The Monsterwake: 40,000 to 4,000 years ago

The Age of Kharaleth's Wake

Period: 40,000 to 20,000 years ago
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. Lightning sang across the endless horizon, and thunder cracked the sky open like bone. Cities of old vanished beneath the waves, and even the bones of Titans were swallowed whole.
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When at last Kharaleth drew its last breath and sank into the deep, the ocean recoiled. The tides receded not in hours, but in centuries, slowly peeling back to reveal a world reborn. The lands that emerged were unfamiliar.
New mountain ranges thrust toward the sky like blades, volcanoes breathed fire into the newborn world, and the old continents were fragmented and scattered like shards of a shattered crown. In this reshaping, Wardenfall became a wild and treacherous realm, primal and raw in its beauty.
From the corpse of Kharaleth came both horror and life. It is whispered that its rotting mass, sunken deep into what is now called the Ivorian Ocean, gave rise to abominations.

Kharaleth

Serpent-kin with venomous tongues, grotesque beasts that drink magic like wine, and creatures that remember the taste of drowning. These monsters, ancient and spiteful, inherited the world and ruled it for twenty thousand years, in dominion not of law or kingdom, but of claw and chaos.

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The Age of Fractured Realms

Period: Begins circa 20,000 until 8,000 years ago
After the cataclysmic silence of Kharaleth's Wake, Wardenfall did not rest. The sea had receded, the land was scarred and reshaped, yet peace never took root. Instead, the world trembled. From the depths of its new crust, a tear opened across the soul of the realm. This was the Great Rift, not a wound of stone or sea, but one of spirit and space.
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Great Rift

Through this breach spilled realms beyond reason. The Nine Hells surged first, spewing forth legions of archdevils and infernal princes. The Abyss clawed its way in behind them, vomited from the void to twist and devour. The Feywild blinked in and out of place, trying in vain to defend their beauty.
The Shadowfell stretched across dusk like a veil. The Far Realm opened only once, but it was enough to leave scars no god could mend. In this war of reality, there were no mortals. Only monsters, beasts, and beings of higher power.

Creatures of fang and nightmare ruled the land, while winged horrors nested in storm-torn skies. Leviathan-born abominations prowled the deep oceans, guided by no purpose but instinct and survival. The divine watched. The hellish fed. And still, no laws were written, no thrones were claimed. The world was raw, untamed. A battlefield of endless becoming. The Cyclopians built temples of eyes and silence, then vanished. The Thri-kreen hunted in strange communion, clicking their dreams into the winds. They too would vanish in time, lost to the entropy of realms misaligned.
The celestial host clashed with infernal legions in thunderous tempests that reshaped mountains. Rivers flowed with ichor. Forests bloomed in dreamlight only to rot into glass. For thousands of years, the realms warred not just over land, but over meaning. Concepts like law, freedom, madness, and grace became weapons. And in time, when the toll grew too great even for gods, the realms sealed themselves. The Rift closed, not with a snap, but with a sigh. The divine retreated. The devils slithered home. The shadows withdrew to their corners. What remained was not peace, but vacancy.
Yet the land was not still. The last touches of the Primals lingered in root and ruin. Their essence bled into the creatures that remained. The monsters, warped by divine conflict and pricked by leftover Primal sparks, began to change. They grew stranger, hungrier, more aware. Not intelligent, not yet, but something older than knowledge took hold in them. This was a world without gods or kings, but ruled by the old echoes of those who once tried to shape it.
And so it was that Wardenfall was ruled not by will or law, but by creatures. Sky-borne terrors, sea-fed leviathans, and beasts that walked on burning earth. They claimed the land as their own, not in conquest, but by right of survival. This was the last breath before the next age began. The Last Primal Intervention.

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The Age of The Last Primal Intervention

Period: Circa 8,000 to 4,000 years ago
As the realms receded into their veils and the monstrous dominion waned, it is said the final breath of the Primals swept across Wardenfall. Their essence, stretched thin and fading, did not vanish, but seeded the world with sparks of sentience. From these sparks rose the first ancient civilizations.
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Though each race would come to revere its own deity, myth holds that it was the lingering will of the Primals that stirred the first mortals into being. This marked the dawn of the Last Primal Intervention, a time when the divine and the mortal world fused in shadow and light. What followed would lay the foundation for all recorded history, and four thousand years later, lead into the Age of Humans.
In these early days, mortals began to shape the world not through survival, but through intention. Cities bloomed atop land once trampled by titanic beasts. Kingdoms took root in soil scorched by divine fire or flooded by ancient storms. The gods and devils did not fade with time. They remained, cloaked in dreams, in temples, in ancestral blood. They whispered to rulers, offered power to the devout, and cursed those who defied them. Each emerging nation bore the imprint of a higher power, and to deny one's patron was to risk oblivion or worse.
It was an era when the sky itself seemed to blur with prophecy. Saints walked beside warlocks, and miracles were born from bargains as often as from faith. Angels wept in the ruins of sunken cities, while demon princes disguised as mortals wrote entire bloodlines into thrones. The fey twisted mortal fates into stories only they could understand. This was a time of divine games and infernal pacts, where mortals rose as champions or fell as offerings. The theologies of Wardenfall began to crystallize here, shaped not in ink and scroll but in blood and fire. The divine houses and infernal courts took names, faces, and laws.
Though the world appeared tamed, the old chaos never truly ended. The great monsters slumbered in the roots of mountains and the depths of forgotten lakes. But civilization moved forward. Mortals, now touched by the final Primal essence, began to weave magic not as wild force but as disciplined art. Spellcraft blossomed among those who studied the remnants of the ancient world. Magic became legacy. Mystery became structure. And the ancient civilizations took their place as the first to wield power not from gods alone, but from the very veins of the world itself.