The Era of the Colossal Thrones: 80,000 and 40,000 years ago

The Era of the Colossal Thrones

In the age that followed the fading presence of the Primals, when their essence still shimmered through ley-lines and slumbered in the marrow of the world, Wardenfall was ruled not by mortals, but by colossal beings born from the planet’s raw memory. These were not shaped by the Primals, but were echoes formed from their fading essence, titanic entities embodying elemental will. Three Thrones emerged, Leviathans, Tarrasques, and Dragons, each a manifestation of one of the core forces, water, earth, and air. The world no longer breathed with emotion, but thundered with motion and mass.
The Leviathans ruled the sapphire oceans and drowned continents of the western deep. Their minds pulsed slow as tides, weaving songlines beneath the waves that gave birth to impossible biologies and alien architectures. Their domains were inhabited by the deepfolk and scaleborn, gilled beasts and ancient krill-tongued oracles that swam through cities made from fossilized bones of long-forgotten deities. These leviathan-kin sang storm-prayers to their lords, drifted in the slipstream of dreams, and battled over the warm trenches where sea-magic bled through the crust of the world.

In the obsidian valleys and the petrified plains, the Tarrasques roamed. Living cataclysms of hunger and tectonic memory, they tore rifts into the planet's crust simply by existing. They did not rule, they endured. Following in their wakes were crustborn beasts, molten-shell crawlers, and the stone-chanting broods known as quake-kin. These creatures mimicked the movements of the Tarrasques and dwelled in the fractures they left behind, treating the tremors as holy rhythms. To them, the Tarrasques were not destroyers, but the rhythm of the world itself, each step a hymn of gravity and stone.
Above, the Dragons coursed through the skies like living pressure fronts, their bodies forged of thunder, breath, and stormlight. They moved with no pattern, appearing suddenly and vanishing into cloudrealms that orbited the highest peaks. Skyborn beasts followed them, cloud serpents, glider-drakes, and stormwings who nested in the slipstreams of their masters. These airborne followers carried fragments of dragon-breath in their wings and eyes, inheriting the whisper of the high winds. Some even became living conduits of the skies, vessels through which lightning sang.
The Thrones never warred, but their presence reshaped the world through sheer dominion. Tides reversed, volcanoes woke to scream, and islands rose only to sink again. The lesser creatures that followed in their shadows evolved not by time, but by necessity, changing shape, mind, and nature just to survive proximity. Magic did not flourish as art or study, but emerged as instinct, a primal reaction to existing beside these elemental sovereigns.

Kornathul the Worldbreaker

"We called him the Worldbreaker because the word for 'god' had already been taken."

— Line scratched into the prison wall of Mad-King Relos

The Era of the Colossal Thrones ended not in war or calamity, but in retreat. As the last echoes of the Primal essence grew faint, the Thrones turned inward. The Leviathans vanished into trenches so deep light had never touched them. The Tarrasques buried themselves beneath plates of stone and magma. The Dragons dissipated into the breath of the stars. And the lesser beasts, once shadows of Titans, began to crawl, fly, and swim through the remnants of a world too large for them to rule. This was no apocalypse. It was a stillness, a great pause, and the whisper that the next age would rise not by Titans, but by something smaller.
It is said that when the Age of the Colossal Thrones ended, the world of Wardenfall did not simply turn a page, but was drowned in it. Kharaleth, the last of the Leviathans, mourned in silence and called the oceans to rise. For twenty thousand years, the seas wept without pause, covering all land in a storm that churned through time and memory.