History · Talan

On Counting Years

The transition point, 0 GR / 0 MR, is the Week of Crimson Rain. Everything before it is measured in GR counting down. Everything after is MR counting up. Scholars of history must always note which calendar they reference.

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Before 6000 GR

The Creation Era Open

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Chroniclers and scholars agree that Tyrnarra and Talan are older than recorded history. Both have existed for a very long time, and the world did not begin with the Elden. But nothing is known from before the Elden Era: no chronicle reaches in, no archive preserves a line, no surviving record names a name. The Creation Era is the polite scholarly label for that depth, an acknowledgment that there is history before history, but no usable testimony. The gods were present and active before the Elden, but what they did, and over what stretch of unrecorded time, lies beyond every catalogued source.

6000 GR · 2945 GR

The Elden Era

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For over three thousand years, Talan was dominated by the Elden, an ancient race of immense power and sophistication. Neither fully mortal nor fully divine, they built civilizations of staggering scale. Little of their culture survives in comprehensible form; what does is often beyond mortal understanding to replicate. Their greatest known achievement was the creation of the Android ancestry, people of extraordinary sophistication that no civilization has since been able to reproduce.

Then, in 2945 GR, every Elden vanished, on the same day, everywhere on Talan. No war, no plague, no exodus was recorded. Their cities stood intact, libraries full, hearths still warm. No explanation has ever been confirmed. Their ruins, scattered across Talan, are among the most sought-after and dangerous places in the known world.

Their tongue outlived them in names. The Elden named the ground they held in the Silent Tongue, and those names are still on the map, though their meaning went with the Elden (see The Tongues of Talan below).

◈ Theories & Common Belief

Three theories dominate popular understanding of the Elden's disappearance. The first holds that they fought a war with the gods, a direct, escalating conflict, and were destroyed or driven out, their civilization unmade in a struggle too vast to leave ordinary records. The second suggests they fulfilled whatever purpose brought them into existence and departed willingly, ascending beyond the known planes. The third, more poetic, holds that they found a way out entirely: beyond the Cloud Sea, to another world, leaving everything behind by choice. All three have adherents. None have evidence.

⚿ Known to Almost No One

The Elden were at war with the gods, and winning often enough to make the gods afraid. Rather than fight to a stalemate, they devised a final solution. They freed the Devourer: a being of pure consumption, imprisoned since before recorded history, existing only to unmake existence, and turned it loose on the gods. While the gods scrambled to fight the Devourer and protect existence, the Elden retreated deep underground and began a ritual to connect themselves directly to the Wellspring. Had it succeeded, every Elden would have become a being of near-infinite power, unified in a single hive mind, drawing from the source of all creation.

The gods noticed in the last moment. With no time for anything else, they shoved the Devourer directly into the Elden's open connection to the Wellspring. The ritual completed. The Elden connected, to both the Wellspring's endless creation and the Devourer's endless destruction simultaneously. Every Elden, every individual, every piece of their civilisation collapsed into a single being: constant creation, constant decay, locked in permanent internal war. The Corrupted God.

What the Golden Empire miners breached in 1321 MR was the Elden's ritual site. What emerged was what the Elden had become.

2944 GR · 1 GR

The Gods' Era

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With the Elden gone, the gods moved to fill the void, and found nothing standing between them and total dominion over mortal life. What followed was nearly three thousand years of divine rule: gods as kings, gods as landlords, gods as law. Mortals lived under the direct and often capricious governance of beings of immense power. The gods ruled Talan in the Court Tongue, and the names of old and holy things across the continent were given in it, while mortals went on speaking their own tongues at home.

It was not uniformly terrible. Some gods were just, even benevolent. Many mortals knew prosperity under divine rule. But the gods were also petty, jealous, and deeply territorial. Their conflicts with one another, over borders, followers, resources, and pride, repeatedly consumed mortal populations in wars they had no say in starting and no power to end.

Mortal civilisations were not idle during this era. Several rose to prominence under, or in the gaps between, divine governance. The Gods' Era also saw the crash of an alien vessel in the volcanic south, what is now Sumendar, bringing the first Dragons to Talan; their landing site became the city now called Dragon's Reach. And in the era's final centuries, a powerful civilisation now remembered only as "the Old Race" rose, gathered forbidden power, and, by every chronicle's reckoning, brought the era to its catastrophic end.

