Era of Ascendance

The Era of Ascendance marks Elarion’s first golden age: sky-cities rise, dragonriders streak across cloud-banks, and raw ley-magic is hammered into schools, vows, and relics that still shape the realms today.

When the Withering Skies finally brightened, the children of the Origins peered out of forest and swamp to find a world hungering for structure. Magic that once spilled like untamed rivers begged for channel and purpose. The answer roared from mountain peaks: Itharûn, its new citadel Highspire hewn by flame-masons and crowned by loyal Sky-Dragons. Warriors bound by the Pact of Flame and Aether pledged life and soul to their draconic partners—an audacity that would echo through centuries of ballads.

South-east, scholars of the nascent Skyreach Spires lifted islands of crystal into the high aether, stitching them in place with spell-lines as delicate as spider silk. They called themselves the Luminari Order, and in tower-top observatories star-serpents twined like living constellations, whispering calculus of light and destiny. From those whispers the first Aether-forges sparked, birthing relics that hummed with cosmic frequency.

Yet the forest did not stay silent. Archdruid Fen Mossbark led a revitalised Verdant Circle, guiding Grove-Wyrms out of dormancy to patrol ley-node borders. In a rare flare of cooperation, Fen signed the Forgotten Pact with Lumarch Velian Thalos: nature would shield the roots of the world while Skyreach studied the heavens. A century later, few remember that fragile parchment, but its spirit lingers in old meeting glades where root and starlight cross.

Progress, however, breeds friction. Shards from a drifting Skyreach isle rained over contested foothills, their impact sites glittering with raw Aether-crystal. What began as salvage rights escalated into the Shardfall Skirmishes—blades of forged dragon-steel clashing against Luminari wands that bent gravity like cloth. Skirmish veterans still speak of crackling Stormriders diving through zero-gravity debris while Thornspine dragons spat poisoned thorns from the treeline below.

Neither side won outright. Diplomats hammered out spheres of influence, and the realms turned inward, each perfecting a flavour of ascendancy. In Duskfall Mire, the Vinebound tasted crystal dust drifting on northerly winds and discovered new sap-spells of memory and fog. Hollowroot’s scholars etched mind-runes into pearl-grey bark, seeding the first Memory Drakes to harvest stories from travelers’ dreams.

Amid exhilaration, hubris festered. Skyreach arcanists wove the Celestial Veil, cloaking the upper spires to hide experimental rifts from prying eyes. The Veil shimmered like moonlit glass—beautiful, but it signalled a retreat into secrecy that would one day crack the era wide open.

Meanwhile Itharûn pursued perfection in flame and honour. High Flamekeeper Aeraleth codified fifteen dragon-rider virtues, and for a brief shining decade raids, piracy, even petty border wars dwindled as would-be tyrants balked at talons overhead. Yet within Highspire’s basalt halls, young officers whispered of glory beyond watchful Elders, sowing seeds of ambition that future eras would rue.

By 180 AE the sky above the Aether Crown pulsed with unstable light. Scholars disagreed whether it was prophecy or fallout, but all sensed a threshold. The gods, once sculptors of chaos, now watched mortals sculpt order of their own—and perhaps smiled at the symmetry. The Age of Wonder had reached its zenith, and beneath its gleam faint fault-lines spread, ready to usher in the Fracture to come.