History & Timeline
"Every age ends in catastrophe, every catastrophe births a new age"
Journey through the complete chronicle of Arcadia, where divine love becomes cosmic catastrophe and mortal hope persists despite overwhelming darkness. Witness the tragic cycle that transforms paradise into wasteland, again and again, as gods and mortals struggle to coexist in a universe too small for infinite love.
The River of First Light
In the primordial location where reality first took shape, the divine creators forged the mortal races from responsive clay beside cosmic waters that ran with color between dawn and dream. This celestial river flowed with unnamed hues—somewhere between hope and memory—where the boundary between potential and actualization was thinnest.
The Divine Creators
Here, consciousness could be breathed into waiting matter as the gods shaped their children: Thainos created Humans, Archadeus created the Beastmen races, Leika created the Nature Spirits, Libros created Angels, and Atonia created the Elves. Each race bore the mark of their creator's nature, embedding within mortal forms the capacity for both profound love and devastating cruelty.
The Age of Open Divine Presence
The First Gods ruled from their celestial thrones, maintaining the sacred distance they believed essential between divine and mortal realms. Occasionally, they would walk the material plane in disguise, observing their creations while preserving cosmic hierarchy. Contact with mortals occurred primarily through chosen seers and sacred intermediaries.
Distant Divine Governance
This era represented divine rule through cosmic law rather than direct intervention. The gods maintained their heavenly duties while monitoring mortal affairs from above. Supernatural guidance came through visions, omens, and carefully chosen prophets who could safely channel divine communication without risking the corruption that direct contact might bring.
The Quenos Catastrophe
The coastal village of Quenos became ground zero for divine tragedy when the eternal curse binding Elodias (god of moon and tides) and Senia (goddess of sun and life) reached its devastating climax. Cursed by the obsessed seer Malritha, Senia was condemned to endless reincarnation as a mortal who dies within seven days of remembering her divine nature.
The Eternal Cycle
Each time Senia remembered her true identity, her mortal form would dissolve into light, triggering Elodias's cosmic grief. His overwhelming sorrow manifested as supernatural storms that lasted three days, fundamentally reshaping the coastline and destroying the lower village entirely. Survivors rebuilt further inland, renaming their home Atheria—"carried from the sea"—and developed protective rituals without understanding their divine origins.
The Guardian Angel System
Under Azrael's command, a sophisticated protective hierarchy was established to prevent divine exploitation of mortals while maintaining beneficial contact between realms. This system successfully regulated divine-mortal interactions through threat assessment networks, intervention hierarchies, and consent verification protocols.
The System's Breakdown
Angels underwent extensive preparation for protective roles, learning to manifest strength precisely without excess. However, when Azrael was exiled from the divine courts, the Guardian Angel System began to collapse, creating the very vulnerability that would lead desperate gods to attempt the direct intervention that shattered reality itself.
The Wild Gods Catastrophe
Following Thainos's example—despite his murder after a thousand-year quest—increasing numbers of gods began living among mortals, believing divine-mortal coexistence was possible. This idealistic movement led to cascading disasters as mortals repeatedly harmed the gods who trusted them, while divine-mortal crossbreeding created hybrid children whose uncontrolled power devastated entire communities.
The Cascade of Divine Victimization
Gods who walked among mortals faced systematic betrayal: Thainos murdered and left to die on a dead tree, Elodias and Senia cursed by the obsessed seer Malritha, Azrael demonized despite his protective service, Khali murdered in cold blood. Simultaneously, divine-mortal crossbreeding produced hybrid children—the Haelim, Vaelari, and Baelak—whose divine heritage made them living weapons unable to control their emotions or power, destroying villages in fits of uncontrolled rage and devastating the very communities the gods sought to protect.
The Divine Wars
The philosophical conflict between the First Gods and Wild Gods erupted into cosmic civil war that threatened to unmake existence itself. Divine beings abandoned their heavenly duties to fight, creating a fundamental crisis of cosmic governance as traditionalists battled progressives across multiple realms of reality.
Silas's Dangerous Gambit
Silas The Trickster God warned the First Gods that their refusal to intervene in the systematic rape and murder of mortals by other gods would force the universe to seek balance—perhaps manifesting something powerful enough to kill gods. When the First Gods dismissed his warning and refused to act, the very next day Silas conducted a fateful experiment: making mortals consume divine blood to create potential god-killers. His creation of the first Bloodmarked proved his threat correct—they could indeed harm gods—but the power backfired catastrophically as mortals didn't understand the constraints, rules, and limitations of their new nature. Forever prone to corruption, the Bloodmarked became crazed from power they couldn't control, turning against their own people rather than their divine oppressors.
The Great Withdrawal
The surviving Wild Gods, recognizing the catastrophic consequences of their direct intervention, withdrew to the deep places of the world—caves that echo with unspoken words, forests where no mortal foot has trod for millennia. They made themselves into living tombs, conscious and aware but forever separate, forever silent.
The Ultimate Sacrifice
This withdrawal was not abandonment but the greatest act of love possible—divine beings choosing conscious isolation over the catastrophic affection that nearly unmade existence. Their silence became the invisible foundation upon which all mortal life depends, a truth too dangerous to ever speak aloud.
The Era of Suppression
Authorities began systematic efforts to erase evidence of divine-mortal conflicts and their consequences. This era prioritized stability over truth through historical revision, educational control, media manipulation, economic pressure, and legal frameworks that made discussion of certain topics illegal or socially unacceptable.
Knowledge Underground
Despite official suppression, networks of truth-seekers maintained forbidden information through scholar alliances, coded communication, oral tradition, and archaeological evidence. Folk preservation maintained accurate histories through carefully preserved stories, while artistic encoding hid dangerous truths in creative works.
The Silence
The most recent cosmic catastrophe began with the Silent God's complete possession of Prince Dain Solarius, transforming Solara from the "Shining City" to chaos almost overnight. This crisis represented the closest the world has come to complete annihilation since the Divine Wars, as reality itself began to fade into consuming silence.
The Ultimate Sacrifice
The crisis was resolved through Mordain Ashcroft's complete self-sacrifice using the Element of Light ritual. His erasure from existence—so complete that even memory of him faded—created a shockwave of restorative power that pushed back the Void and stabilized reality. This also weakened the Silent God enough for Kaelen R'Veyne to kill his vessel, essentially defeating the Silent God, though the cosmic forces it represented were merely pushed back, not destroyed.
The Rise of Zenith's Chosen
In the aftermath of The Silence, a powerful religious organization has gained significant influence by offering absolute certainty in an uncertain world. This monotheistic movement represents a fundamental challenge to the traditional Wild God pantheon, aggressively converting communities through salvation promises and social control.
Post-Silence Power
Operating through hierarchical systems and expansion strategies, Zenith's Chosen capitalizes on widespread fear and displacement. Their message of order and purity resonates with traumatized populations, while their systematic demonization of alternative spiritual paths creates new forms of persecution and control in communities struggling to rebuild.