Before creation, there was only Ix — a singular consciousness adrift in the void, outside time and beyond measure. When Ix slept, his dreams became real. The universes he imagined bloomed into existence, teeming with life but without awareness, without purpose. Upon waking, Ix found his dreams had become a world too vast to manage alone. He birthed the Primordial Gods to steward what he had made — not gods as mortals understand them, but forces of nature given will, asking nothing of the living and receiving nothing in return. As beings on these worlds began to worship them out of fear and awe, the gods changed. Followers made them stronger. This became the foundational truth of divinity in Dort: belief is power.

Satisfied but not finished, Ix breathed intelligence into the world — and the Ancients were born. The first sentient beings, they were slightly less powerful than gods but extraordinary in their own right: immortal, capable of manipulating matter, distorting time, and crossing the void. They spread across the universes in small groups, reshaping worlds to their preferences, building ecosystems from scratch, breeding the first monsters, domesticating the first animals. Mastery over everything except the one thing Ix kept for himself — the power to create life from nothing.

The Ancients wanted it. Ix refused. They rebelled.

Over millennia they plotted in secret, hiding their operations in void pockets where Ix's awareness couldn't reach. When he finally found them, the weapon they'd built to end him was nearly complete. They had no choice but to use it unfinished. It didn't kill Ix. It shattered him — each fragment becoming one of the gods of the modern pantheon. In his final act, Ix bound the universes together into the physical realm, the mystical realm, and the Soul Planes, then sealed the Ancients in the last remaining void pocket.

The Ancients are still there. Whether they have found a way back is a question scholars debate with genuine unease.

The First Age belonged to the Primordial Gods and the slow churn of the natural world. Planets formed, burned, and went cold. Life stirred in crude forms and organized into basic communities driven by instinct, not culture. These early beings worshipped from fear, and that worship fed the gods, who grew more powerful in proportion to their devotees. The more followers, the greater the god.

Scholars call this era "the age before time." No calendar reaches it. What is known comes from inference, fragment, and the occasional artifact that has no business existing.

The Ancients were first. Immortal and ever-growing in power, they spread across the multiverse claiming entire planets as personal domains. They bred and merged life forms, created monsters, built and remade ecosystems with the detached curiosity of children pulling wings off insects. After eons of mastery came ennui, and after ennui came obsession: the power to create life from nothing, which belonged to Ix alone.

Ix refused them. The Ancients went underground, hiding their rebellion in void pockets for millennia. When Ix tracked them down, the weapon was nearly ready. They fired it before it was done. Ix shattered into the gods of the modern world, and in his last moment, he trapped the Ancients in the void.

Records from the Ancient Age are nearly nonexistent. The artifacts that have survived from this era are extraordinarily powerful and extraordinarily dangerous — weapons built to concepts, not purposes, by beings who thought on a scale mortals struggle to imagine. A dedicated sect within the followers of Zopha exists solely to locate and secure these objects before someone finds one and decides to see what it does.

In the aftermath of Ix's shattering, the gods turned their attention to the world and began shaping the races that populate it today. What followed was a brutal epoch. Without Echo's intervention, life was short, savage, and largely miserable. This period is called Before Echo — abbreviated BE — and while the historical record thins the further back one looks, what remains is not encouraging.

The first organized violence in Dort's history was between the elves and dwarves. Positioned as natural rivals over scarce resources, their animosity escalated into the First War of the Races — a prolonged slaughter that both sides prosecuted with grim enthusiasm, leaving tens of thousands dead across contested ground before it finally burned itself out.

Humans emerged from the conflict as the diplomatic victors, having played the other races against each other and brokered the alliances that ended the fighting. Within a generation, their descendants had forgotten the cost of those alliances. The peoples who bled alongside them found themselves marginalized in the cities they helped build, shut out of the prosperity they helped create. Resentment accumulated in the years that followed. The Second War of the Races was coming — humans had simply run out of allies.

