The Lost Ages

  The Lost Ages were a time of unbridled wonder and progress, when magick and science advanced in tandem, when cities floated and diseases knelt before knowledge. The boundaries of what was real bent daily beneath invention and imagination. For thousands of years, the world knew a golden age of unrivaled equilibrium. But like all bright flames, it eventually, violently, burned out. From the first recorded histories to the moment The Great Schism to pick up the world's pieces would begin, the prosperity of the Lost Ages gave way to loss, desperation, and the utter obliteration of millennia’s worth of progress. The Fall, what the world would come to call the days that armies of demons poured out from Hell, bringing about the war of all wars that ended our world, was a long, hard fall to say the least. The gods were silent and content, the stars mapped, and the impossible was made real with every passing moment, until it all crumbled to dust. What came after was not history, nothing peaceful as the era's monicker of 'The Civil Age' would imply, but survival, at-best.   I. Era of Wonders:
Before war swallowed the world, the Lost Ages represented the most advanced and unified period in Gaiatian history. For millennia, disparate cultures coexisted in relative peace, bolstered by shared trade, arcane cooperation, and scholarly exchange. Cities once floated above the clouds; healing required no potions, and communication spanned continents in seconds. Magick and science were not rivals, but allies. It was an age of:

• Magick-powered airships and flying machines called Ironbirds.

• Clockwork laborers and prosthetics.

• Autonomous cities fueled by pure Aether.

• Cooperative religious and scientific councils.

