Welcome to Gaia! ::

Sareth's time is divided up like it is on earth, with minutes, days, months, years, etc. However, Sareth is also divided up into seven ages, much like how we have BC and AD. When a new age begins, the year count is reset from that point onward. Each new age is brought about by some great event in the history of the world that radically changed how the world functioned. Below is a list of the ages of Sareth and what even triggered a new one to begin (More detail will be provided in later posts).

The First Age: The first age officially began during a summit of many of the elven and dwarven lords of the time, who decided that a standardized record of time should be started. Before then each culture recorded their time separately, and so the years often differ widely. Soon after the recording of time in this form began, the lords were able to convince all but certain human tribes and almost all of the orcish tribes to adopt the system. The orcs will continue with their own system into the late fourth age before officially adopting the age system.

The Second Age: The second age began with the establishment of Belan, a city-state that would later become the first true kingdom in Sareth. For almost a hundred years after the establishment of Belan, scholars still considered it the first age, but it was eventually decided that the age began with Belan, to show how crucial that area proved in the development of the world.

The Third Age: Just like the second age, the third age began when Belan grew in power, this time from a city-state to a full kingdom. However, Belan had been destroyed during the second age, and so their capitol was now New Belan, in homage to the previous city that was now ruins. With the kingdoms first conquest, it's king Landes declared that the third age of the world had begun, and such was his influence, that the change was accepted. The third age was one of the longest of all the ages, lasting for nearly two thousand years, in which many more kingdoms sprang up and many more fell to foreign powers.

The Fourth Age: Triggered by the fall of Denra to the Holy Rautian Empire, thus making all of Sareth controlled by a single governing body. This is the shortest of the ages, and only lasted seventy four years. The king of the Holy Rautian Empire at the time of the beginning of the age died only a few years later, and the crown was passed three times before the age came to a sudden end.

The Fifth Age: After a set of events involving a religious crusade and the supposed banishment of the "evil gods", a rebellion started within the Holy Rautian Empire that eventually culminated in the Godwars - literally a war between the avatars of the many gods of the time, given physical bodies by the devotion of their followers. The chaos created by the great beings at war with one another drove humanity nearly to extinction, and the survivors of the first few years were forced underground in an attempt to save their lives. The fifth age is perhaps one of the most war-torn of all the seven ages of Sareth, with the various races already living beneath the surface attempted to drive the invaders back into the ever shifting landscape of the Godwars.

The Sixth Age: The Godwars eventually died with the last of the gods, and not long after humanity was forced onto the surface with enemies at their heels. With the end of the Godwars the sixth age started, leading to a long period of rediscovery as the survivors attempted to adapt to the blasted landscape and changed flow of magic.

The Seventh Age: The seventh age is a period that can only be described as "the end of the world". Though it lasted nearly a century and a half, it is by far the most chaotic of all the previous ages of Sareth. The world begins to degenerate as the planes all return to that which made them: the True Gods, known as Sareth the Creator.

The Second Age

Belan City rose and signified a new age, but it would be almost twenty years before the age was retroactively changed. The reason for the change was the significance of Belan City, as even in it's infancy it was a mighty power and drew many of the greatest heroes and villains of the time to it, at one point or another.

As the 2nd Age continued, more and more city states began to pop up throughout Sareth as humans moved more and more away from their former tribal lifestyles, though there were still a few human tribes left well into the 4th Age. Elves and Dwarves began to retreat more into their own cities as human populations swelled while the longer lived races didn't grow very fast - if at all.

Ayrn, a knight of Belan City, would father the cause of the end of the 2nd Age. Though young, Ayrn was an esteemed knight and spent much of his time riding through the countryside seeking enemies of his king. On one such ride he came upon an elven maiden, and the two found themselves in love. After a year of courting, the two were married, and four years after the marriage the maiden's father, an elven lord of no small power, discovered the news and grew angry, and arrived at Belan City to take his daughter back. A duel was called for, and Ayrn struck down the lord, though with his dying moments the elf cursed the knight to lose everything he had loved before falling to the same blade that had killed countless others.

Later that same year Landes Half-Elven was born, though his mother did not survive the birth. Grieving, Ayrn became a distant and cold father, but Landes grew to be a knight like his father despite the hardships he had faced as a child. Six years after Landes had left their small home to serve his king, Belan City fell to outside invaders. Landes had escaped the siege by a few days on an errand sent to try and get help for the city, but Ayrn knew nothing of this and believed his son to be dead. Weeping, Ayrn threw himself upon his sword, thus fulfilling the curse set down by the elven lord.

Landes came back to the ruins of Belan City only a month after his fathers death, and leaving that place he was able to travel across Sareth rallying commoners and kings alike to his cause. Those that had destroyed Belan were slaughtered without mercy, and Landes set about to reestablish the ruined city to it's former glory. Many years later it was finished and Landes because the first king of New Belan, a city built atop the wreckage of it's namesake. Soon after, his former allies became angry that he had taken portions of their own armies to create his. In response, Landes attacked them, leading a crusade across the island that vanquished everyone they came into contact with. Before long, Belan was the first nation Sareth had ever seen, and the Third Age began by the decree of Landes Half-Elven.

The Fourth Age

The Sixth Age

After the horrors of the Godwars, humanity finally returned to the surface in a great exodus, known simply as "The Flight". What they found was a changed, blasted world, altered irrevocably by the Godwars that had taken place for nearly nine centuries before the last of the combatants had perished. Most of the world was now connected, a single continent named Argen connected to dozens of peninsulas by way of narrow straits. Most of the land is rocky and mountainous now, with great sheets of striped rock standing vertically and wavering back and forth to the horizon. In the valleys lie deserts, great expanses of cracked, scorched earth without any signs of life. However, in the spots that scholars theorize were held by the gods of nature, dense forests have sprung up and nestle in between the rocks.

Magic, too, changed greatly. After the gods were killed, mana became a much more distant thing, remote and unpredictable. Mages were dismayed, but after five years most of remaining civilization had learned to create nodes from which to draw their power. The surviving guilds formed together under one flag, calling themselves the League of the Arcane after an ancient school of legend in the second and third ages, this guild controlled most magic users to one degree or another, limiting them so that no single mage could rise above all the rest as well as educating any students who wished to learn the arts of magic - though those became few as time passed on.

In this new world the human race, as it often did, simply adapted to the new world. They spread their population everywhere they could, from the mountains to the deserts to the fringes of the jungle. The elves lived deeper within the wooded areas, more secluded than ever now that they had but a few tiny patches of land that they still felt fit to live in. The dwarves, however, became a more sociable people as a whole after they were returned to the surface.

Argh, pending.