The primordial formation of Shorne up to the continental split.
Long ago
Two great creatures swim in the waters, a great stone turtle and a great silver fish. Nothing else lives.
~2,000,000 years ago
A great proto-continent forms on the planet.
1,850,000 years ago
A magical void strikes the eastern side of the continent. Some astrologers have speculated this was a segment of the Vastness. The impact causes a volcano to erupt in what is now Huang lake, forming the Huang delta.
The great fish dies. Its skeleton creates a home, and its flesh sustenance, for the first living things.
1,820,000 years ago
The great volcano stops its eruption. A magnetic pole forms on an island within Huang Lake, forming the first leylines and sparking the first magic.
1,800,000 years ago
The great turtle ends its swim, perhaps dead, perhaps merely slumbering. Its body forms the Turtleback Archipelago. Its brain crystallises, forming an indestructible prism, slowing down the light of the sun and causing it to be a site of eternal daylight and constant magical power.
1,400,000 years ago
A great earthquake divides the continent. It is split into four parts: Huang, Ester, Hyver and Reghel. Two great deserts expand across the inner ring of the torus. These are the Pavel and Vah deserts.
1,200,000 years ago
Crabs and other bottom-feeding creatures are drawn towards the pole. Their primitive mating dances form the basis of the first magical spells.
800,000 years ago
Two ape-like species emerge in the rainforests of Ester. One carves out a niche for itself during the day, clothing itself in leaves and bark. The other is more active at night. These will become the humans and wode elves.
300,000 years ago
The crabs, now magical beasts, create their home in pillars of volcanic stone in the strait between Huang and Reghel. They carve their homes into the mountains, and dance their spells in the sands below the waves.
63,000 years ago
After many generations feasted on the corpse of the great fish, the first living creatures are uplifted to become sentient. The vulture-like, flightless people worship the body as a god, building shrines in its honour, forming the first city.
Ancient texts speak of a great bell that rang out in the sky and started the first rains. As the rains come, the city of Reek sinks into the sea, and is abandoned. Its inhabitants flee, slowly travelling north towards the desert.
The reekians change, becoming bird-people that sail the desert in sand ships, scaly, and well-adapted to the heat. They are known as peregrins.
45,000 years ago
The world cools, and ice covers much of the planet as the Matron shields it from the sun's light for longer.
Ice covers much of the map, and some of the peregrins become better equipped for the cold, forming white fur and black wings to bask and absorb any warmth from the meagre sunlight. At night, they shelter in caves. Some migrate south to live in the pine forests, forming a symbiosis with the moss and lichens for food and warmth.
A lake forms in the Pavel desert which the peregrins call Galahar. The peregrins split into the raft-surfing Galahari wyverns and Pnician river traders.
43,000 years ago
A new culture of wyverns establishes itself on Hyver. They are shorter and covered in downy feathers and refer to themselves as alks.
42,000 years ago
As the world warms, the ice retreats. Black Pool lake forms in the northwest of Huang, and Mongoose lake in the north of Ester, above the Vah desert, from glacial waters.
The alks become more isolationist as their territory reduces, but a small population decides to explore. Their flippers develop into spade-like hands, which help them to become the cave-dwelling toboggans, who live in the Singing Spire mountains.
38,000 years ago
Toboggans tunneling ever deeper, westwards, and even under the Divine Strait, discover and form a friendship with the mossites. These creatures make their home under the mountainous region north of the pole.
15,000 years ago
The first writing systems emerge.
12,000 years ago
Some of the crab-people are inexorably drawn to Lake Huang and form their breeding pools there. The harsh environment and strong magical background radiation causes them to take on a more humanoid form, emerging as time raiders.
6,000 years ago
The Pearlescent Empress is born on Hyver from a bright, shining egg which reflects the sky at night. She forms the Frostfeather empire. At the height of her power, the empire encompasses all of Hyver and large swathes of both Ester and Huang, fighting bloody wars against the time raiders on Huang, and subjugating the alks that live within the rainforests of Ester. Many settlements are founded along the coast of the Divine Strait.
5,700 years ago
A tribe of wode elves pledges allegiance to the Frostfeather empire and is taken to Hyver for education and training in the army. Within only a century, they become part of the aristocratic classes of the empire. These are the ancestors of the high elves.
5,400 years ago
An expansionist faction on Turtleback founds several religious expeditions south across the Vah desert, to teach their beliefs that the sun, not the Vastness is the true source of magic.
Many expeditions fail, but eventually, an expedition reaches Egg-Egg, then under the control of the Frostfeather empire. The Frostfeather viceroy is killed in a battle, and war breaks out between the Tursians and Frostites.
3,200 years ago
Time raiders travelling up the Pnial river find crab shells engraved with unknown writing. As they follow cairns and sign-posts east along a new road, they eventually find Lake Galahar. They form an alliance with the peregrins against the Frostfeather Empire which lasts for centuries.
2,800 years ago
The batfolk near Reservier lake pledge allegiance to Turtleback, becoming a vassal state in exchange for access to the turtle's knowledge and magic.
1,200 years ago
In the westernmost part of the Frostfeather empire, a peasant girl, Adrina of Egg, is born from a pearlescent egg. She leads a bloody and violent rebellion to claim the Pearlescent throne, under a banner of a crab's pincer cracking an egg. Her rebellion fails as she is assassinated.