◈ Theories & Common Belief

Chronicles agree that the Gods' Era ended badly because of "the Old Race who killed Tani." Beyond that the accounts differ. Some hold the Old Race were the Elden, returned from wherever the Elden Era's vanishing had taken them. Some hold they were a separate mortal civilisation who rose during the Gods' Era, gathered forbidden power, and reached too far. Some hold they were sorcerer-kings who pried open a divine secret no mortal was meant to touch. The phrase "the God Killing Incident" survives in dozens of variants; most retellings strip the killers from the story entirely, naming only the consequence. Whoever they were, every account agrees their homeland was annihilated in the Week of Crimson Rain that followed, the cursed-ground scar on the modern southern coast of Lioaru, called the Lost Kingdom.

⚿ Known to Almost No One

The "Old Race" were the Storveldi Denbora: a mortal civilisation of the Gods' Era, not the Elden. They settled atop abandoned Elden ruins on what is now Lioaru's southern coast and built their capital on those foundations. They claimed Elden descent for prestige; they had no such blood. The conflation of Storveldi with Elden in modern mortal histories is the Storveldi's own original lie, transmitted forward across millennia.

What they actually achieved was the integration procedure: the technique for imbuing a found shard of divinity into a mortal's own divine essence. Generations of selective practice, alchemical work, and archaeology of the Elden ruins beneath them produced this single piece of choke-point knowledge. With it, they elevated their entire ruling class to Demi-God status by the Wellspring/belief mechanic, and their two most accomplished sovereigns went further still, integrating recovered shards to reach Minor God status.

Backed by their Demi-God ruling class, those two Minor Gods attacked Tani in her own domain and killed her. This is the act mortal chronicles preserve as "the God Killing Incident." Tani's death triggered the Week of Crimson Rain, and the centre of the retaliation fell on the Storveldi homeland. Their capital was annihilated; the land has not healed in three and a half thousand years.

One member of the ruling class survived. He used the integration procedure on himself in the aftermath, ascended to Minor God of Undeath, took the self-given name Betibizi ("eternal life"), and fled Talan for Abyss. He has not returned. He is the original holder of the integration procedure as it persists today; fragments persist on Talan among his cult and the descended Azarketi lineages.

A scattered population of Storveldi survivors, descendants of those who had been experimented upon but who were never themselves elevated, persists today as the Azarketi. Their inherited "Elden blood" folk-claim is the Storveldi's original lie passed down in a form none of the modern claimants recognise.

See lost-kingdom.html for the cursed-ground deep dive; gods-law.html → The Mortal Ascent Ladder for the cosmological mechanic player-facing.

0 GR · 0 MR

The Week of Crimson Rain

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The pivotal event in all of Talan's history. For one week, the skies across the entire continent wept crimson, not rain, but blood. Divine blood. The nature of the conflict that caused it is still debated: was it a war among the gods? An intervention from outside the Material Plane? A judgment passed by the Wellspring itself?

Casualties among divine and mortal alike were of a scale that has no name. At the end of the week, the Gods' Law was established, a binding compact enforced by the Ethereal Plane itself: no direct governance of mortal civilizations, no open warfare, no unchecked divine control of mortal lives. Thirteen accepted the binding and remained on the Material Plane; the rest withdrew to the other planes, taking their own pantheons with them. The world the Thirteen inherited was broken.

◈ Theories & Common Belief

The cause of the Week of Crimson Rain is the subject of ongoing scholarly debate and popular legend. The widely-repeated folk-link runs back to the "God Killing Incident" recorded in the Gods' Era's last centuries: the chronicles that name "the Old Race who killed Tani" also note the Rain followed shortly after, and most folk retellings treat the two as cause and effect. Beyond that connection, three theories compete on what the actual conflict looked like. The first holds that it was a war among the gods, territorial, petty, and catastrophic in scale, the same divine conflicts of the Gods' Era simply taken too far, with Tani's killing the spark. The second suggests an intervention from outside the Material Plane: a judgment handed down from the higher layers, perhaps from the Wellspring itself, the killing of a Grand God a trigger the cosmos refused to ignore. The third, favoured in more mystical traditions, holds that the gods simply became too powerful, and reality pushed back, the God Killing the last refusal the cosmos answered. None has been confirmed. The gods do not comment.

