Each mayor religion has its own version of the true beginnings of Sergetti. Regardless of the particulars, all versions agree that the First God was Ardalon. For eons he lived by himself in a place where Fire, Water, Air and Earth mixed into perfection. Yet one day, Kaggain became curious… What would happen was he to take away one or more of the elements he controlled? He hid all but Fire and breathed life into it, and soon two boys sprang to life. Amdal and Soraga, but they only thought of playing, and soon, the Elder God tired of their company. He then attempted to breathe life into air, bringing forth a young girl, Hidora. Quiet and circumspect, she made for a poor companion as well, so Ardalon told her to go play with her brothers. Other gods did Ardalon create in the early days: Zathras, Valnator, Sorn and Ulven, but soon again Ardalon grew bored with them and decided to leave them be.
While the First continued experimenting with the elements, Amdal and Soraga played with each other, chasing one another in an endless circle while pretending to be great warriors. In their haste, the twins hurt their sister, Hidora, causing her to bleed. To save her, Soraga gave Hidora of his own life force, becoming smaller and dim, but healing Hidora’s wound. At the same time, Hidora grew in size and radiance. Amdal, to make amends as well, gave Hidora a ring and some pearls as a way to ask forgiveness. The Twins still chase each other, but now never come near Hidora, for they might hurt their sister again.
It was Hidora’s blood that gave life to one of the pearls. Once the blood touched the pearl, a multitude of trees sprang from the soil, and smaller animals began to move about. Interested, Hidora decided to keep the living pearl near her.
The years passed, and Hidora grew more and more interested in her pearl. One day she went to her father, Ardalon, and asked him to breathe fire into some of the creatures. Most of these creatures died. But one species managed to learn from the fire, making it a tool, and with this start, they grew in cunning and knowledge.
What they called themselves is unknown. We refer to them as the Firstborn. What they looked like, or the records of their history are long since lost. The only certain thing is that they are our ancestors… and troubling as it may be, they were the Illithid’s ancestor, and for that matter, the ancestors of every other species that now lives on Sergetti.
The Firstborn were cunning and curious... Dangerously so. They eventually discovered the arcane, and the knowledge of how to manipulate the fabric that binds our universe together. Their tampering with these energies inadvertently gave life to another god, Asgaroth, Lord of Knowledge, who sprang forth from Ardalon himself, or rather, from the curious nature of the ancient god. His thirst for knowledge gone, the Elder god never again attempted to create or breathe life into new gods.
With the knowledge of the Arcane, the Firstborn began to experiment on themselves, trying to better their kind in all ways physical and mental. Not all the Firstborn had the same ideas about what constituted an improvement, however, and soon some Firstborn were so different from their brothers that they could hardly recognize each other.
As the differences between the Firstborn grew, various groups became hostile to one another and, soon, the fighting had begun. The magics used in their battles are beyond description, but it is believed that the Storm’s Eye and the Sea of Blue Sand are but two byproducts of their war. Who won the firstborn war is pure speculation, but it is believed that those who would become Dragons ended ahead of the rest, and chose to leave the other races be, preferring solitude.
Those that survived the Firstborn’s war were called the Secondborn. They had lost most of the knowledge of their ancestors. We, the races that now walk this land are the Second Born, and difficult as it may be to believe, we are brothers with all other sentient life on Sergetti… From Dragons to Beholders to Halflings, we all came from the same common ancestor. Even some of the worst Aberrations known to exist, like Oozes or Fungi are descendants of the Firstborn.
It was maybe 5.000 years ago when one of the worst races to come after the Firstborn showed themselves. The Illithids… or Mind Flayers if you prefer the more common name. They had hidden themselves in the deepest caves of the Shield to escape the ravages of the Firstborn war, and returned eons later, wielding magics of a new kind, one that seemed to stem directly from the mind. How they came to this knowledge remains myth and mystery. What’s important is that they used this new magic, and powerful artifacts called a Darklight Crystal to darken the skies and shield themselves from arcane magic.
Some races chose, foolishly, to join the Illithids in their crusade as they spread a continual True Night and enslaved any that did not submit to their rule. Only the Dragons managed to remain largely free of their domination, but their reduced numbers, and their generally isolationist attitude kept them away from the fray.
For the next 3600 years, the Illithid ruled the land, the other races slave to their every whim. It was then, however, when a boy called Gerome Jozen discovered yet another kind of magic, one that could bypass the Darklight Crystal's magic-negating field. Some say that Asgaroth himself gave Jozen this knowledge. Others speculate that it was the god of War, Zathras that answered Jozen’s cry. Whatever the case, the new Divine Magic, had it’s foundation on faith, not knowledge, so it was a difficult concept to grasp for a people used to knowledge providing the way.
