This is the age of legend, carved from ice and told in whispers around dying fires. The first blow was The Great Frost—not a storm, but a new state of being. The magical winter descended, locking the world in a crystalline grip, forcing the Dvergar (Dwarves) into deep hibernation within their mountain holds. Against this desolation walked Lorik the Unfrozen, a wanderer of colossal human stature. He survived not by brute force, but by wisdom, forging bonds between scattered tribes and building the First Bridge across the Chasm of Howling Winds. He taught that survival lay in shared knowledge and cooperation, planting the spiritual seeds for the guilds and hunters to come.
Yet this age held a second, darker truth. In the shadow of the tyrannical empire of Drakmor the Sunderer, the sorceress Revna, the Mother of Divergence, made a horrific choice. She deliberately forged her five children into distinct, asymmetrical weapons of sabotage, seduction, and terror, sacrificing their unity to shatter the empire from within. After victory, she abandoned them to become a scattered "storm of blades." Her legend established a brutal philosophy: strategic division and hidden power are greater than naive unity. Thus, from the very beginning, the world was defined by a fundamental tension: Lorik's dream of connection versus Revna's doctrine of strategic division.
This is the age of early ambition and catastrophic failure. Hope stirred with The Awakening of the Dvergar (c. 35 BH), as they emerged from stone as the first Iarn-Greppar (Dwarf-Giants), masters of geothermal fire. They and their allies attempted to build: the Sun-Ridge Commune blossomed as a partnership between proto-Ashen Crest and Free-Soul ideals, and the wise Code of Vigg sought to bring law to the nascent giant clans. But all experiments failed, fatally unable to reconcile the growing chasm between giant and Lítillfólk.
This tension exploded into The War of Broken Oaths. Led by the brutal philosophy of Skarl the Unbent (proto-Frost-Fang), those who saw empathy as weakness moved to erase the dream of unity. They first razed the Sun-Ridge Commune, then laid siege to the great library-fortress of Haugaeldr. Skarl's final act was not conquest, but erasure; his shamans triggered a volcanic cataclysm, burying the library, its master Mokkur, and the lost art of Rune-Shrinking under a river of lava. This destruction in 1 AH (After Haugaeldr) became the world's epoch. Its immediate aftermath was The First Apocalypse: The Great Famine (3-7 AH), a silent, starving die-off that seared a single lesson into the survivors' souls: survival demands control, order, and sometimes, brutality.
This is the long, grim struggle to rebuild in a broken world. The giant nations solidified around their traumas: the rigid Stone-Shield Commonwealth, the industrial Ashen Crest Dynasty, the elitist Sun-Splinter Throne, the militant Frost-Fang Clans, and the nomadic Free-Soul Collective. This fractured era was marked by pivotal struggles: The Silent Rebellion (220 AH) and The War of a Thousand Cuts proved the Lítillfólk a political and military force, while The First Sighting of the Hrímþursar (310 AH) revealed the Frost-Grasp as a sentient, corrupting enemy, not merely a cold wind.
Now, in the Modern Age (750 AH - Present - 867 AH), tensions reach a breaking point. The frost deepens, beasts grow bolder, and in 797 AH, the Ashen Crest Dynasty ignited the War of Great Reclamation to seize the Scarred Frontier—the very ruins of the old Sun-Ridge Commune—from the Frost-Fang Clans. It is a war over a poisoned heirloom, a land with three conflicting claims of ownership.
The present year, 867 AH, finds the world on a knife's edge. The war grinds on, the Hrímþursar gather strength, and all powers sense a final, defining confrontation looming in the perpetual twilight. The ancient sagas of Lorik's unity and Revna's divergence are no longer just stories; they are the two paths forward, and the giants must choose one before the gathering storm breaks.