The World
Two centuries after the cataclysm that destroyed the seat of the world, the realms that remained still carry the wound of it — and the gods still answer those who call.
The Veil
The mortal world and the spirit world are separated by a thin and ancient thing the priests call the Veil. Human will made manifest — built cities, wrought iron, the structures of law and faith and craft — strengthens it. Trauma, slaughter, and the violent unmaking of souls wear it thin.
Where the Veil is thin, the spirit world bleeds through. Skies turn the colour of sea-glass. A cold blue-white mist gathers at the ground. Stones and walls become, for a moment, less certain of their geometry. Mortals who have stood in such places do not always come back the same.
In the lifetime of any man living, the Veil has thinned more than it has thickened.
The Day of Rending
For more than a thousand years the Sargossian Empire was the unifying power of the known world — its capital at Arcaenum, its laws on every coast, its cataloguers having long since reduced the world's many gods into a tidy imperial taxonomy.
On the winter solstice of 1172 CA, in the span of a single morning, the imperial peninsula was annihilated. The capital was lost. The neighbouring lands sank or burned. What had been Sargos became the Tear — a maelstrom of churning waters and storms that has not stilled in the two centuries since. No ship goes near it. No record agrees on what is true beneath the storm.
The world that survived had to remember how to govern itself. Old kingdoms re-asserted; new ones rose. Trade routes had to be re-walked. Gods who had been quiet for an age began answering prayers again. The wound is two hundred years old. It has not closed.
The Last Great City
Once known as Aurumos, Portasang is the last great city of old Sargos — Arcaenum lost in the Rending, Ulum sunk into the sea. It straddles both banks of the Meredesang where the river empties into the Sea of Contest. It is the natural throughway by which Edor and Adoran reach Amon, Rivas, Thendare, and the rest of the known world by sea. All merchants, all manner of goods, and all strikes of coin have, at one point or another, likely sailed through the Seagates of Portasang.
It is a massive city — physically more expansive than Ulum was — and its architecture is uncanny in its diversity. At its heart stand the Seagates themselves, of a construction never before seen nor reproduced since. Some say the Titans must have crafted them, for the whole of the structure seems carved from a single sheet of limestone. The district around the Seagates is unrivalled the world over for its immensity, its precision, and its alien style.
Radiating outward from the Seagates are the districts built by Sargos during its direct rule of the region — sewer systems, copper plumbing, aqueducts, bath houses, theatres, and the wide, distinctive roads that make Portasang a modern city by every account. Newer quarters bear the clear hand of Mydlothnyan and Alendorish settlers, timbered houses with plaster-and-straw facades braced by crossbeams, the wood-tiled rooves stepping up the hills.
Today nearly five hundred thousand souls live within the walls and the outskirts. Denizens of every nation pass through, as residents or as travellers. Every manner of spice, invention, school of thought, religion, magical system, culture, criminal, and hero can be found inside.
The Realms Beyond
Two places the road will take you.
The Conquered Frontier
Seventeen years ago, in 1357, the Blood Vale and Rivas launched an attack on Avaris — one of the twelve city-state bastions of the Amonite Empire in Tullisaba. The Amonite Empire had thwarted centuries of Sargossian invasions. Somehow, Avaris fell. Its immortal undying god-king, the Adonai, was slain. The city became a joint hold of Rivas and the Blood Vale.
Now Amonite refugees from Avaris are crossing into the Blood Vale, and a new — once-forbidden — system of magic called Sahari is being studied and taught for the first time in the modern world.
Where the Empire Was
Where Sargos used to be. Two hundred years on, the seas there still churn against nothing. The sky above it has never been the same colour as the sky around it. No record agrees on what is true beneath the storm.
The Tear is the unhealed scar at the centre of every map.
The Order
Many simply call them Lanterns. Rare, and less a knightly order than a highly specialised police force sanctioned by the Seat of the Archmage in Bardsey, the Lanterns are the feared instruments of a powerful institution. They hunt down and bring corrupted mages to account, focusing on those who have made pacts with demons or fallen to possession by extra-dimensional forces.
Shrewd investigators with a broad sanction, all are also of the ranks of nobility — and their word and reputation carries as much weight as a Count or even a Duke in matters of magic. Their lanterns, apart from being their namesake, reveal corruption, reveal the Veil, and can compel or banish demons.
While feared, they are also respected. If there is danger from the undead, from mages, or from dark forces, the first hope of those in need is the aid of a Lantern.
The road reveals itself
Lore unfolds beside the episodes. Sign on for the dispatch to walk it as it is written.
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