Aerda

Every age inherits a version of the past it can tolerate. The Fourth Age, with its libraries of stone and crystal, its catalogued dynasties and measured skies, has convinced itself that Aerda is finally known. Yet the deeper one studies the early world, the more evident it becomes that certainty is a luxury history has never afforded us.
  Aerda did not begin as a single civilization, nor even as a coherent idea. It began in fragments—survivors clinging to memory after Kii’Rahn, peoples learning again how to name the sun, how to bury the dead, how to tell the difference between a god and a story. What we call “early history” is not a straight road but a braided river: Selenican hearth-cultures branching into continents, belief systems mutating under distance and conquest, languages breaking apart like ice under spring thaw. To study this era is to accept contradiction as evidence, myth as data, and absence as loudly meaningful.
  This anthology does not seek to resolve those contradictions, nor should it. Instead, it preserves them—placing Norathic tablets beside Oruhmic chronicles, clan-song alongside royal decree, archaeological scar next to sacred verse. “The past is not what happened,” wrote Rama'Um Da, a Khun'Shili monk, “but what survived being forgotten.” In assembling these texts, inscriptions, and recovered testimonies, we offer not a single origin story, but many—each shaped by fear, faith, and necessity. May this volume remind its readers, especially those who rule in the present, that every empire rests upon older worlds it never truly understood.
 

— Professor Halveryn Caelos-Adrorus Chair of History, Antiquities, and Archaeology Grand Collegium of Velnareos, Northern Dalzenia Written in the Year 412 of the Fourth Age