These marvels were not limited to elites. Commonfolk enjoyed lifespans twice what they are now. Childhood mortality was rare. Even the poorest villages had access to clean water, education, and glowing lanterns that needed neither fire nor fuel. Disease had been almost eradicated. The world was large, and most borders were open to trade or travel, even when disputes flared, diplomacy triumphed more often than war. But this was also an age of soft fragility, one where people forgot what hardship meant. The abundance made mortals bolder, less dependent on their gods, and more enamored with their own cleverness. Many began to see faith as superstition, and the divine as an inconvenience to overcome rather than a force to revere. Magick and machinery were no longer tools, they were crutches. This erosion of spiritual humility, coupled with the immense access to power, laid the groundwork for catastrophe. The stars had been reached, yes, but the foundation beneath them was thin glass.   II. The Rise of Vile & Prelude to The Fall:
The end began not with war, but a whisper. Vile, a General of staggering discipline and ambition, would rise to power as sovereign lord of The Hells, taking command of a terrible army of Devils with zealous devotion to their wicked master. There, he accomplished what none before him had ever come close, Unifying through wit and wrath its infernal races and scattered clans under one bloodied banner. Through brutal cunning and a master’s charisma, he forged this army into an empire of all demonkind. But Vile, the devil who lived for his next challenge, with none left to be had within his own realm, grew listless, depressed; So when the goddess Xaethra appeared to him, an ancient deity of hunger, greed, and jealousy who schemed to use his armies to further her own ends, would have the perfect bargaining chip, and offered him something no one else could. Purpose. Vile had no more battles to fight in his own world. She showed him a way to another. Ours. Together, they formed a pact: she would guide him to Gaiatia, a realm unconquered by the Hells, and he would raze it in her name, spreading her faith and Godly power in-turn. The portals they opened were wholly unprecedented. Vile’s armies poured into Gaiatia with surgical coordination, each tear in The Folklands we call home calibrated to a nation’s blind spots with obsessive planning months in-advance; Bypassing walls, fleets, and centuries of layered defenses in an instant. Capital cities fell overnight. Scattered arcane defenses meant nothing against the abyssal fire and infernal siegecraft of the demon legions from every direction. Civilization, for all its glory, had grown too complacent to defend itself. Even the gods, long revered and half-forgotten, were caught off-guard. They could not intervene directly without shattering reality itself beneath their raw power. Instead, they had to act through mortal proxies: paladins, oracles, mages who's power is measured by their faith. But faith had waned in the face of such all-encompassing destruction, and the obscenities dealt out by our invaders too cruel to put to words, so their influence was faint indeed. The war spiraled. Eventually, Vile sought more than conquest, he wanted godhood. In betraying Xaethra, he attempted to consume her power by binding her into a draconic golem-vessel. Instead, their fusion failed. Their souls twisted, combusted, and vanished. The vessel, lifeless and god-tainted, plummeted from the sky.   III. End of an Age:
The impact sundered the world. Tectonic plates shifted. Mountains split. Oceans flooded. The skies blackened. From the peaks of progress, the world fell into dust. Volcanic eruptions poured fire across continents. Tidal waves erased coastlines. Entire biomes were annihilated in seconds. The vessel’s fall was not just destruction, it was the death of certainty. Civilization didn’t just break, it unraveled. In days, the known world collapsed. Without infrastructure, transportation, or communication, surviving nations fractured. The gods went silent. People turned to desperate cults or isolation. Arcane energies surged wildly without regulation, many mages exploded from raw overexposure, while others lost their minds entirely. The few intact strongholds became refugee havens or war camps. The remnants of glory fell into ruin. What followed was not peace, but The Great Schism: a hundred-year dark age of chaos, genocide, religious extremism, and desperate attempts to carve order from the wreckage. Treasure hunters became kings. Ruins became city-states. Monsters thrived in the new wilderness. From the broken bones of the old world rose three bitter nations: Everwealth, Kibonoji, and Kathar.   IV. Legacy & Loss:
The Lost Ages remain a wound that never fully closed. Every vault, every ancient ruin, every shimmering relic whispers of what was once possible. Those who seek to reclaim its glories, scholars, adventurers, and cultists alike, walk among the graves of giants. And every broken machine, every sealed lab or derelict cathedral reminds us: we once held the stars. Some believe the golden age can be reborn. That Gaiatia, scarred though it may be, still carries the seeds of what was. Others whisper that the Lost Ages were never meant to last, that the gods themselves broke the world because we were not ready to wield such wonder. Whether a warning or a promise, the Lost Ages endure in every shattered obelisk and forgotten ruin. A time when we soared too high. A time when we were gods, if only for a moment.   V. Utopia Built on Cracks:
And yet, despite the golden shine cast by memory and myth, the Lost Ages were not a paradise unmarred. What we call “miracles” may have simply been ignorance polished to a gleam. Many of the era’s so-called breakthroughs were hastily understood, half-tamed things, chemical compounds, engineered plagues, arcane contraptions, and radiant energies that were dangerous even in the hands of their creators. Touted as wonders of a new age, these volatile inventions were distributed across cities and households without concern for consequence. Healing stones that turned organs to crystal over time. Clockwork anesthetics powered by fumes that caused madness after prolonged exposure. Infrastructure latticed with alchemical minerals now known to poison water tables. There are ruins where entire populations vanished overnight, some believe it was war. Others, that it was progress that killed them. The truth is: even at its height, the Lost Ages were fragile. Its confidence bloated, its advancements unvetted. Many of the substances once praised as panaceas have since been deemed unholy, saltblood resin, for instance, now banned by the Scholar’s Guild due to its generational deformities, was once used in everything from architecture to infant medicine. The term “miracle compound” appears again and again in surviving texts, often beside horrific footnotes in later copies written by survivors who lived long enough to see the miracle rot them from the inside out. Perhaps that is the cruelest lesson of the Lost Ages. Not that they ended, but that they were always ending. Not that their marvels failed, but that they were never built to last. It was not evil that broke the world. It was unchecked brilliance. Hunger mistaken for wisdom. We remember the Lost Ages as a dream, but perhaps they were a dream half-woken, half-screaming. A wonderland poised forever on the edge of its own oblivion. Now we live in the shadow of its gleam, still tempted by its ghostlight. Still digging in its ruins. Still wondering if we are clever enough to rebuild what the arrogant did not survive.