The history of the known universe is a story told across eons, a saga of creation, destruction, and rebirth. It begins in the formless chaos before time, chronicles the rise of gods and the forging of Reality, and follows the great celestial wars that shattered creation only to see it expand into an infinite cosmos. This timeline charts that epic past, from the long isolation of the mortal races on their scattered homeworlds to the revolutionary dawn of interstellar travel and the turbulent galactic era that followed.
The Age of Myth
The first chapter of history was written not by mortals, but by gods and cosmic forces. This age encompasses the very genesis of Reality and the great cataclysms that defined the fundamental laws of existence. It is an era of foundational myths and universe-altering legends, concluding with the mortal races, inheritors of this violent and beautiful cosmos, taking their first tentative steps toward the stars.
The Primal Dawn
Before existence, there was only the Primal Chaos, an infinite sea of quantum probability. From this roiling chaos, a single possibility achieved stable self-awareness. This first consciousness, desiring permanence, began manipulating the fields of probability, collapsing them into a single, stable Reality.
As this new Reality took shape, other entities coalesced from the chaos and joined the great work. These became the elder deities:
- Estlore the Light: Weaver of the vital essence that grants life.
- Shimai the Empty: Carver of the Void, a path for that which ends to return to Chaos.
- Olim the Forge: Forger of the six elemental planes—Air, Earth, Fire, Metal, Wood, and Water—the building blocks of the material world.
- Losteroth the Wise: Architect of the Astral Plane, the foundation upon which all other planes would rest.
- Tark the Conduit: The establisher of cosmic pathways, allowing the energies of Reality to flow.
Together, they and their divine offspring created the world of Riadus, placing it at the very center of their new, finite creation. Riadus was orbited by its sun, Solaris, and three moons. At the farthest edge of Reality, the Stars glittered as a shimmering boundary separating the stability of Creation from the all-consuming Void and the Primal Chaos beyond.
The Chaos War
The ordered, stable pocket of Reality was an affront to the nature of Primal Chaos. It lashed out, seeking to unmake creation. These incursions birthed demons—creatures part-Real, part-Chaos—that existed only to destroy. As their numbers grew, their assaults escalated into a conflict that spanned every level of existence, from the mortal world to the divine realms. This was the Chaos War. Reality was besieged, and despite the gods’ power, Chaos was winning.
The Expansion
On the brink of annihilation, the elder deities and many of their children made a final, desperate choice. They sacrificed their divine essence in a cataclysmic act to save what they had built. This sacrifice did not just repel Chaos; it fundamentally rewrote the laws of Reality in an event known as The Expansion.
The effects were absolute:
- Cosmological Shift: Riadus was thrown from the center of the universe, becoming a planet in orbit around its sun. The old geocentric model was shattered.
- Stellar Genesis: The Stars, once simple boundary markers, exploded outward into the Void. They became true suns, many birthing planets of their own. Some went supernova, triggering a chain reaction of stellar creation that expanded Reality to a seemingly infinite scale, filling the Void with countless galaxies.
- Temporal Paradox: The Expansion warped time itself. Billions of years of history were instantly and retroactively written into the fabric of the new, vast universe. Civilizations now had ancient histories on worlds that hadn’t existed moments before. The universe was now paradoxically far older than its own creation.
On Riadus, the event was witnessed as a spectacular celestial event. Scholars would forever debate their world’s true history, but the new reality was undeniable.
The Reach for the Stars
In the wake of The Expansion, the raw magic of the world began to fade on Riadus. Humanity, adaptable and prolific, rose to become the dominant species, while the populations of other ancestries like the elves and dwarves dwindled, while others simply vanished.
As technology advanced, these elder ancestries saw their future not on a human-centric Riadus, but among the new stars. Both elves and dwarves eventually developed the means to leave their ancestral home, seeking out new worlds to settle. Meanwhile, other ancestries like kitsune and orcs seemed to simply appear on distant worlds, their cultures already established. Whether they were transported from Riadus by forgotten magic or were simply written into their new existence by the Expansion’s grand revision of reality remains a subject of debate.
Across the galaxy, the newly scattered peoples of Riadus and the suddenly ancient native races of other worlds began to rediscover magic and develop technology. The desire to explore, to connect, and to find new homes fueled their desire to pursue interstellar travel long before it was practical. The methods they employed were daring, born of either immense magical power or grim technological determination.
The most direct routes were magical, but they were also the most perilous. Archmages of immense power could attempt direct teleportation across stellar distances, but such feats required godlike reserves of energy and pinpoint accuracy across light-years, making them legendarily rare and unreliable. A more common, though no less dangerous, method was to create Gates—tearing holes into transitive planes like the Astral, hoping to navigate its timeless expanse to emerge at another point in Reality. These Gates were notoriously unstable, prone to collapse or, worse, connecting to unintended, hostile dimensions. For these reasons, magic could move individuals or small groups, but it could not move a civilization.
