The Chronicle of Tormya

As written down by the priests of the Temple of Dawn, copied and kept in every temple of the realm.

I. The First Dawn

Before there were kingdoms, there was only the Aethal - the living light that flows beneath the earth like water beneath ice. Where it rose to the surface the land grew green, rivers found their way to the sea and the first peoples woke under an open sky. The elves were the first to learn its song. They raised the stone circles that still stand on the hills, and in the Golden Woods of the far east they built temples of white stone, where the Aethal shone so brightly that the leaves never forgot the colour of autumn.

For a thousand years the elves kept the light. Then they grew few and quiet, and one by one their temples fell silent. Their ruins remain - overgrown, guarded by things that were once their servants - and scholars still argue over where the elves went. The captains of Silver Bay say simply: "West, over the sea. And they are not coming back."

II. The Age of Crowns

Humans came later, in boats from the south. They settled the green Heartlands between the mountains and founded a city at the meeting of three roads. They called it Crownhold - the seat of the crown - and its first king, Aldren the Builder, swore to guard the Aethal as the elves had. The kingdom that grew around the city took the name Tormya. For six generations the Crown kept that promise. Roads were paved, the harbour of Gullhaven was dug out of the cliffs, and the fortress of Frostwatch was raised in the north to watch the ice.

In the west, beyond the dunes, the kingdom of the Sun Pharaohs rose at the same time. The Pharaohs did not guard the light - they drank it. Their last and greatest ruler built a pyramid over the deepest spring of the Aethal in the desert and had himself sealed inside it, alive, so that he would never die. The desert people say he still waits there, and that the scarabs in the sand are his eyes. The gate city of Sandgate was built by the Crown to make sure nothing ever walks out of that tomb again.

III. The Fall of Varnhal

South of the capital stood Varnhal, the richest city of the Heartlands, ruled by the mage-lords of House Varn. They were the first humans to learn what the Pharaoh had learned: that the Aethal can be bent. They dug beneath their city, deeper every year, until they broke into the old dark under the world - the place where the light does not reach and where something had been waiting for a very long time.

No one knows exactly what happened on the Night of Ash. The chronicles say the ground opened, the towers burned with black fire and the dead of Varnhal stood up again before morning. The city was lost. The survivors fled south and built a small walled town on the plain, facing east, so that every morning they would see the sun rise over the ruins - Dawnhold. The Temple of Dawn was founded there, and to this day its priests watch the Ruins of Varnhal and the crypt beneath them, where the restless dead still walk.

IV. The Dragon Years

What the lords of Varnhal woke did not stay underground. The old dark reached up through the roots of the Dragon Isle, the volcano in the southern sea, and the dragons that had slept there since the First Dawn woke hungry. For forty years the Dragon King and his brood burned the coasts. The Misty Marshes were once farmland; the ash of the Dragon Years made them a swamp. In the far north the Ice Dragon covered the Frostlands in winter that never ended, and the yetis and frost trolls came down from the glaciers.

The war ended not with victory, but with a bargain. Queen Maerin of Tormya sealed the volcano's lower caves with the last great working of the Aethal, and the dragons withdrew to their island. But the priests warn that the seal was made over a door, not over a wall - and that beneath the dragons' lair lies the Abyss, where the Demon Lord gathers what was freed on the Night of Ash.

V. The Long Peace

A hundred and twenty years of quiet followed. Tormya grew rich on trade; Gullhaven filled with ships; the coachmen's roads connected every town of the old continent. The kingdom forgot. The goblins of the Goblin Caves, the orcs of the northern hills, the trolls of the old mines and the bandits of the forest were a nuisance for the guards, nothing more. The Pharaoh slept, the Dragon King slept, and in Dawnhold the priests grew old telling stories nobody wanted to hear.

VI. The Eastern Reaches

Thirty years ago a Gullhaven captain named Isolde Varr sailed further east than anyone before her, around the storms off the eastern cape, and found a new land: the Eastern Reaches. Windswept Highlands full of cyclopes and hill trolls. The Golden Woods with their elven ruins and giant spiders. The steaming Jungle of Echoes with its lost temple, and the Crystal Valley, where the Aethal breaks through the ground as living stone. On the western shore of that land the settlers built Silver Bay, today the richest and wildest port of the realm.

South of the Reaches lies the Southern Archipelago: the Pirate Island, where the Pirate King rules the smugglers of the southern sea, and the distant Emerald Isle, where no settler has lived longer than a season. Old lighthouses and shipwrecks mark the dangerous waters in between.

VII. The Waking - Now

This year the signs have returned. The dead walk again in Varnhal. The goblins have found a chieftain and the orcs a warlord. Ships from the south report smoke over the Dragon Isle, and in Frostwatch the guards swear they have heard the Ice Dragon breathing under the glacier. In the east the spiders of the Golden Woods have grown to the size of horses, and something in the Jungle of Echoes has begun to call the beasts to the old temple.

The Crown has sent out a call: every sword, bow and staff that can be raised is needed. You arrive in Dawnhold as one of those who answered it - a Warden, a Ranger, an Elementalist, a Shaman or a Shadowbinder, with nothing but a starting weapon and a name that nobody knows yet.

What happens next is not written in any chronicle. That part of the story is yours.

Timeline

~ -3000	The First Dawn. The elves raise the stone circles and the temples of the Golden Woods.
~ -1200	Humans land in the south. King Aldren founds Crownhold, the heart of Tormya.
~ -900	The last Sun Pharaoh is sealed in his pyramid. Sandgate is built.
-212	The Night of Ash - Varnhal falls. Dawnhold and the Temple of Dawn are founded.
-190 to -150	The Dragon Years. The Marshes and the Frostlands are born. Queen Maerin seals the volcano.
-150 to 0	The Long Peace. Roads, trade and the harbour of Gullhaven.
-30	Captain Isolde Varr discovers the Eastern Reaches. Silver Bay is founded.
0	The Waking. The Crown calls for heroes - and you arrive in Dawnhold.