Flush with population growth and military confidence, humans consolidated power by force. A rigid social hierarchy emerged: halflings and gnomes as second-class subjects, goblins, orcs, and ogres as barely tolerated threats. The other races retreated — elves to forests, dwarves to mountains, halflings to their shires, gnomes into interstitial corners of civilization. Orcs and goblins were pushed into the harshest land anyone could find.

The Second War of the Races followed. It was long, grueling, and resolved nothing. The casualties came from blades, starvation, and plague in roughly equal measure. When it ended, there were no victors, only survivors too exhausted to continue — who then withdrew to their separate territories and severed contact for generations. Scholars call this period the Great Retreat. The wounds didn't heal. They just stopped bleeding visibly.

In the aftermath of the Second War, the races turned inward. The most aggressive among them had largely died in the fighting, and those who remained wanted stability above all else. They got it, at the cost of contact with anyone who wasn't their own kind.

As populations recovered, something unusual happened: elves and dwarves — species known for slow reproduction — began producing twins and triplets, with births occurring every three years rather than every decade. Humans, orcs, and goblins replenished within decades as usual. It was during this quiet rebuilding period that one small human village and one small elven village maintained a wary proximity along a shared creek. Most of their interactions were commercial, conducted with the minimum necessary goodwill. Two children — a human girl and an elven boy — were overlooked by parents too busy surviving to supervise closely. They spent time together. Eventually, they had a child. No one knew what to do with that.

When the girl fell pregnant, both parents fled rather than face their communities. They built a life in the wilderness, raising their son Jolem in isolation with a set of values neither society had managed to produce: compassion independent of race, hospitality as a given rather than a transaction.

Jolem grew up watching his human mother age while his elven father and he himself did not. When she died of old age, he understood what she had given him — not just her values, but her purpose. He spoke both languages. He walked into both villages. Both sides treated him as a freak.

He kept walking. Over years, he found a small following of humans and elves willing to listen to a half-blood with ideas about coexistence and efficient resource sharing. His growing influence alarmed the leadership of both communities. They conspired together — possibly the only cooperative act of the era — and on a winter morning, they dragged Jolem from his home and hanged him in the creek that separated the two villages.

His followers found the body and scattered outward with his message, which spread faster than either community expected. The leaders who killed him had made him useful.

Jolem's teachings reached everywhere — distant wastelands, mountain ranges, the Underdark. The movement couldn't be suppressed because it had no center to cut out. One of the original twenty disciples proposed a day of global supplication, a single coordinated act of collective prayer to the gods for relief from the world as it was. Leaders across Dort recognized, too late, that something was about to shift. The day came. The world cried out in unison.

Echo was born.

Echo materialized as a fully formed deity, ready to answer what the world had asked for. He moved fast, amassing followers at a rate no god had seen before. He began reshaping Dort — tempering its harshness, creating opportunities, advancing what the races were capable of. The other gods were not pleased. They had been content with their playground and wanted it back.

Echo, rather than fight them, offered a bargain: give him a century. If he could increase their worshippers and enhance the world such that each god grew in power, they would allow him to remain. They agreed. The century that followed became known as the Years of Echo — abbreviated YE.

Echo worked before the bargain was even struck. He began addressing the most immediate suffering — one in three infants born with deformities, parents leaving them exposed to the elements as offerings to gods who didn't answer, plagues with mortality rates of 80 to 95% devastating entire regions, the sun's unfiltered rays crippling people who worked in it daily. He hardened constitutions, expanded temperate lands, reduced the toll of disease and exposure. By the time the other gods realized what he was doing, he was already too established to remove.

Before Echo's intervention, megapredators were the defining fact of life on Dort. Creatures of such size and ferocity that entire armies were required to bring down a single one, and often failed. They moved through settled regions without distinction between livestock and the people tending them. Echo culled them — keeping only the weakest representatives and allowing the rest to be hunted to extinction. The Tarrasque alone survived in something close to its original form, a deliberate choice. It surfaces every few centuries, obliterates everything around it, and vanishes again — a periodic reminder of what the world was before Echo decided to make it livable.