⚿ Known to Very Few

The Week of Crimson Rain was not started by a divine dispute, a cosmic judgment, or an outside intervention. It began with a single act: the killing of Tani, god of Time, by the Storveldi Denbora: a mortal civilisation of the Gods' Era whose ruling class had self-ascended past Demi-God status through their own integration procedure. Tani was the first Grand God ever slain, a thing that had been considered impossible. The retaliation fell first on the Storveldi homeland, what is now the Lost Kingdom, the cursed-ground scar on Lioaru's south-west coast, and the remaining eleven Grand Gods, now understanding that they were not untouchable, went to war out of fear as much as fury. For the Storveldi's full story see the Gods' Era → GM Secret above.

Cronus, a mortal man, hated it. He began uniting mortal survivors under one banner, and because belief is real, the act of thousands rallying to him began making him more than mortal. Araphel was the first Grand God to stand behind him. Together, with Tani's rebirth at the end of the war, the eleven remaining Grand Gods forged the Gods' Law. Only thirteen accepted its binding. Common people do not know this. Scholars have theories. The gods know exactly what happened and have not said.

1 MR · 559 MR

The Lost Era

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For over five centuries, mortal civilization simply tried to survive. The gods were constrained. The divine infrastructure, the systems of governance, food distribution, law enforcement, had been divine-built, and without active divine management, it collapsed. Mortals, who had never been asked to govern themselves, had to learn.

The Lost Era is characterized by fragmentation, rediscovery, and immense loss of knowledge. Entire libraries of the Gods' Era were lost. Languages fractured and drifted. Populations crashed in some regions, migrated in others. Slowly, painstakingly, mortal kingdoms began to form, imperfect, contentious, but their own. The era is called "Lost" not because nothing happened, but because so much of what happened was simply not recorded.

◈ Theories & Common Belief

The five hundred years between the Crimson Rain and the Golden Empire's rise are called Lost because almost nothing survived in written form to describe them. Scholars offer three explanations. The first holds that the survivors of the Crimson Rain were simply too shocked to write, generations stunned by the war's casualty scale, occupied entirely with subsistence, with neither inclination nor institutions for chronicling. The second points to infrastructure collapse: the gods had run the great libraries, schools, and scriptoria of the Gods' Era, and without divine maintenance these collapsed; what was lost was lost. The third, common in mystical traditions, proposes a kind of collective amnesia, that something in mortal awareness changed after the Crimson Rain, that whole decades simply did not lodge in memory the way ordinary time does, and that mortals who tried later to remember those years found the past slipping out from under them. The kinder versions of this theory blame trauma. The stranger versions argue the Wellspring was different in those years.

⚿ Known to Almost No One

The forging of the Gods' Law banished all divine beings from the Material Plane except the thirteen who accepted the binding. Before the Crimson Rain, the world held many gods, Major, Minor, Demi, and the Grand twelve, whose combined presence mediated the Wellspring's outflow into the Life Layer through dense networks of divine grant, clerical channel, and direct presence. After the Compact, thirteen alone remained to do this work. They could not.

The leak. For roughly the first century of the Lost Era the Wellspring's source-fluid touched the world more directly than at any time since pre-Creation. Dreamers in scattered places shaped reality in their sleep; certain valleys spoke languages that produced what they named; infants were born already speaking forgotten tongues; and the Storveldi integration procedure became findable again to anyone whose curiosity took them the right way. Some mortals certainly ascended in those decades. There was no one to stop them and no one to record what they became.

Reflections. The first class of beings produced by the leak: mortals born when raw, un-mediated Wellspring touched a conception or earliest gestation. Mortal-shaped but with no ancestry, anchored directly to the Wellspring rather than to any deity-mediated ancestry line. The bestiary's existing magical mishap / Wellspring blip / no parent lineage gloss is the public cover. Most Lost-Era Reflections died young; a few survived to seed the modern Reflection lineage.

