No civilisation of Talan's chronicle-record carries more competing identifications than this one. Each of the four major traditions has serious scholarship behind it; none has documentary footing strong enough to settle the question. Almost all of the actual records were lost when the homeland was annihilated, and what survives are second- and third-hand accounts from neighbouring kingdoms whose own libraries were thinned by the Crimson Rain in the days that followed.
The fourth tradition is correct. The civilisation's own self-name was Storveldi Denbora, and the other three traditions are debris from a lie its own rulers authored.
Whatever they were called, every chronicle agrees on what they did. At the end of the Gods' Era, this civilisation killed Tani: the Grand God of Time, struck down in or beside their own capital in her own domain. A Grand God had been killed for the first time in the world's recorded history. The folk-tongue calls the event simply the God Killing Incident, a phrase whose elegance comes from how thoroughly it omits the killers' identity.
The mechanism is unknown. Chronicles speculate. Tani's clergy hold one view; secular historians another; the temples of Cronus and Araphel a third. The common ground is small: there was a strike, it succeeded, and a Grand God died. The killers' methods are not preserved in any record reliable enough to publish.
What the killing actually triggered, every account does agree on. The Week of Crimson Rain opened within hours. The remaining Grand Gods, now confronted with proof that they too could be killed, went to war. The killers' homeland was the first to fall. The capital was annihilated. The land around it has not healed.
Their actual achievement was not the recovery of Elden technology. It was the integration procedure: the technique for taking a recovered shard of divinity and imbuing it into a mortal's own divine essence. The procedure was the choke point; the procedure is what enabled everything that followed.
The Wellspring/belief mechanic that lifts a mortal toward Demi-God status was openly understood in the Gods' Era. Many civilisations used it. What the Storveldi Denbora had that no one else did was the recipe for converting a found shard into ascended capability rather than leaving it as inert relic. (Full mechanic: Magic & Faith → Mortal Ascent Ladder.) The procedure had been mythical or fragmentary everywhere else. The Storveldi Denbora held it complete, and they held it institutionally. Ascensions could be planned, scheduled, and stacked.
With that concentration of mortal-derived divinity, the two Minor Gods supported by their Demi-God court did what no other mortal civilisation had ever organised the scale to attempt. They attacked Tani in her own domain and killed her. The strike's specific method is not preserved, every chronicle that might have recorded it died with the capital, but the political and divine arithmetic behind it is straightforward: two Minor Gods plus a Demi-God ruling class, against one unsuspecting Grand God on home ground.
What remains of the Storveldi Denbora homeland is the Lost Kingdom: the cursed coastal sub-region of southern Lioaru known in older chronicles as the Blackened Lands and in traveller's tales as the black spot on the map. Concentrated divine retaliation fell here at Grand-God scale during the Crimson Rain, and the wound has never closed.
The terrain reads wrong to anyone who walks it. Blackened soil. Time-warped strata where moments pool and repeat. Ruins that read newer than the stone they sit on. The ground twists living flesh into the irregular bodies of Fleshwarps; the restless wound pulls the dead back into motion as Skeletons. Neither ancestry is anyone's deliberate work, they are the land itself, still bleeding. No kingdom claims the interior. No reliable maps exist of the deep ground. The Adventurers' Guild posts a perpetual standing warning. Necromancers, ascension-cultists, and a handful of Tani-mourning pilgrim sects make the edges anyway.
The Lost Kingdom is the only physical evidence of the Storveldi Denbora that the chronicle-record can point to without dispute. The civilisation itself is contested. The wound it left is not.
The Azarketi, a water-adapted ancestry scattered across Talan's coastal communities, almost universally claim Elden blood in their inherited cultural tradition. The claim is old, deep, and held with the kind of certainty that does not invite scholarly cross-examination from outside the lineage.
A persistent minority of scholars argues that the Azarketi are in fact survivors of the "Old Race": descendants of those who had been on the periphery of the kingdom when the Crimson Rain fell, and who carried inherited body-modification rather than Elden ancestry. In this reading the "Elden blood" claim is a folk-memory of the same Elden-conflation that has dogged the chronicle record for three thousand years: the Azarketi inherited their forebears' Elden-claim along with their bodies and have transmitted it forward across millennia.