Towns and villages had always disposed of waste in the nearest river. When populations were sparse, the waterways handled it. As populations grew under Echo's improving conditions, they could not. Pollution levels exceeded what any natural system could process, and the rivers became open sewers feeding into the coasts.

Echo's first response was to purify the waterways himself. Within months, the towns had fouled them again. He took a different approach: he taught the people sanitation — how waste moved through water, how disease spread through contaminated sources, what proper management looked like — and then made cleaning up their own rivers their responsibility. The lesson stuck. The rivers recovered. It took longer than the direct approach, but it held.

In the final phase of his century, Echo turned to individual welfare. He eliminated several of the most debilitating mental disorders that had run unchecked through the population, reducing suffering on a scale that is difficult to quantify in retrospect. He then taught healthcare — physical treatment, wound care, the management of illness — and established that one day in seven would be a day of rest. No labor. No obligations. Recovery.

The final accounting was done at the end of the century. The gods reviewed what Echo had built. They found they had more followers than before, more power than before, and a world that was — against their expectations — more interesting than the one they'd had. They acknowledged his success. Echo took his place among the pantheon.

The period after Echo's century is referred to by scholars as the Modern Era — ME — though common folk, particularly among long-lived races, often still say Since Echo (SE). No single event since has reshaped the world as completely as Echo's century did. Consequently, the calendar remains anchored at its conclusion.

Rhodar was an explorer with a string of catastrophic expeditions behind her — lost ships, dead crews, and monarchs in Irna increasingly unwilling to fund a woman whose voyages reliably ended in wreckage. When conventional backing dried up, she commandeered a ship with a band of brigands and sailed north into the uncharted sea on a hunch and a flock of birds.

Her navigation method was unconventional: she released birds and followed those that didn't come back, reasoning they'd found land. When the northward birds failed to return, she followed their heading and found Passhall. She used the same technique later to find the western lands.

Back in Irna, she faced charges for the ship she'd stolen. She negotiated her freedom by offering the Lords of Harken the routes to both discoveries — carefully declining to promise exclusivity. She then sold those same navigational charts to every interested party she could find and retired wealthy. The Lords of Harken never forgave her, but there was nothing in the agreement that prevented it.

The western lands attracted the kind of wizards who had been asked to leave everywhere else. Free from oversight and the ethical constraints of established academies, a cohort of arcane researchers pursued the fusion of humanoids and animals — a practice banned in every land that had a law against it. Working in isolation, they eventually produced stable hybrids. The Animal-lings were born from those experiments, bearing traits of both human and animal lineage, representing the first genuinely new races created since the gods themselves made the original ones.

The reaction from the wider world was predictable: fascination, fear, and revulsion in rough equal measure. The Animal-lings, having no say in their origins, carved out a place for themselves in the western lands anyway. The wizards responsible were never formally prosecuted. Most of the relevant documents were lost or destroyed before anyone thought to look for them.

In 2000 ME, death stopped working. Wounds closed instantly. Diseases lost their lethality. The elderly did not die. Soldiers on battlefields were injured and didn't succumb. No one understood why, and no god claimed credit. The predictable result: a culture of recklessness. People leaped from heights, consumed lethal substances, explored the ocean floor without air, picked fights they had no business winning. The novelty of invulnerability proved irresistible.

The year ended. Death resumed — without warning, without transition — in 2001 ME. The reckless habits of the previous year met ordinary mortality, and many people who had stopped accounting for consequences died in the first week. What followed was overcorrection: years of extreme caution, bland diets, minimal travel, refusal to engage in anything with physical risk. Construction slowed. Conflict dropped. The world held very still for a long time. No one ever determined what caused either year. The question remains open.

On the day of his own feast, Izon — god of winter and snow — chose to manifest among his followers at his grand temple and celebrate with them directly. It was the kind of gesture his worshippers had prayed for, and the followers of Amnyth, god of death, had been waiting for it. They had learned of his plans and set an ambush.