Stabilisation. The thirteen returned during the second century with a new mediation framework, what mortals now experience as the Four Schools and the modern cleric craft. The Four Schools' modern form is not pre-Crimson-Rain magic; it is the post-leak stabilisation tooling, designed to let mortals mediate the outflow themselves where the thirteen are too few. By the close of the second century the general leak had subsided.

Stillpools. When the general leak stopped, a small number of Wellspring-touched sites remained scattered across Talan as Stillpools: quiet, locally folkloric (fairy-haunted, witch-touched, bad-luck-to-visit). When a mortal interacts with a Stillpool, there is a chance that a Reflection is born nearby roughly one week later. Every modern Reflection traces back to a Stillpool event. The Adventurers Guild keeps a sealed atlas as a working register for high-rank parties.

Why the records didn't survive. Not divine redaction, the bound thirteen are forbidden by the Compact from that kind of mortal-surveillance work. The records simply didn't survive: infrastructure had collapsed, surviving Reflections and ascended mortals had reason to keep their own accounts unwritten, and by the time the thirteen returned the strangest decades were already folk-memory. "Lost" is the polite word.

560 MR · 1325 MR

The Golden Era

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Named for the civilization that defined it: the Golden Empire, a dwarven empire that rose from the southern heartlands and, over seven centuries of expansion, conquest, and political absorption, came to control approximately 70% of Talan. At its peak it was the largest mortal empire in recorded history, a monument to what mortals could build when freed from direct divine governance.

The Golden Empire was not a gentle ruler, but it was a consistent one. Trade flourished. Roads were built. Common law spread. The era saw genuine prosperity across much of the continent, and the cultural foundations of many modern kingdoms trace directly to this period. The dwarven language and script became the scholarly standard of the age, fossilized in the old place-names that survive to this day. The Empire ruled largely through local lords, its provincial nobility, and the tongues it ruled lived on beneath its own; Talanese grew on Imperial Dwarvish's spine wherever the Empire reached.

Among the Empire's many pursuits, its greatest scholars attempted to recreate the Androids of the Elden, synthetic people whose sophistication had never been matched. They could not. What they produced instead was the Automaton ancestry: formidable constructs of considerable capability, but not the living people the Elden had made. The distinction haunted Imperial scholarship until the Empire's end. For the full institutional history of the Empire, its sweep, its work, its fall, and the legacy still embedded in modern Talan, see The Golden Empire →.

◈ Theories & Common Belief

The Golden Empire's seven centuries of dominance are the subject of more scholarly debate than any other era of mortal rule, and three explanations dominate. The first credits the Emperor's personal qualities, a dwarven sovereign of legendary discipline, strategic intelligence, and longevity, whose institutional foundations his successors merely maintained. The second, common in temple traditions, holds that the Gods' Law was quietly bent in the Empire's favour: the bound thirteen permitted its flourishing because the new order needed an anchor civilisation to rebuild around, and what mortals read as divine absence was in fact divine allowance. The third, favoured in mystic schools, holds that the Wellspring itself shaped events to reward the first true mortal civilisation for surviving its gods, the Empire as the world's gift back to itself. All three flatter the present. None has documentary footing strong enough to settle the question; the dwarven imperial archives that would, did not survive the Dark Era's first decade.

⚿ Known to the Lower Single Digits

The Golden Emperor was a Reflection. He was conceived a generation or so before the Empire's founding, born near a Stillpool (a forest pond his mother had unknowingly approached on the southern foothills of what would become the imperial heartland). The midwives knew there was something different about him, eyes that focused too soon, an oddly settled gravity in an infant, but no one named what he was, because the framing for what he was did not exist in the post-Lost-Era scholarly vocabulary. The conscious-pull technique that would make his ascent possible was something he discovered for himself over decades, through patient inward attention to a sensation no one else around him could feel.

Reflections operate outside the Compact's framework. Because they are born of direct Wellspring contact, the divine-mediation framework that the Gods' Law uses to bind mortal/divine ascension does not fully apply to them. A Wellspring-direct being slips the framework's grain. The Emperor was the only Reflection in recorded history who recognised what he was, identified the connection he carried, and learned to consciously pull on it. By doing so he ascended to Minor God status while remaining on the Material Plane: the unprecedented loophole exploit. His ascent was gradual, hidden, never named in court. The Empire's seven centuries are what one Wellspring-direct minor god, operating outside the Compact, can build in a single career.