For those without such esoteric power, the path was one of monumental technology and solemn sacrifice. Generation ships were launched, vast self-sustaining arks carrying entire societies whose descendants, many generations later, might be the first to see their new home—if it was habitable and not already occupied. Sleeper ships took a different approach, placing their crews in cryogenic stasis for the centuries-long voyage, with the colonists praying their automated systems would not fail in the lonely dark between stars. These incredible undertakings were acts of migration as much as they were exploration.
This all changed with a single, paradigm-shattering discovery.
The Age of Contact
This era is defined by the opening of Wildspace and the invention of the Feydrive. This singular discovery heralded the dawn of the galactic community and the beginning of a new era of exploration, expansion, and conflict.
Wildspace
The breakthrough that ended the era of slow journeys was the discovery of Wildspace, an extension of the fey-touched reality known as the Wild that filled the void between the stars. In this empty, transitive dimension, the laws of physics were different. Distance was conceptual, not strictly physical, allowing a vessel using conventional propulsion to traverse light-years in a matter of days or weeks.
This potential, however, came with a seemingly insurmountable barrier. Wildspace is anathema to the matter of Realspace and manifests a constant, immense metaphysical pressure on any foreign object, as if the dimension itself is trying to force any foreign object out. Because of this, simply creating a portal to Wildspace was not enough; any ship crossing the threshold would be instantly and violently expelled, making travel through it impossible.
Invention of the Feydrive
The Feydrive was the revolutionary technology designed to overcome this fundamental barrier. Its first function is to pierce the Veil, creating a stable gateway between Realspace and Wildspace. Its second, and more critical, purpose is to generate a protective field that allows a vessel to survive the dimension’s immense expulsive pressure.
The way the drive accomplishes this can be compared to how a hydrofoil operates on water. Rather than taking the metaphysical force head-on, the Feydrive uses the ship’s forward momentum to allow the protective field to “lift” the vessel, letting it skim along the hostile energies of Wildspace instead of being crushed by them. Because of this, a ship must maintain a speed above a critical ‘stall velocity’; if a ship’s speed drops too low, it can no longer maintain this “lift,” causing it to succumb to the unrestrained pressure of Wildspace and be catastrophically ejected back into Realspace.
The Rise of the Stellar Nations
While the Feydrive was new to the races of Riadus, they were not the first to travel Wildspace. The enigmatic Zentians had plied the routes within their Spectrum Nebula for centuries, their sprawling empire more concerned with its own affairs than the galaxy at large. Likewise, the pragmatic, technologically focused Inza had long exploited the resources of their local cluster, expanding with slow, deliberate purpose.
Into this established landscape came the explosive expansion of Humanity. Driven by a unique purpose and unity, humanity didn’t just explore; they colonized. They encountered and absorbed a multitude of worlds that had not yet developed FTL, creating a patchwork of independent human-led stellar empires. During this time, they made contact with the Anemonians, who had long been aware of the Zentians but were denied FTL technology. Eager for a partner, the Anemonians embraced human overtures, and with shared technology, they quickly forged their own small but significant star-nation.
This rapid expansion was not without conflict. The resource-hungry Inza saw the burgeoning human powers as rivals, while the mysterious Mnemosyne, who had expanded to their nearest star systems using a bizarre, non-Wildspace form of FTL, viewed all other races with hostility. These pressures provided the catalyst for the disparate human empires to unify. For mutual protection and shared prosperity, they formed the Coalition, a massive, diverse, and powerful political entity that quickly became a major galactic player. It was also during this period that the Systems, ancient beings who had wandered the cosmos for eons, made contact with a Coalition vessel, their first interaction with humans in eons.
The Riadus Exodus
Well before the formation of the Coalition the other surviving races of Riadus chose their own destinies. As human technology and culture became dominant on their adopted homeworld, the Elves felt the world’s magical attunement fading. They gathered their resources and launched a great exodus, seeking a home more suited to their nature, a search which so far has failed. The Dwarves, seeing an opportunity to return to their celestial home, boarded their enormous colonizer ships and set course for a distant star.
It was during the expansion from this new home that the Dwarves rediscovered the Orcs. Believing them to be a new alien species, they were shocked to find Orcish oral traditions that spoke of a world with three moons and a shared history with dwarves, giants and the other peoples of ancient Riadus. It became clear the Orcs were another lost people of Riadus, somehow transported to their own worlds during the chaos of The Great Expansion.
The Core Worlds Today
Today, the galaxy is a complex tapestry of powers. The Coalition stands as one of the largest and most dynamic nations, but it is young and faces challenges from older, more established empires. The Inza remain a formidable industrial and military rival. The Zentians have begun to look beyond their nebula, their intentions unclear. The Elven and Dwarven kingdoms are powerful in their own right, maintaining a cautious neutrality. The Mnemosyne remain an unpredictable and hostile enigma on the Coalition’s border. And between these great stellar nations lie countless independent worlds and minor powers, navigating a galaxy defined by fragile alliances and the ever-present threat of war.