Izon fought. He took thousands of Amnyth's followers with him before he fell, but he fell. His death marked the first confirmed killing of a god in the modern era, and Amnyth's followers declared it loudly — proof that the gods were not invincible. The other gods heard this. Their response was a unanimous pact: no god would physically manifest on the Prime Plane again. The risk was simply too high.

Izon's death site is unknown. His followers died alongside him, leaving no witnesses. Charlatans across Dort have been claiming knowledge of the location ever since, asserting that godstones — physical remnants of a deity's presence — can be found there in quantity. None have been verified. Several expeditions to claimed locations have disappeared.

The Red Plague turned afflicted skin a deep crimson as infected blood rose to the surface. Any wound — however minor — refused to clot. Cuts became fatal. For women, the monthly cycle became a death sentence without immediate intervention. The disease killed one in three women and one in four men over two years of continuous spread.

The leading theory is that a rogue sorcerer was attempting to weaponize blood through the dark arts and lost control of the pathogen. No one was ever identified. The spell, if that's what it was, burned itself out after two years. No cure was found before it ended on its own.

Princess Chaslia, youngest daughter of King Yukan of Irna, had a habit of slipping her guards. During a family holiday in Frosthaven — the king hunting, the queen at sea, her brothers otherwise occupied — Chaslia slipped out of the castle and walked to the town market. She arrived the same morning that a sorcerer lost control of a bound demon.

What exactly failed is still disputed. Some say the Ancients interfered with the binding circle. Others say the sorcerer was simply careless. The demon got free, summoned minions, and began tearing through Frosthaven. Chaslia saw a young boy cut in half and screamed at the demons to stop. The lead demon found her reaction amusing and confronted her. When her guards arrived and saw what they were dealing with, they fled. Chaslia did not. She demanded the demons return to their plane.

They took her captive instead. What followed lasted until nightfall. The town's clerics and nobles, fully aware of what was happening, did nothing.

Her parents arrived to find her dying. King Yukan killed the demons himself with an enchanted blade. When it was done, he established the Order of Chaslia — dedicated to hunting and eliminating supernatural threats — appointed his sons as its first knights, and abdicated the throne. The queen assumed rulership. Yukan pursued the order's work for the rest of his life and never returned to the court.

The sun rose red on the first day of the new year and stayed red for twelve months. No explanation was given by any god. The obvious fear — that it presaged another Red Plague — sent people into immediate hoarding, which caused food shortages that had nothing to do with any actual disease. The year was marked by elevated conflict and short tempers, violence spiking across every land, reconciliation proving harder than usual. By year's end the sun had returned to normal. What caused it remains unresolved.

The War of the Blood Sea began with rumors — tavern stories and court whispers about powerful artifacts and treasures hidden beneath the crimson waters of the Bay of Blood, next to the Second Lands. Irna and Shoing mobilized their navies and both set course, each convinced the other would claim something too dangerous to leave in their hands.

The bay was already known for treacherous waters. The fighting made it worse. The war lasted several months, with naval engagements, boarding actions, and heavy losses on both sides. Sailors reported ghostly galleons crewed by the spectral dead, and sea creatures rising from the depths to attack ships unprovoked — accounts numerous enough and consistent enough that they were not easily dismissed. Neither side found the artifacts. Neither side would admit the artifacts might not exist. Both sides eventually withdrew, exhausted, claiming tactical repositioning.

The bay has been feared since. Sailors do not linger in it. The ghostly ships are still reported periodically by those who pass through quickly.

The heartlands of Irna — breadbasket of the region, farmed by human and halfling communities for generations — went dry in 3823 ME. Rivers dropped. Crops failed. The drought lasted three years. Prices spiked beyond what ordinary families could sustain, civil unrest broke out in multiple cities simultaneously, and the local authorities found their ability to maintain order tested past comfortable limits.

What emerged from the crisis was unexpected: the races of Irna put aside their differences and cooperated. Communities shared what remained of their stores. Wealthy merchants opened granaries to the public. Mages pooled their abilities to summon water and coax growth from the parched ground. It was the most sustained cross-racial collaboration in Irna's history to that point, born entirely from desperation. The drought ended in 3726 ME, but the agricultural practices it forced — water conservation, sustainable farming, coordinated regional planning — outlasted the emergency and changed how Irna's heartland was managed permanently.