His end. The Emperor was alive and active throughout the 1321 MR breach crisis. He coordinated the Imperial defence personally and began concentrating his power directly against the Corrupted God: the closest anything has come to a mortal-led counterattack on a divinity of that scale. The concentration worked locally and broke the Empire elsewhere: pulling his strength inward starved the periphery, cracks grew, and by 1325 MR the Empire had formally collapsed. He kept fighting in shrinking territory for years afterward. A rebellion party (the imperial fleet's own officers) eventually surprised him after a defensive engagement, in his weakened state, and killed him. The death should have routed his soul to Layer 3. It did not. At the moment of death he captured his own soul into a pocket dimension within Layer 2: same Wellspring-direct mechanism that had bypassed the Compact at his ascent, now applied to bypass the Postlife at his death. He has been in that pocket for roughly twelve hundred years, continuously seeking a path to resurrect.

Why the Grand Gods can't reverse-engineer the trick. Two reasons, both structural. First, they analyse divine events through the Law's framework, the Ethereal-Plane lattice that mediates god / Material-Plane interaction, and the Emperor's ascent operates outside that framework. Their diagnostic tooling is the wrong instrument for the question. Second, the population that can exploit the loophole is the population the thirteen cannot watch: surveilling Reflections en masse to study the mechanism would itself violate the Compact's prohibition on unchecked divine control of mortal lives.

Who knows. No living Reflection knows what they are. Across all of Talan and its veils, the people who know the full arc, Reflections, Stillpools, the Emperor's loophole, the Emperor's persistence in the Layer-2 pocket, number in the lower single digits. The Emperor himself, in his pocket, is one of them. The others are not who you would guess.

1321 MR · 2135 MR

The Dark Era & The Guild's Birth

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In 1321 MR, Golden Empire miners under the imperial capital, Hyseat, in the mountains of what is now the Red Dominion, breached something deep beneath the earth, a sealed place, old beyond reckoning. What emerged was the Corrupted God: not a deity of the Gods' Law, not bound by the Ethereal Compact, something older and something wrong. Its influence spread through the rock and soil like poison through water. Its spawn, countless, varied, relentless, erupted across Talan. By 1325 MR the Golden Empire had collapsed entirely, its infrastructure overwhelmed, its population shattered. The emperor's fleet sailed from Saegate, the Empire's sea-gate on the point, in 1321 with as many as it could carry; Saegate held, and a handful of the fleet's ships are in commission still, under the Red Dominion's Admiralty.

What followed was eight centuries of attrition. The Corrupted God's forces did not conquer, they hunted. Probed. Destroyed. Drove mortals apart and then eliminated them in isolation. Kingdoms fell. Populations dwindled. The 13 Bound Gods could not directly intervene; the Gods' Law held even in this crisis.

In this darkness, something unprecedented emerged. Not a king's army. Not a god's command. A group of people, adventurers, wanderers, soldiers without banners, began to resist. Not for coin, not for titles, but because their own conscience demanded it. They organized, slowly, across borders and nations. They became the Adventurers Guild.

The Guild grew from desperate resistance cells into a continent-spanning organization: the only institution on Talan with reach, resources, and the independent will to stand against the Corrupted God's tide. They did not answer to kings. They answered to the mission. In 2135 MR, a party of adventurers descended further than any before them and, working with what mortal forces remained and with Araphel's hand on the chain, bound the Corrupted God beneath the bones of the world. The binding was not a slaying, such a power is beyond mortal reach, but it was decisive: anchored by the Seven Wardstones forged at the close of the era, all of them placed within Araphel's domain of Myrkono. The spawn retreated. The darkness receded. The Wardstones still glow. For the full account of the Wardstones, the Nine Generals, and the ongoing War of Seals, see The Binding →.