The Azarketi themselves, by and large, reject this reading. Their cultural traditions are explicit about Elden descent, and the few scholars who have argued otherwise have generally not found the diaspora's family lines a welcoming audience. The question remains open in published scholarship; in living rooms it is mostly closed.
The minority reading is correct. The Azarketi descend from the Storveldi Denbora, not from the Elden, and their inherited "Elden blood" claim is the Storveldi's original lie passed down across two and a half millennia in a form none of the modern claimants recognise.
Not every Storveldi Denbora citizen was at the capital when the gods came. A scattered population of survivors, descendants of those who had been experimented upon, or who carried the inherited results of generations of court-supervised self-experiment, but who had never themselves been elevated, survived the retaliation as a diaspora. They are the modern Azarketi. The water-adapted features the Azarketi heritage carries today were Storveldi body-modification work, refined by generations of selection and three thousand years of stable inheritance.
Most modern Azarketi do not know any of this. A handful of family-line elders suspect or know. The diaspora itself, as a body, still believes the cover its forebears authored.
Three things survive of the Storveldi Denbora in any form a chronicler can cite. The Lost Kingdom as physical wound, the unhealed coast that no living scholar would deny. The Azarketi diaspora, whose connection to the civilisation is debated but whose existence is not. And the chronicle-record's own confusion: the four traditions, the conflation with the Elden, the phrase the God Killing Incident that everyone uses and almost no one can date.
What this civilisation actually did at the end of the Gods' Era, how they did it, who their kings were, how a Grand God could be killed by anything other than another Grand God, is the most-asked unanswered question in Gods'-Era scholarship. The Guild has standing requests open with multiple chronicler-fellowships for any pre-Crimson-Rain document that might bear on the question. Almost nothing comes in. The fewer-and-fewer documents that do tend to disagree with each other in ways that suggest each chronicler had been working from a different fragment of the same vanished record.
The conflation persists because it is convenient. The Elden are also vanished, also mysterious, also implicated in cosmic catastrophe, and conflating two enigmatic civilisations into one closed mystery is easier than maintaining two open ones. Most modern mortals do not distinguish the two at all. Scholars who do, do so quietly.
The Storveldi Denbora are dead as a polity. The integration procedure they developed is not lost. The complete recipe survives, scattered across the continent and one Postlife plane, in fragments none of which is sufficient on its own, and the reconstruction problem is the most dangerous open project on Talan.
One member of the inner court survived the fall, held a working knowledge of the procedure, was not present at the capital when Tani was struck down, and used the procedure on himself in the aftermath. He ascended to Minor God status, took the self-given name Betibizi (Basque-drifted betiko bizi, "eternal life"), and fled Talan for the Abyss rather than face the Grand Gods' attention. He has not returned. He is the published Minor God of Undeath worshipped today, and the original holder of the procedure as it persists.
What persists on Talan is fragmentary, and it persists in three identifiable forms.
The shard sites are known. The places the Storveldi Denbora pulled shards from in their original programme are largely catalogued, old godblood battlefields, ruined Gods'-Era sites, the rare veil-touched location. Each is now insanely well-guarded by whichever modern faction has authority over that ground. Knowing where the shards are does not get you up the ladder. The procedure is what hides, and the procedure is the choke point. An adventurer-party that has somehow obtained a real shard and intact procedure documentation, even partial, is sitting on the most dangerous knowledge a mortal can hold on Talan.
The bound thirteen do not discuss it. Cronus almost certainly knows; the others' awareness is open. The bound thirteen carry, in their bound state, a permanent structural inability to act pre-emptively on a possibility, only on the realised event. The procedure is therefore one of the most quietly load-bearing secrets on the continent: nobody is actively suppressing it, because nobody outside the lower-single-digit circle knows it has not been lost. The day someone does is the day the calculus changes.
Why this matters as canon. The Storveldi Denbora are the only mortals known to have killed a Grand God. They are the only mortals known to have reached Minor-God tier by integration of recovered shards. They are the only mortal civilisation known to have developed and held the integration procedure. Their fall is the structural twin of the Golden Empire's, mortal ascension overreaching its mortal scaffolding and bringing cosmic catastrophe down on what surrounded it. Twice in recorded history now.