as of crusading certainty.
Far later, around the eleventh century DS, rose its dark mirror. The Infernal Creed venerates the imprisoned Ancient Devil, and teaches that her sealing was not justice but the greatest crime in history — the silencing of the one god who dared to make her children strong. Its theology exalts strength, ambition, and the relentless climb to personal power, and it has grown from a heresy into a sprawling theocratic state that now looms over central Kworgalya. It keeps, too, the name of a chained power older than itself, whose freedom it is said to desire.
Older than either stands the faith of the Ruby — for the goddess of fire and freedom never truly fell, and her people never stopped tending her flame. Through the whole long dark, the Religion of the Ruby endured in the human south, the one great thread of unbroken devotion linking the present age back to the gods who walked at Vadesh.
Elsewhere, belief took stranger and quieter forms. The long-lived elves of the frozen north, who can almost remember the gods, keep no true church at all — only philosophy, duty, and the reverence of memory. And the immortal dwarves of the northwest trace their faith through blood and craft, honoring the Hammer not in worship but in the unbroken lineage of his sons. By the modern age these faiths and powers had hardened into the great rival realms of the world — the shape of the Present Age.
LoreThe Years of AshThe cataclysm did not end the dying — it began it. The first two centuries after the Deity's Sacrifice are remembered as the Years of Ash: the long, grey, godless collapse in…
LoreThe Deity's SacrificeThe world counts its years from a single instant. Everything before it is reckoned in the long shadow of the gods; everything after is the struggle of their orphaned children.…
LoreThe Religion of the RubyThe Ruby is the most beloved and most feared of the gods of the human south — and of all the divine powers of Kworgale, she alone is worshipped not as a distant maker but as a…
LoreThe Present AgeIt is the year 1337 DS, and the world the broken gods left behind has grown into something they might not recognize. The age of the Elders is thirteen centuries gone; the age of…
LoreThe Five Elder GodsBefore they were gods, they were exiles. The powers the world calls the Elder Elehath — the Elders — were once members of a deathless race of star-born beings who came to…
LoreThe Fivefold FleetsFive and a half centuries after the founding of Vadesh, the children of the Ur-City set out to inherit the world. The great dispersal is remembered as the Fivefold Fleets, and…
LoreThe ConflagrationFor eighteen centuries the Elder gods guided their children. Then they destroyed each other, and the world with them. The war that ended the divine age is remembered, with dread,…