◈ Mortal Chronicle · The Sage Lorant Account

Mortal histories of the deep past recount these centuries as the Age of Corruption. The most widely circulated account is the chronicle attributed to Sage Lorant of Highspire, 3rd Century After Binding: a text that has survived in dozens of copies and informs almost every village sermon on the binding to this day:

"There was a time when the earth itself seemed to rot beneath our feet. The god of Corruption, whom some name the Maw Below, others the Blightfather: rose from darkness and turned his gaze upon all mortal kind. Fields withered, rivers festered, the very beasts of forest and plain were twisted into horrors unfit for this world. Armies crumbled, cities drowned in plague. Yet a fellowship arose, champions whose names are etched in every tongue. They bore relics of light, rallied what hosts remained, and struck into the god's heart. They could not kill him, for such a power is beyond mortal reach, but they bound him in chains of divine law, sealed deep beneath the bones of the world. Thus ended the Age of Corruption, and so began the era of the adventurer, the age we live in today."

Maw Below and Blightfather are the folk-titles by which most mortals know the bound god. The closing line names the binding as the dawn of the Adventurer Era: the current age. The Adventurers Guild's founding-mythos status is baked into popular history, and Lorant's account is part of why: the fellowship that bound the god became the institution that still walks the continent.

⚿ Known to the Lower Single Digits

The 1321 MR breach was not an accident. The Golden Empire's miners weren't exploring; they were excavating to a known target. The Imperial mining programme of the late thirteen-hundreds was not commercial. It was directed by the Emperor himself, run through commercial cover, aimed at a site he had located through means no mortal expedition should have managed. The depth, the bearings, and the resource allocation were all his.

What he expected. A dormant power-cache: shards, residue, raw Wellspring-touched material at the scale his ascent needed to keep climbing the ladder. Fragments of pre-Crimson-Rain records implied something of unprecedented size sealed beneath the strata under Imperial mining country.

What he found. Not a power-cache. A terrible being of wrongness woke beneath the seal and attacked on sight: what mortals would come to call the Corrupted God. The Dark Era is the price of that miscalculation. The Sage Lorant chronicle above is mostly cover; the fellowship and the binding are real, the cause is not.

2135 MR · Present (2532 MR)

The Adventurer Era Current

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Four centuries of rebuilding, expansion, and uneasy opportunity. Kingdoms have risen in the ruins of the Dark Era, some rebuilt on old foundations, some entirely new, some assembled from conquered neighbors. The Adventurers Guild, no longer fighting for survival against a singular threat, has transformed: still independent, still outside government, but now a world-spanning institution of enormous soft power. It brokers contracts, maintains neutral ground, and quietly influences more political decisions than any king would like to admit.

For four centuries the threats of the Corrupted God were a steady background hum. Spawn still emerged from deep places. Old ruins still harbored things that should not have survived. But the work was contained and almost routine, the Guild knew the protocols, border villages knew the signs. The world was alive again: trading, scheming, building, exploring.

That changed in 2524 MR. Overnight, nine colossal subterranean fortresses: the Nine Dungeons, tore open pathways into the mortal world. From them came the first great corruption armies in four centuries, led not by mindless hunger but by purpose: each dungeon was commanded by one of the Nine Generals of Corruption, lieutenant-vessels wrought from the bound god's power. The kingdoms united, the Guild rallied, and the first wave was broken. The main entrances were sealed with wards, stone, and sacrifice. One General has fallen: the Ash-Binder, in a campaign now reckoned the closest thing the modern age has to a founding heroism. Eight remain.

The Adventurer Era did not end. It changed shape. Smaller leakage continues; the Guild's research operation has shifted from emergence prediction to siege management; border towns plague-rot from below. The Wardstones still glow. For now. See The Binding → for the seven stones, the Nine Generals, and the doctrine of the War of Seals.

It is a time of genuine opportunity and genuine danger in equal measure. History is being made by anyone willing to reach for it, and by some who would rather it were not.

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The Tongues of Talan

Talan has had three masters, and each left its tongue on the map. The Elden held the continent for three thousand years and named its ground in the Silent Tongue. The gods ruled after them as kings, landlords and law, and named in the Court Tongue. The Golden Empire carried Imperial Dwarvish across seven tenths of the continent, and Talanese grew on its spine. A chronicler who dates a hall or a road by the sound of its name is usually right.