Jozen led a battle against a group of Illithids near Mount Irellia, ambushing the Flayers and freeing enough slaves from various races, that the ragtag group could hope to stand against the Illithids for a while. They eventually retired to the Sea of Blue Sand, where Jozen taught his followers about divine magic, and soon many among their numbers had found faith strong enough to cast divine magic of some type, although not necesarilly from the same god.
With their newfound weapon, the slave races had something to wield against the Illithids, and eventually organized a full scale rebellion against their would be masters. Decadent after nearly four millenia of complacency, the Flayers were not prepared for such a massive revolt... especially not one that could wield magic of a kind they had never seen before. Soon other priests started appearing among the slave races. Faith and belief became a way of life, one that would eventually guide the races to their freedom from the Brain Devourers... but one that would have dire consecuences later in history.
In SY -175, clerics of Amdal & Soraga won a momentous battle against the Brain Devourers near the Celestial Waterfall, in what would eventually become the Starfall Reaches. With the destruction of a Darklight Crystal, the permanent dark shroud that covered the world seemed to lift a little, and finally gave the Slave Races an idea of how to conduct their war against the Illithids: destruction of the Crystals would force the Flayers back into the underground caves from which they spawned.
During the war, as other Darklight Crystals were destroyed, the Slave races’ capacity to use arcane magic returned to them in gradual steps. Carefully preserved tomes were rediscovered and little by little, arcane mages started making their presence felt in the war. Eventually, in SY -25, the last Darklight Crystals was destroyed, and like a river that had been kept at bay by a dam for nearly 4000 years, arcane magic returned like a flashflood inundating the world. Some beings began to show an incredible aptitude for arcane magic, as though they had absorbed more of the very magic that now rushed through the world into them. These beings are now called Sorcerors.
Thus, after two hundred years of fighting, the Illithid were driven back into the deepest caves of the Shield mountains. Jozen’s Grandson, Veldrin, was chosen to lead the now free peoples of Sergetti. He declared the new year a new age for Sergetti and the Year was renamed SY 1, the year of Freedom. He named his Empire after the tallest mountain in the Spear mountain range, Irelia, and himself the Empire’s first Imperator. His line has ruled over the Irelian Empire for 1200 years.
In SY 402 a group of wizards, members of the Imperial Order, broke away from their parent organization, protesting against the Empire’s treatment of them as second class citizens because of the natural suspicions the common man felt against wizards in general. They moved to the newly colonized region of Sanadir, and with the backing of disenfranchised nobles, declared themselves outside the Empire’s jurisdiction.
Emperor Jullianne Jozen’s heavy-handed response caused a wave of protests from members of the Zathrasian clergy that considered military actions against peasants in response to the threat of Wizards and some nobles to be dishonorable. These outcries were especially loud in the Province of Thaur, and was the catalyst for a schism in the Zathrasian church. When the Commanding General of the church didn't try to stop the massacre, these priests joined the mages in rebellion against the Empire. The resulting conflict was short, but bloody and furious. In the end, the combined might of the Thauran and Sanadiran provinces, and the weight of the church of Meldor, the 'new' God of War, were enough to stop the advance of the 4th Imperial Legion sent to retake the rebel colonies.
In early SY 403, Jullianne was deposed in a military coup, and his brother Micha was elevated to the Imperial throne. Growing troubles in the outer reaches, the sea of blue sand and the northern lands drove the new Emperor to sue for peace, and in the 40th of the tenth month, the Empire acknoledged the Thauran Theocracy and the Magocracy of Sanadir as free states.
Angered by what appeared to be the betrayal of those that died on the Sanadiran and Thauran plains, groups of soldiers and priests within the Imperial Army spoke against Micha's decision to sue for peace, and thus the Empire stood at the brink of civil war. Several factions raised against the Emperor’s rule, only to be clobbered back into the ground by the elite Imperial Guard Regiments.
In SY 410, priests of Zathras broke from the church’s main body. Many imperial soldiers that felt betrayed by the Emperor’s decision to grant freedom to the 'wayward colonists' joined the 'renegade' priests. Among these, was Lord Admiral Gallan Saer’el, Duke of Ironhold and commander of the Southern Fleets that covered the sea of ice. Using his influence, he convinced the majority of the vessels of the Hailstorm Fleet to join the priests and break away from the Empire since they couldn’t hope to defeat the fiercely loyal Imperial Guards. He planned and executed an exodus of soldiers towards a region of Sergetti known as the Outer Reaches... A vast and fertile lowlands that extended north of the Magocracy, and south of the Shield Mountain Range.