In 4220 ME, an organization called the Veiled Hand made itself known by making itself felt. Operating for years through infiltration, the group had placed agents in the political and social structures of Dort's major cities. When they moved, they moved everywhere at once: sowing discord, inciting unrest, manipulating events from behind maintained anonymity. Their goal was control of Dort's cities — and through those cities, the world.

The war that followed was nothing like conventional warfare. No open battles. No grand armies. Secret meetings, coded messages, hidden daggers, and the slow work of finding who in any given institution was working for the Veiled Hand. The various races, for once united by a common enemy with no racial agenda, coordinated against them — sharing intelligence, pooling resources, running down leads. The cities of Dort became contested territory fought over by intelligence against intelligence.

The war ended in 4225 ME. The Veiled Hand's plots were exposed, its agents captured or killed, its organization dismantled. Security measures across Dort were heightened in the aftermath. Espionage moved from an occasional tool of statecraft to a permanent fixture of politics. The Veiled Hand's leader was never identified. Whether the organization was truly dismantled or simply driven deeper underground has been argued about by paranoid administrators ever since.

A plague struck Harken in 4561 ME. The city's healers and alchemists worked through the outbreak without finding a cure, watching the bodies accumulate. A young priestess of Echo named Eladora had been praying with the fervor of someone who genuinely expected an answer. She got one.

One night she was filled with a radiant energy that her contemporaries described in terms they didn't have adequate words for. The next morning she walked among the sick. Everyone she touched recovered. Hundreds were cured before the day was out.

The Miracle of Harken is one of the few documented cases of direct divine intervention after the gods' post-Izon pact to remain off the Prime Plane. Whether Echo worked through Eladora as a vessel rather than manifesting directly is a theological question that Eladora herself refused to answer definitively. Her monastery became a pilgrimage site within her lifetime and grew into a major religious institution. Echo's worship spread significantly in its wake. Eladora died of old age, having reportedly never claimed personal credit for any healing she performed after that morning.

In a single week in 4998 ME, coordinated cells of a cult called the 9 Eyes executed a simultaneous operation across the entire world. Their targets: wealthy individuals — merchants, nobles, anyone with significant holdings. The captives were stripped of their gold, which was melted down and redistributed. No one was killed. The message was ideological: the existing order of wealth and power was illegitimate, and the god Qvalnx — the prophetic deity of insanity — would end it.

The 9 Eyes continued for over two centuries, conducting calculated attacks designed to destabilize rather than destroy. Their devotion to Qvalnx was absolute. Rumors circulated that their rituals included the sacrifice of infants and the consumption of their blood. Whether true or not, the elites of Dort used these rumors aggressively, understanding that lost gold wouldn't turn the common people against the cult — but the threat to their children would. The propaganda worked. Public sympathy dried up.

Qvalnx's prophetic ability proved the cult's greatest tactical advantage: forewarned of approaching threats, cells could scatter before arrest. They were nearly impossible to catch by conventional means.

Lord Frost, King of Frosthaven, ran out of patience with the 9 Eyes in 5214 ME. His solution was a specialized strike force of war mages and paladins, operating on tips about suspected cult cells. Their method was straightforward: teleport directly into the location, eliminate everyone before they could be warned by Qvalnx or escape. No warnings. No arrests. Swift, overwhelming force.

It worked. It also killed innocent people and destroyed property that had nothing to do with the cult, and the public outcry was significant. Lord Frost defended the collateral damage as the cost of actually stopping the 9 Eyes rather than chasing them indefinitely. The campaign ran for several months. By its end, it was believed that every active cell had been destroyed.

The leader of the 9 Eyes was never captured or confirmed dead. The organization has not resurfaced in any documented form. Whether that means it was destroyed, that it went quiet, or that it learned from the Cleansing and became better at hiding, no one in authority will say with confidence.