The Chronicle of Eurosia

IThe Twilight

Before there were realms, there was the Twilight.

It was not a place and not a time. It was two voices that had never been apart: Dusk and Dawn, the Twin Gods, one will speaking with two mouths. Dawn spoke the words of mercy, wisdom, life, peace and the soul. Dusk spoke the words of justice, strength, order, kingship and honour. The first thing they spoke together was the world.

Those first words still exist. The Ancients called them the Twilight Arcana, the eldest magic there is. A few were written down in the Ancient Tomes, and a mortal who reads one can still move the world a little with it.

Dawn raised Heavenreach above the clouds, with a sea the colour of gold. Dusk sank Hellmaw beneath the fire, ringed around a boiling maw. Between them they laid Eurosia, the middle land. Nothing the twins made was good or evil by birth. Every war in this chronicle was fought by people who had forgotten it.

IIThe Firstborn

Before the peoples, the twins made helpers who do not die of age.

IIIThe Children of Dusk and Dawn

Then the twins peopled the world. The Faith still reads this ledger aloud on Firstlight every year.

Both twins bleed gold, and so, in a thin trace, does every child of both. This is why gold and silver are the sacred metals: gold for the blood that is in everyone, silver for Dawn's light that is in the moon.

IVThe Withdrawal

Then the twins fell silent. They did not die and they did not leave. They stopped answering, the way a smith lets a blade cool before judging it.

They left four things behind: their words in the Ancient Tomes, their blood in gold and silver, the Firstborn to keep the balance, and sixteen doors between the realms. Eight Holy sites where Heavenreach touches Eurosia, eight Dark sites where Hellmaw does. The doors were shut when the twins went quiet. They did not stay shut.

The oldest teaching of the Ancients: the Twin Gods do not answer prayers with armies.

VThe Opening of the Doors

The first Demons came through a Dark site in the dead of a Longnight and burned three villages. The first Angels came through a Holy site the following spring, sure the middle land needed correcting. Both were met with spears. The breaches of today are that same war. It has never ended; it has only paused.

Something else came through the Dark sites: Nuvrith, the Taint, a thin, cold hunger that Hellmaw leaves behind. The dark schools of magic draw on it, and it draws on the caster in return. Asked whether she lets it through on purpose, Testarossa has always given the same answer: the doors leak.

VIThe Fall of the Halo

One Archangel decided to end the wars of the middle land by force, and told the kings of the plains they would kneel to Heavenreach. They did not kneel. The Dragonkin claim a dragon cast it down, the Dwarves a siege engine, the Elves a single arrow. Its halo struck the ground before the body did, and the earth sank into a perfect ring of water that has never frozen and never dried: Halofall.

Its name was struck from the record on purpose. The lesson stayed: no power from outside Eurosia may rule it. On that shore rose the first shrines, then a temple town, and in time, Kingsreach.

VIIThe Ancients and the Faith

The Ancients were never a church. They stayed at the shrines when the twins went quiet, kept the Twilight Arcana and swept the Holy sites, and taught three things: the twins do not answer with armies, nothing from outside Eurosia may rule it, and no people is judged by its maker. Over the shrines they raised the Grand Temple, and in its tower hung the great bell that rings only for a king's death, a king's crowning, or a door too large to close: the thirteenth bell.

The Faith of the Twin Gods began long after, with the First Avatars, the twin brothers Raph and Eil, healing a dying man by the river Albarina. It grew three branches, the Clergy, the Sepulchre and the Synod, and its Sacred Paladins swear to the sites and the rites, never to a king. What the Faith added was the Oracle. The High Oracle of Kingsreach holds the Twin Staff, is chosen and never born, and has never worn a crown.

VIIIThe War of Thrones

For generations every kingdom was at war with every other. Elves fought Humans at the edge of Westerwald, Dwarves fought Orcs over the passes of Mordraug, the Dragonkin raided every harbour, and the Vampires of Noctmere sold every secret twice. It was the age of the hired bow, when the Elven companies of Westerwald sold their arrows to any crown that paid.

It did not end in victory. It ended with exhaustion, and with a door. A Dark site in the south opened wider than any before, and it took Human, Dwarf and Orc standing in one line to close it. The three kings agreed on one thing before they rode home: the middle land needed one crown above the crowns.

IXThe Concord of Kingsreach

The rulers met beside Halofall, the one place none of them had ever ruled. Under the thirteenth bell they swore before the Twin Gods to one High Crown, forged of gold for Dusk and silver for Dawn, set with one stone from each founding kingdom. The Age of Eurosia is counted from that oath: year 1 AE.

The first High King was Aldric I of House Ancalagon, King of Arvenheim, who had stood in the mud at the closed door. The temple town took a new name, Kingsreach, and the thirteen lands, for the first time, had one name between them. Every kingdom kept its ruler, laws and army. The High King held the oaths, the capital, and the right to call all of Eurosia to arms against a breach.

XThe Crown Calendar

In the 58th year of the Age, High King Edmar Ancalagon decreed one count for every oath and treaty: year 1 of the Crown Calendar, CC. The year has twelve months of thirty days and five Holy Days outside the months.

The week: Firstday, Spearday, Kingsday, Godsday, Wyrmday, Shieldday and Moonday. A Holy Day carries no weekday name, which is why no Holy Day ever falls on a Kingsday.

XIThe Crown Passes

The Concord never said how the Crown should pass. For most of eight centuries High Kings named heirs and no kingdom objected in arms, because the alternative was a door. Twice it went wrong.

• 231 CCThe First Interregnum. Aldric II dies with two sons and no word on which. Two winters of war end at the ford of the Albarina, and Halvar is anointed with the blood still on his hands.
• 486 CCThe Second Interregnum. Osric Valroy dies childless. Three claimants fight for five years; in 491 CC a border lord nobody counted, Wulfric of Greymoor, takes Kingsreach with four hundred riders and is anointed because he is the one holding the city.
• 814 CCAldric IV takes the Crown at twenty-two, seals more breaches than any king before him, and makes the longest peace in the Crown Calendar.

XIIThe Seventeenth of Frostfall

On the 17th of Frostfall, 843 CC, in the Royal Keep at Kingsreach, High King Aldric IV died in his bed with the first snow on the window. He had married late, his children had not lived, and he named no heir, believing any name he gave would start the war while he was still alive to watch it.

The twelve bells rang, one for each month of the year he had not finished. Then the thirteenth.

On the seventh night of mourning, under the thirteenth bell, with the High Crown on its platform and no head to put it on, High Oracle Lucial said what the Faith had learned from two Interregnums and eight hundred years.

The High Crown must be won.

What happened after that is told in The War for the High Crown, and it is being written by the people who play it.