The two old tongues. Folk say the old tongue for both; scholars keep them apart. The Silent Tongue lives in names and ruin-inscriptions and nowhere else. Its meaning went with the Elden, though the peoples who had lived under them went on using its words for a time after the vanishing, until the gods' speech took over. The Court Tongue is the speech the gods ruled Talan in. The gods themselves speak every tongue, and a prayer reaches its god in whatever language it is prayed; the Court Tongue was their speech on Talan, and old and holy things were named in it across the whole continent. Two communities still speak it as their own: the River Houses of Sugeiturri, who kept the gods' rivers before mortals took them at the Rain, and the druid tribes of the Basogur. It is also the holy tongue of the bound thirteen's clergy, carried in their rites, and the sanctums bear it: Igarbe, Zutarri, Urbarren.

Reading an old name. A Silent-Tongue name is Elden ground that outlasted its namers, and a domain named in it is ground its god kept: Vindul, Floteyn, Lioaru. A Court-Tongue name was given by the gods: Ehizahar, the oldest name on Talan. A name in both is Elden ground the gods renamed and half kept: Brauogi, the bread named twice over, and Myrkono. The Storveldi Denbora wore both, a word from each on one people, a claim to Elden descent made in language.

⚿ Words of the Bound

The Elden became the Corrupted God (see the Elden Era → GM Secret above). Every Silent-Tongue name on the map is a word in the tongue of the thing bound beneath the world. Scholars who tell the two old tongues apart credit the Silent Tongue to the Elden from ruin-inscriptions, and stop there.

Talanese. The common tongue grew in the Golden Era as a braid: Imperial Dwarvish's spine, with each region's own words woven through it. It is a second tongue nearly everywhere and the first one in a few places: where a land was emptied and refilled by many peoples, as in Brauogi's reclaimed basin, and where strangers gather from everywhere, as in Frae City and Rika Tikur. Imperial Dwarvish itself is read by scholars and spoken by no one. Its sister, Old Dwarvish, the older speech of the southern mountain dwarves, survives as the Order of Steam's antique register.

The families. Beneath Talanese, every region speaks its own tongue, and the tongues fall into families. Kin tongues share their roots, and the nearer the kin, the more of a neighbour's speech a traveller catches. A tongue belongs to a place and the culture raised there: a kitsune raised in Merkavar speaks Merkavar's tongue, and anyone raised in Emarrea speaks Emarrea's. Families follow the ground and its history, never the god-domains, so Zuzental holds four, and the northern tongues cross from Vindul into Brauogi.

Family	Where it is spoken
The imperial dwarven tongues	The Thousand Kingdom's spine; Kaosadaemi. Imperial Dwarvish's living kin; the Thousand braids them with its inner-sea speech.
The southern dwarven tongues	The Order of Steam; the drifting isles of Floteyn, where every docking is a new dialect. Old Dwarvish's line.
The inner-sea tongues	Legea; the Thousand's older layer; Namur; Harro Distiratsua, Lua Lasai and Argia Esfera. Sisters from a root older than the Rain.
The jungle-edge tongues	Vernua; Nahaskel. The east's oldest family, pressed back against the Basogur.
The Lautaran tongues	Emarrea's Kotokoe; Itsasalda, Merkavar, Azkataria, Atarialda and the Dreaming Cape. One family across the commerce country, each region with a sound of its own.
The Ezkudon tongue	Jakinduria and Thekkavar; the Golden Coast. One tongue with deep dialects, meeting the Lautaran on Azkataria's coffee-house floor.
The tongues of the south-western sands	Hareaveldi (Sokhan); the Lost Kingdom, whose form, Hizva, is the oldest.
The whale-tongues	Galdua Jendea and Valreka (Awal); the River Duchies (Ameslay, the sister the returners brought down).
The mountain tongues of Sumendar	Tahu Tangata (Reahi); Haraour Eliza (Leowai, a Hawaiian sound); the Red Dominion (Folau, a Tongan sound); Burdineyja, on both its seas.
The Reach-tongue	Dragon's Reach. Kin to nothing on Talan: the Dragons came from beyond the world.
The clan tongues	Villtur, where grass, snow and jungle-edge clans each sound their own; Veidrath's common speech; Ardo Beroa; Fenurra. The largest family the Empire never ruled.
The northern tongues	Baerfrost; Haizetsua; Haldmark; Fellibylur; Haizava.
The Myrkonan tongues	Ilun Tasun; Itzasoa; Izarelai; Three Pines; Tvisol.
The island tongues of Askamira	Maitagarri; Basamortua; Dea Elurra. The island's own people, there before Frae City.
Tongues of their own	The Anadi and the Vanara of the Basogur; the Order of Law; the Elkaride of Hirubaso, whose Grove Tongue is taught only within the order; the Wildreach, whose speech the Feyworld touches and no family claims.
Talanese at home	Brauogi's reclaimed ground and Lurrath; the Emerald Isles; Rika Tikur; No Man's Land; Eldara; Frae City.
The Court Tongue, still spoken	Sugeiturri; the druid tribes of the Basogur.

