Timeline, and the Empurios

A thousand years before Empurios, Ethora had one king, not three.

Rumor named him immortal before anyone could prove it—an Arcanus gifted with an element no one else carried, it's said he earned it by standing closer to the god who made the world than anyone since. Tribe and town leaders, tired of fighting each other over a continent no one could hold alone, chose him to lead it. He accepted, on one condition he never told them: he would never fall in love, and he would not make friends. He had already worked out what "forever" meant for a man surrounded by people without immortality.

He kept that vow for eight hundred years. Then he met a woman who outlasted his resolve, and broke it. Together they had three children who also grew past ordinary strength already in childhood. The same gift, inherited from their father. When her years caught up with her the way his never would, he understood exactly what pain he'd been afraid of in those 800 years.

In 200BE, he gave the crown to all three of his children at once. No single heir, no line of succession—three siblings with equal claim, because he could not choose between them and would not make them choose either. He said he wanted to travel. He left and disappeared forever.

The Divine element is his—passed down the royal line ever since, which is why only the crown can still give it away in rites.

The core energy inside every Arcanus is not unique to Arcanus. The same core runs through every living thing in Ethora — animal, plant, and person alike, together it forms a balanced network of energy. It has always been this way, and it was never meant to be tampered with.

In the years before Empurios ( a catastrophic event we discuss in the next chapter), that balance was disturbed. A number of forbidden practitioners began experimenting directly on the life-force itself — not merely studying it, but reshaping it, forcing it into forms it was never meant to take. Arcanus disappear, never to be seen again and sightings increase of Arcanus gone rampant, some are seen mutilated and deformed.

King Hidan, who was in charge of the army together with his son Velkss, led the royal army against the practitioners for a hundred years. He said it was for the crown, and left it there — he wasn’t a man who liked to explain himself, and no one who served under him ever heard him say otherwise. But the man held a deep love for his family and his people, and he was in the field himself far more often than a king needed to be. Whatever it was for, he fought like it was personal.

The sun is setting. However, something is off. Unlike the usual orange and pink clouds, the sky turns bright purple and yellow. You get an uneasy feeling, a ringing in your ears, and you decide to hide in your house as you start to experience an uneasy feeling. You get inside and eventually doze off in your favorite chair. Suddenly you are awakened by the violent shaking of the ground; your instincts immediately kick in, and you try to hide. Rubble is falling everywhere, so in a split second you decide to run to the door. When you finally make it outside, you realize something is not right with this earthquake. Instead of the usual 10–30 seconds, the ground proceeds to shake even after several minutes; you lose your footing, and you fall to the ground. Bit by bit you feel your consciousness slipping away, and everything turns black.

You slowly awaken, opening your eyes. You’re blinded by the bright rising sun, weak with hunger, and overwhelmed by the feeling of thirst. You start to take in your surroundings, images of the disaster coming back to you in flashes as your head stings. You stand up and find the rubble that used to be your house, hoping to find anything of value. But... plants have grown over it? The scene around you looks like no one has been there for years. You’re sure the disaster happened last evening... right?

The disaster was named Empurios: the balance correcting itself, all at once, to fix what had been done to it. It did not ask who was responsible. Everyone alive carried the same missing time, the same absence of memory, because the world does not scale its answer to the size of the crime.

Every injury from the earthquake was gone. What remained was the missing time — the same gap, for everyone.

Something else came with the correction. Voices, in every mind—the Judgment Gods, present from that day on. No one has ever agreed on whether they arrived because of Empurios, or what caused them to appear.

Islands appeared in the ocean, off the top-left of the continent, bound by a barrier that can't be broken through. The forbidden practitioners were sealed inside it. There are no Judgment Gods within that barrier. Some say that’s not a coincidence—that the islands, now called the outer reaches, hold an older, uncorrected version of the world from before the Empurios disaster.