Those who wished to leave did so under the cover of the True Night. Emperor Jozen did little to stop them from leaving, since they were the ones feeding the fires of civil war and chaos, and once they left, the tensions within the Empire calmed down.
The priests that left with Admiral Saer’el during the second Schism formed a new church, dedicated to the 'true' God of War, Hertes. The division of the Zathrasian church in three distinct sects, with slightly different views and ethos has made many wizards believe that the gods may be nothing more than extremely powerful beings, as fickle as any mortal. It was this point of view that eventually sparked the first Cleric-Mage war.
In SY 682, Archmage Falthon Xanadir, a member of the Circle, published his treatise on cosmology "Of gods, mortals and magic". The book’s overall theory is that the gods were either limited in power, or that they jealously limited the powers of their own priests. Xanadir concluded his magnum opus stating that, by all rights, the gods were little more than uber-powerful mages, that used the blindness of those incapable of original thought as their playthings.
Many after-war historians point out, not without some cynicism, that the Archmage’s wife, Leonnore of Xanadir, had died 4 years previous and that none of the churches he petitioned were able to bring her back to life. If this sparked the Archmage to write the book remains guesswork, though the almost unanimous belief is that it did.
The tome caused a whirlwind of outraged protests among many churches, except, notably, the Church of Asgaroth, whose priests studied in all detail the proposed theories of Archmage Xanadir, and then pronounced them as an 'internally consistent theory'
Other churches were not as gracious. The Hertesian priests took great offense from the book, and demanded an official apology from the Magocracy’s Council, the burning of all the tomes and the expulsion of Xanadir from the governing body of that nation. When the Magocracy refused, the Kingdom of Saer’el attacked, ostensibly to repay the affront made to the kingdom’s official religion. More likely, the campaign of aggression was launched to gain badly needed territory.
The Wizards counterattacked and during 10 years skirmishes were fought everywhere along the Magocracy-Kingdom border. During one such skirmish at the intersection of the Magocracy-Kingodm-Empire border, an overzealous MageKnight launched a magical attack on members of what he believed were the 3rd Royal Dragoons. The soldiers where, in fact, members of the 1st Imperial Legion. The Empire, long since recovered from their weakness of centuries ago, and always looking to test their mettle in a fight, declared war to the Magocracy over the incident.
Suddenly faced with a new and very powerful enemy that outnumbered them, the mages did what little they could. Shortsighted by their desperation, they bagan summoning all manner of outsiders to bolster their waning ranks. The move succeeded in stopping their enemies’ assault. But also caused great devastation across all the land, particularly when the Magocracy-bound Tannar’ri battled their hated foes, the Baatezu, summoned by the Clerics of either the Empire or the Kingdom.
In SY 698, the Theocracy entered the war, declaring war against both the Magocracy and the Empire. They had seen the devastation brought forth by the fiends, genies and other outsiders brought to fight, and feared, quite reasonably, that the war would soon extend to their borders. Forced into a sudden three-way war, all parties sued for peace soon after, and in late SY 699 the First Cleric-Mage war ended. No winner could be declared, but the Thauran Theocracy undoubtedly suffered the fewest losses. Curiously, however, 'Of gods, mortals and magic' remains a very looked after book, and has become obligatory reading for novice acolytes of the Asgarothian church.
During the war, many refugees had left the Magocracy and the Kingdom, fleeing from the war. Most went to the Empire, and later, when the Irelian Empire entered the war, into the Thauran Theocracy. Soon, the sheer number of refugees strained the resources of the Theocracy, who couldn’t produce enough food by itself to feed so many people.
When it became evident that the Theocracy would enter the war as well, many of these refugees did the only thing they could. Like Gallan Saer’el did centuries ago, they prepared a fleet to leave the Theocracy.
They left in SY 709 under the cover of the True Night and eventually settled a group of islands two hundred miles off the Thauran coast. Not all ships that left the Theocracy are account for, however. It is possible that some of the ships were lost during the trip, or that they separated from the main group and settled elsewhere. That another, unknown, culture grows beyond the explored seas is a distinct possibility.
In SY 985, the Kingdom of Saer’el decided that since most of the refugees that eventually founded the Starfall Reaches came from the Kingdom of Saer’el, that the Reaches was nothing but a colony of the Kingdom, and demanded the payment of taxes. The Starfall’s refusal sparked an attempted invasion of the Isles by the kingdom. Aided by the Magocracy, the Starfall Reaches easily deflected at least two separate invasion fleets.