Each god-city speaks its host region's tongue and keeps a naming of its own, and Hringseyja is split along the Quietline, Lautaran on one half and Legean on the other.

What every tongue carries. Every tongue carries words lent by its neighbours and its trade. Everywhere the Golden Empire ruled, the old tongue also carries the Empire's own words, Talanese and Imperial, in its names and trades, deepest where the Empire held longest. Never-held ground carries the least, in Ehizahar, the Basogur, Baerfrost and Zuzental's far east, and a traveller with an ear can hear whether a place was ever Imperial.

The strangest entry on the family map is in that far east. The Thousand Kingdom, which the Empire did not hold at its height, speaks the living tongue nearest to Imperial Dwarvish, and its legal Talanese is the closest of all the dialects to the Imperial original. The chronicles leave it unexplained.

⚿ Known to the Lower Single Digits

The Empire began on the Emerald Isles. The record says it rose from the southern heartlands, and for most of its life it did rule from there; it was born elsewhere.

The cradle. The Isle dwarves, who reached the Emerald Isles in the Elden or Gods' Era, founded the Empire on the islands. The Emperor's Stillpool on the southern foothills of the imperial heartland is on the Southern Isle, the island the modern kingdom calls its founding bough. The Isle dwarves took the Thousand first and fully, laying their tongue over its native inner-sea speech, which is why the Thousand's tongue is a braid and its legal Talanese the nearest to the Imperial original, and Kaosadaemi second.

The throne moved south. As the Empire grew, the dynasty moved its capital into Sumendar's dwarven mountains, to the mines and the southern dwarves of the Old Dwarvish line, and ruled from there for centuries; the capital is Hyseat, now the sealed city in the Red Dominion's northern mountains. So the record remembers the Empire rising from the south, and the archives that would correct it did not survive the Dark Era's first decade. Beyond its first conquests the Empire spread by leaving local rule largely intact.

The cradle's mainland broke away early. By the Empire's peak the Thousand had shattered into the fractious kingdoms of Zuzental's far east, the thousand polities the Old King later hammered together. The Isles stayed crown land under direct rule, and after 1321 MR they fell hardest: with no vassal to hold them, they collapsed with the Emperor and emptied. The modern Emerald Isles kingdom was refounded on the Southern Isle without knowing whose cradle it was, and its Talanese is the imperial tongue's direct daughter at its birthplace.

Before the Rain. Families were spoken on Talan long before the Crimson Rain: the inner-sea tongues' root, the jungle-edge tongues in the east, and an old tongue of the south-western sands, where the Storveldi Denbora rose. Scholars argue over a likeness between fragments recovered from the Blackened Lands and the speech of Hareaveldi, and the argument has never been settled.

⚿ Lost to the Record, Alive on the Ground

The likeness is descent. The tongues of the south-western sands came from the Storveldi Denbora's own speech, the tongue of their homeland beneath the two old tongues they dressed themselves in. The Nagaji of Hareaveldi speak its daughter, and its oldest form survives in the Blackened Lands as Hizva, the tongue of Ida, coming back to the risen through the memories in the bones they got up in. The Storveldi tongue is lost to the chronicle record and alive on the ground.