Ethora had three kings, not one — three siblings, each with an equal claim on the crown. Sys was the diplomat. Hidan led the army. The third was barely seen even before Empurios, and vanished sometime during the hundred-year war against the forbidden practitioners. Ethora had stopped counting him among its rulers before Empurios ever happened. No one today can tell you his name.

That left two kings, two of the brothers. And once the war was over and the practitioners sealed away in the outer reaches, only one of them still had a kingdom that needed what he did. Hidan had spent a hundred years leading an army; with the war over and nothing left for a soldier-king to lead, that role simply stopped being necessary. His brother, Sys, saw the judgment gods as a blessing. They will take over judgment, and there will be no need for an army. Sys didn’t take Hidan’s throne. There wasn’t one left to take. He just kept doing what he’d always done, govern—and became the only king Ethora still needed.

Hidan did not take this well. He had given a hundred years to a war he understood, to a world he understood. And the world that came after had no place left for the man he’d been. People called him a reminder of a time they wanted to forget. He did not disagree with them, not out loud, but he stopped attending the things a king was supposed to attend, and eventually he stopped being anywhere anyone could find him.

Velkss stayed. He had adapted to the peace faster than his father. Spying and infiltration, which were Velkss' forte, made a strange kind of use even in peacetime, and Sys leaned on him for it more than either of them said aloud. But watching his father get quietly pushed out of his own kingdom wore on him. When Hidan finally disappeared, Velkss asked his uncle for leave to go looking for him. Sys gave it. Velkss never really stopped traveling after that.

Hidan did not want the old world back exactly as it had been. He wanted the Judgment Gods gone. He'd come to believe they offered nothing but fear and control disguised as peace, watching everyone’s smallest choices and calling it justice. Judgment should lie within the people. As much as he wanted the judgment gods gone, he never took action. He just isolated himself at the far left of the continent. He never organized anything to make a movement happen. He didn’t have to. Enough people had their own reasons to also want the gods gone. People with similar views longing for a time that was, or extremely corrupt individuals wanting to escape judgment, so a following gathered around his name without his say-so.

In Year 150, not only did Hidan become stronger in his beliefs, but so did his following. This escalated so far that his 'following,' led by extremists, carried out a massacre in the west. Hundreds of villagers were killed in Hidan’s name. Hidan had no direct hand in this, but he led his beliefs, and with those beliefs, escalated by extreme movements, his followers toward this. He never intended for it to go this far. He had no direct hand in the massacre itself: he didn’t order it, and he didn’t carry it out. But the massacre was carried out in his name, by people acting on convictions he himself had spread. He was indirectly responsible.

Killing on that scale does something to the mind and the gods that judge it, and something happened to Hidan's inner state. That indirect responsibility is what broke Hidan. Corruption took over, and not only his god of love but also his god of life went into slumber. What was left was hatred, uncontested—and it twisted of his own Divine element into something else entirely. The Corrupt element did not exist before that year. It does now, and it is his.

He has not spoken to anyone who remembers the man before Year 150. But first shame, and then blind hatred have taken over his mind, and there's nothing left to say that would change what had happened.

The barrier of the outer reaches has never been perfectly stable, but it was once known as impenetrable. But corruption—the same corruption that affects an Arcanus—has not only an effect on the balance of all energy around it, affecting plant and animal life, but it also seems to wear down the barrier that separates the outer reaches with each generation. By the current year, 300 AE, weak points open at random, long enough for someone to slip through. On the other side, there are no gods watching. That makes the island a place for illegal trade, and experiments, and for those who believe the Judgment Gods should never have arrived at all.

Extreme movements that once came to life around the time of the massacre are bigger than ever. They are more motivated now that they see that the growth of corruption has an effect on the barrier that the gods once created. 

Fortunately, most of the continent still knows peace. The most affected continent is Vharak, where Hidan resides in the capital, Drüggen. The continents Harthmoor, Karagor, and Korvash have strict border controls around the mountain range. Most towns have a corruption check where you can't enter or register if you show visible signs of corruption. The continent is vast, and the further you leave the west, the less you see the signs of the corruption that poisons Ethora.