Angrean Atlas

The Pre-History of Angrea

Before memory, before the gods now worshipped, before even the eldest of the Sidhe drew breath, Angrea sprawled infinite and unknowable. This is the chronicle of the world that was, pieced together from fragments of fragments, whispered by mad prophets and carved in stones that predate the seas themselves.

The Time Before Memory

Unknown - ~100,000 years ago

In the infinite reaches of history, Angrea existed as vast continents connected by traversable lands. Seas, and even what some would call oceans, dotted the landscape, but there were vast stretches of land, filled with strange peoples. Civilizations rose to heights that would seem like magic even to today’s most accomplished sorcerers.

Of this age, we know almost nothing save this: Iliana and Korin were the only constants. All other gods rose with their peoples and fell with their kingdoms, their names now dissolved into the void of forgotten time. Some scholars wonder, quietly, if our Gods might face the same fate.

The ruins that occasionally surface - a gear the size of a house made of metal no blacksmith can shape, crystals that hum with impossible frequencies, stones that weep fresh water - these are the only testimonies to what was lost. Even these artifacts defy understanding, their purposes as alien as if they came from another plane entirely.

The Flood

~100,000 years ago

Korin’s grief manifested as the Great Drowning - a tantrum that reshaped reality itself. For one hundred years, storms raged without cessation. Rain fell in sheets so thick that breathing became swimming. The oceans rose not gradually but in great gulping swallows that could devour a mountain in a day. None now know what Korin grieved, but she made sure that all those alive then shared in it.

Some call this the end of the First World, though whether that world was truly the first, on a plane infinitely old, who could say. The wise speak of cities that touched the clouds, of magic that made today’s miracles seem like parlor tricks, of peoples whose very names have been washed away. All drowned. All lost. For thirty thousand years, Angrea lay beneath the waves, a liquid grave of untold civilizations.

Yet life, as they say, found a way.

The Age of Sail

~100,000 - ~70,000 years ago

As the endless waters covered all, the survivors took to vessels that became floating worlds. The great colony ships - cities of wood and faith - carried the remnants of land-dwelling peoples across the infinite ocean. Each ship developed its own customs, its own hierarchies, its own understanding of the divine.

Ship logs speak vaguely of “the old prayers” and “ancestors’ ways,” religious practices that sustained hope during the darkest centuries. These floating peoples developed philosophies alien to land-dwellers - some treasured isolation as safety, others built elaborate codes of maritime conduct, and many found new forms of worship suited to their wooden worlds.

Generations upon generations were born who would live full lives never seeing land. Knowing only the deck beneath their feet and the endless horizon. They adapted in remarkable ways - some say this is when the first sea dwarves learned their craft, when the gnomes perfected machines to harvest water from clouds, when humans developed their fierce adaptability.

The Great Ships of Legend

The Emergence

~70,000 years ago

Land returned slowly, first as mud flats that ships would ground upon, then hills that broke the eternal horizon, finally mountains that pierced the sky like accusations against the flood. The mountain kingdom of Kress emerged first, the dwarves having sealed themselves away with gnomish ingenuity in the early days of the drowning.

For years they had the revealed lands to themselves, establishing Kresselrock and beginning to rebuild what civilization meant on solid ground. They planted the first crops in thirty thousand years to see Iliana’s suns directly. (During the Flood, sunlight had to be filtered from above the sea down into their underground kingdom via ingenious gnomish devices lined with mirrors.)

Then came the ships, one by one, like leviathans breaching. Each landing brought conflict and cooperation in equal measure. Ship-dwellers who had known only the roll of waves stumbled on solid ground. Children who had never seen a mountain sat silent in awe. The collision of ship-cultures with the underground-cultures of Kress created the unique blend that would eventually become the foundation of all land-based civilization in the Isles.

Many ship-dwellers abandoned their maritime ways entirely, burning their vessels in great bonfires of celebration and sorrow. Others clung to half-remembered traditions, creating syncretic practices that confused mainlanders. Still others returned to the sea, unable to adapt to the stillness of earth beneath their feet.

The Quiet Millennia

~70,000 - 12,278 years ago

For nearly sixty thousand years, this small land knew relative peace. Civilizations grew like coral - slowly, beautifully, occasionally breaking in storms but always rebuilding. This was the age of the Small Kingdoms, when a single valley might house three rival nations, and wars were fought over fishing rights and marriage contracts rather than continental domination.

The ship-descendants gradually integrated with those who had survived through other means. The “old ways” of the ships became grandmother’s tales, then legends, then forgotten entirely except in the most oblique references. Sailors would sometimes make gestures their great-grandparents taught them, not knowing these were once prayers to deities whose names had dissolved like sea foam.

It was during this time the Siltlings appeared. No one can say exactly when, not even the Siltlings are sure. Though they still speak of hearing a song, and opening their eyes to dry land. They quickly made themselves invaluable for their gifts in farming.

By the end of this age, the Flood had become myth. Children played in tidal pools without knowing their ancestors had watched their entire world swallowed by water. The great ships rotted on beaches and sandbars, or were broken down for building materials. The infinite ocean became just the ocean - vast, yes, but no longer the entire world.

The Shattering

12,278 years ago

If the Flood was Korin’s sorrow, the Shattering was her rage. Where her first tantrum brought water to drown the world, her second brought quakes and meteors to sunder it. The land that the Kressians had emerged onto, that had slowly accumulated more and more of the seafaring peoples - by then, some say, a continent that rivaled the old world’s greatness - cracked like a dropped plate.

In a single day and night of madness, what was one became many. Mountains split and tore apart. Valleys became straits. Plains tore into archipelagos. The Phalagian Republic, of which we know little beyond its name, saw its capital city divided among three different islands that drifted apart like quarreling siblings.

From one land came dozens: the Neuranian Isles were born in divine violence.

This catastrophe destroyed not just nations but knowledge itself. Libraries swallowed by the sea. Trade routes severed. Entire schools of magic forgotten as their practitioners drowned or found themselves buried under falling mountains. Languages diverged. Customs split. What had become one people became many, separated by waters that generations had forgotten how to cross. The sea dwarves hadn’t built anything bigger than fishing boats in generations, because they knew of no other land to visit.

Yet from this destruction came opportunity. The fractured lands would prove perfect for a new kind of empire, one that could unite the scattered isles under a single banner. But that is a story for another chapter of history.

Thus ended the age before history, and began the age of heroes. What came before - the First World, the Flood, the Ships, the Quiet Millennia - these are shadows of shadows, stories told by the dying light of civilizations that exist now only in fragments of brass and whispers of prayer. Yet they shaped all that followed, as the ocean shapes the shore, patient and inexorable.

Unsigned Manuscript
Argent Sol Memorial University
Discovered 8th Day of Brin
Year 2487 of the Chrysian Reckoning