Vespera is a fantasy setting of kingdoms, cathedrals and long memory, set upon a single world in the late afternoon of its history. It has elves and dwarves, demons and dragons, and not one of those words means what the reader expects it to.
Vespera — the evening. Not the night, which has not come; not the dusk, which is approaching. The hour when the light is still good and the shadows have begun to lengthen.
How to read it
The inhabitants are not reliable narrators, and the setting is built upon that.
The chronicles of the Old World were written by men who had inherited a vocabulary older than their understanding of it. When a chronicle says demon, it means a thing out of the Astral for which no human tongue has a word. When it says elf, it means a people who were ancient when the first human kingdom was raised, and who would not recognise the name. When it says dragon, it may mean almost anything, and the dwarves who kept the better records were careful to write either a dragon or a demon and leave it there.
None of this is deception. It is what happens when a civilisation survives its own scholarship. Nearly everything the Old World believes about itself is half true, and the false half is generally the more interesting.
The Old World
The setting is one continent, called Endaran by its elder inhabitants and the Old World by everyone else. Across the western ocean lie the Westerlands, known to the eastern kingdoms chiefly by rumour and by the occasional ship. Southward, beyond the Kara River, stand the troll empires of Gantumba, which have twice come north in force. Between the two runs the Seren: a desert now almost impassable, which was open savannah eight thousand years ago, and which several nations have a story to explain.
It is a world living in the aftermath of an empire. Sarcera ruled from the hills of Berland to the Daracian Sea for more than a thousand years, and has been gone for fourteen hundred. In its place stands a patchwork of successor realms — Thetland, Ascania, Ancora, Darde, Berland, Lythe, Azade and the Eastern Kingdoms — held loosely together by the Council of Kings and the Church of the Eternal Sun, and divided by very nearly everything else.
Two monuments dominate the map. A wall runs sea to sea across the south, raised by a Sarceran emperor who had watched his predecessor spend twenty years and a good share of the treasury trying to settle the southern question by arms. He concluded that the forests and swamps beyond were not worth what they would cost to hold, and that a border kept was the cheaper article. In the narrow sense he was right. What nobody weighed was that the provinces beyond the wall had been the empire’s gateway to the wider world and its chief source of invention, and that an empire which shuts its own door begins, quite quietly, to stagnate.
The second monument is Haldorak, the greatest city the dwarves ever built, which closed its gates two thousand years ago without explanation and has sent no word since.
The common tongue is Thetch, spread by merchants rather than by armies.
The received chronology
What follows is the reckoning held by the learned of the Old World, and taught in its schools. Like every such chronology it grows more confident as it approaches the present, and more generous with its numbers as it recedes from it; the two elder ages are not history, and were never meant to be taken as history. Both are nonetheless the memory of something, kept for forty thousand years by people who had no means of understanding what they were keeping.
| Age | As reckoned | What is held to have happened |
|---|---|---|
| The Age of Gods | from about 40,000 years ago | Divine powers descend upon a world then called Rhun and set it in order, appointing seven guardians — associated with the Sun, the Moon, Corcas, Sothos, Romon, Eracas and Larcan. Over ten thousand years the guardians shape the races of the world. The seventh and brightest, delving into what lies beyond the heavens in order to arm himself against it, is warped by the study into the thing he feared. The age ends in a war that breaks the world in two and sinks its central lands for ever. He is imprisoned; his servants, the Demon Lords, are not. |
| The Age of Myth | ~22,000 to ~11,000 years ago | The sorcerer-king Anu opens a gate out of the shattered world. The Demon Lord Marach raises an empire over the ruins of the south and east, and is at last thrown down — by a hero, it is said, though learned men have disputed it for three thousand years, not least because his influence has never wholly gone. The first kingdom of men and the first of the dwarves, Dhur’ad, rise and fall together in his war. The greater part of what is now told as legend is set in this age. |
| The Age of Mortals | ~11,000 years ago to the present | Ordinary history, in four parts and a fifth still running. |
| — The Aftermath | ~11,000 to ~7,000 | The scattering. The first dwarven city that can be called historical, Halbrad, rises and falls to something the chronicles decline to name, and the dwarves withdraw north to build Haldorak. The Seren ceases to be grassland. |
| — The Dawn of Man | ~7,000 to ~3,000 | The age of migrations. The Anân come down from the northern forests to the Caphenthes Plain and raise Ûrdâg upon the Ethoras; the Talud arrive after them, take their cities, gods and customs, and replace their language entirely. Ûrdâg becomes Raphon, and the Anân are forgotten within a few centuries of having invented nearly everything. |
| — The Classical Age | ~3,000 to ~1,400 | Sarcera: a thousand years of empire, ending in a long stagnation of its own making. The War of the Waning Moon brings the goatmen out of the south. The Church of the Eternal Sun is made state doctrine under an emperor whose greatness proves to be the death-throes of the thing he restored. |
| — The Middle Ages | ~1,400 to ~300 | Gothic tribes take the imperial heartland and claim the inheritance. The trolls of Gantumba launch two Great Conquests, the second reaching the edge of the far east before it dies in the desert. The Council of Kings is formed. |
| — Recent history | ~300 years ago to now | The War of Six Crowns settles the shape of the modern north, binds the last independent kingdoms into the Council, and makes Berland a naval power to rival Ancora. By tradition it is this war, and not any event of statecraft, that divides the middle age from the present one. |
The division itself is worth noticing. A chronology of successive ages before the present one — each longer, grander and less documented than the last, ending in a catastrophe that clears the ground for the next — is the shape every learned tradition of the Old World arrives at, whether it counts its ages in gods, in metals or in kings. That the traditions agree is taken by the Church as proof. It is taken by the dwarves as evidence of nothing more than a common source, which they consider a different matter entirely.
The peoples
The names men give their neighbours are rarely the names those neighbours use.
- Men, in a great many nations, across both continents. Their own origin is unknown to them, though the physical likeness between the races suggests one.
- Dwarves, out of Haldorak. They keep Adranal — chronicles — and are in consequence the most reliable historians in the world. They live two hundred years, and some of them sleep through the winter.
- The Taldar, called Hulden in the common tongue and elves by almost everyone. Taller and fairer than men, with short tufted tails and prominent canines, they keep to the forests where forests remain and hide what marks them out where they do not.
- Gnomes, the smallest of the mortal races at a little over two feet, subterranean, ubiquitous, and generally regarded as vermin. The names goblin, kobold and hob are all insults for the same people.
- The Hadur, the goatmen. They were men once, and were made into this; what remains of that knowledge is held mostly by them.
- Trolls, so called, who hold the whole of Gantumba under the Fakal, and who have a classical civilisation of their own that the north has never troubled to study.
- The Taer’zal of the Westerlands, four-legged and maned, who serve as their own cavalry.
- And the Kar’aqa, reclusive and singular; the Necks of the coasts and rivers; and the last giants, in the far north.
Magic
Magic in Vespera is not a discipline of spells but a property of the world. The material universe is permeated by aether, and souls are a dense and unstable concentration of it; to work magic is to reach the incorporeal and reshape the corporeal through it.
Aether obeys something much like entropy. A soul without a vessel disperses into the astral sea, which means a world cannot produce complex souls at all unless something holds them together long enough. This world has such a thing. It is asleep beneath the ground, it has been there longer than any record, and a good deal of what the Old World calls the spirit realm is its dream.
Still to come
This page covers the present age. The deep past as it actually occurred, the greater universe, the nature of the Astral, and the ages before this one will be treated on their own pages.
The world itself has no settled name. Vespera is the name of the age.