The Magocracy’s aid of the Starfall Reaches caused a lot of tension between Kingdom of Saer’el and the Magocracy of Sanadir. Tensions grew steadily for many years, until, in SY 1107, fearing a repeat of the old war, priests of the twin brothers tried to mediate an end to the conflict. When both sides refused any kind of third party intervention, Priests of the Amdal sect petitioned the governing body of the Theocracy to impose economic sanctions to both countries to 'force them to see reason'. Since most of the foodstuff and cattle of the Magocracy had to be imported from the Reaches or the Empire, the proposed embargo caused a spark of fear among the social and economic elite of the Magocracy.
Without declaration of war of any type, the wizards struck the Theocracy, sending into that realm’s territories no less than 4 divisions of MageKnights, backed by all the magical might of a country led by Wizards and Sorcerors. Caught by surprise, the standing Theocratic army was easily routed. Not even the vaunted Azure Crusaders managed to stop the invaders. The invader's edge came from a surprising new weapon, the like of which had never been seen: Smokepowder Muskets.
At the same time, the Kingdom of Saer’el saw this as an opportunity to repay old debts to the Magocracy, but didn’t expect that the Starfall Reaches had already entered into an alliance with the Magocracy. The Reaches' Pearl Spear Fleet started blocking the Kingdom’s most important port cities, including the capital, Saer’el Dalaam. These actions gave the Magocracy the time it needed to shift some of its troops to the new front, and with the aid of the 1st Starfall Expeditionary Force, managed to blunt the Kingdom’s assault and even stage a counter invasion of their own. This, however, finally gave the Theocracy the chance to stop the Magocratic juggernaut that had trampled their forces, stopping them along the Stillwater riverside.
Imperator Sigard Jozen had watched from the safety of his palace in Dehra Dün how the other powers of the region fought for territory once again. Not willing to risk his own territory, he decided to reinforce his own border garrisons with barbarian mercenaries hired from among the desert-dwellers of the east. At the same time, he sent an invasion fleet, protected by the northern Stormstrike fleet to attack the Kingdom of Saer’el from the back. They invaded in SY 1204, after moving quietly along the Inner Sea, quickly established a beachhead, and spearheaded an attack with a mere 6000 troops. Many towns in the far north, including Ganarlan soon fell under the power of the empire.
At first, the Kingdom was unconcerned about this small attack on its rear, and sent a division of troops to deal with the invaders, while keeping the majority of its best Dragoons and Cavaliers to handle the Magocracy/Reaches forces. However, when the 7th Royal Dragoons discovered that the invaders were, in fact, the Imperial Guards... the best troops in the empire, fanatically loyal to the Imperator, King Gallan Saer’el VI lost his composture.
Outnumbered in the south and outclassed in the north, he chose to abandon the northern provinces to their luck, while, at the same time, he started using divine magic to bring back to life soldiers whose souls had already finished their journey through the flow of the dead. He unleashed the first Undead on the northern provinces and the Imperial attackers. Forced to fight as many as ten times their numbers, the Imperial Guards retreated when Richard Jozen himself was slain in battle against a mysterious, life draining undead.
Meanwhile, the Magocracy's troops continued pushing northward, until the managed to conquer the rich Palvian Province, border between the Empire and the Kingdom, granting the Magocracy an entry point to the Storm's Eye sea.
The war stopped in SY 1205 from sheer exhaustion of all parties involved. The territorial gains of the Magocracy were offset by the higher casualties that country suffered. In SY 1207, 100 years after the war began, various cities of the northern provinces declared themselves free from the Kingdom of Saer’el, which quite clearly, didn’t care about them.
Dessert dwellers from the Sea of Blue Sand have begun to appear in greater numbers in the southern highlands of the Empire. Apparently having seen the, to them, heavenly lands of the west, some do not want to return to the harsh desert of the east.
The Freelands, as the cities that broke from the Kingdom call themselves, are still fighting a war against the Undead plague. The port city of Gomeinas, in the Storm’s eye coast, has become the point of entry to this new land, and the place to hire mercenaries.
Suddenly faced with protecting a larger territory than they effectively can with their reduced troops, the Magocracy of Sanadir has started to attempt rapprochement with the Southern Theocracy, aided in part by their Starfall Reaches allies, which have good relations with the clerics.
Rumor has it that the Empire has been under attack from the inner sea by unknown peoples. It is rumored that a lost tribe of Firstborn is attacking the Empire from under the seas.
Explorers from the Starfall Reaches’ Jade Flag Fleet have discovered an island 600 Kilometers south of Sergetti. Completely covered in snow and ice, the new island baptized Ice Hell, is rumored to be dominated by gigantic creatures with lava for blood.
