A Primer for New Travelers

If this is your first visit, begin here. Alluria is a world of wonder and intrigue: hundreds of peoples sharing its continents, magic as common as weather, gods who answer, and a sky that is not a ceiling. Beyond the air, spelljammers, void-sailing vessels that cross between worlds and planes the way galleons cross oceans, tie Alluria to its neighbors near and far. The chronicle below was written for readers who grew up on the old histories. This page is everything those readers already knew, compressed, so that nothing in what follows catches you without a handhold.

Here is the world as it stood twenty years ago, told in full in chapters II through IV. Two centuries earlier, a catastrophe called the Voidfury Incursion killed most of the gods. Out of the wreckage, a group of heroes built a working order: the Mystic Conclave, an assembly of elders that governed magic and legitimacy; five great dominions that sorted the nations of the world into compacts of cultural kinship; the Domain churches, faiths kept functioning by borrowed power and administered from the Pantheon, a walking Clockwork Citadel; guilds that licensed every profession according to your dominion of birth; advocacies that lobbied for maligned peoples; and over it all the Dowelloft Trading Company, which owned half the sails on the sea. That order lasted almost exactly two hundred years, and its ending is the story this page tells.

The Eleven Nations, as the Old Histories Knew Them

Chapter VIII describes what twenty years have done to each of these. This is the baseline it assumes.

• Krydodan: The largest and most ambitious of the nations. Inventive, industrious, proudly expansionist, with a formidable military and a frontier appetite to match.
• Kor: A rugged realm of forests, tundra, and mountains. Fierce seafaring warriors, hunters, and craftsfolk with a deep bond to the wild.
• Grazan: Passionate, artistic, and fiercely independent. Its cities are living museums of plazas, cathedrals, and chronicles, governed by a blend of aristocracy and assembly.
• Milea: A maritime nation of marble temples and pastoral coasts, home to humans and minotaurs alike, devoted above all other powers to Poseidon.
• Mupalan: A continental empire ruled by an Empress, where honor, duty, and discipline order every rank of life. Both a nation and a dominion in its own right.
• Nyambe: Savannas and jungles governed by a council of tribal leaders. Renowned for oral histories, craftsmanship, and an unbroken bond with the land and its old gods.
• Haukburia: A desert land of bazaars, caravans, and grand palaces, famed for hospitality, deep spirituality, and wisdom older than its own records.
• Nithia: A reverent river culture of pyramids, obelisks, and hieroglyphs, masters of arcane lore, raised among the monuments of a far older Nithia that history had given up for dead.
• Azcana: Mainland councils and scattered isles bound by ceremony, craftsmanship, and tight community, its cities bright with stepped pyramids and vivid murals.
• Feldorheim: A land of glaciers and communal hearths, governed by councils of elders, where endurance is the first virtue taught and the last one surrendered.
• Fiskheim: The far polar nation of the squawks, a penguin people, and the thanor, a walrus people: warlike, adaptable, and joined to Feldorheim by the polar portals that link the two ends of the world.

Names the Chronicle Assumes You Know

• The Book of Creation: The ledger of reality itself, kept by the world's Builders. What is written in it exists; what is erased from it is unmade.
• The Underdark: The sunless cavern-realm beneath the surface, home to the drow, the duergar, the deep gnomes, and stranger peoples besides.
• Athas: A dying desert world beneath a swollen red sun, assumed home of the thri-kreen, the mantis-folk nomads. Three weeks out by the swiftest sails, and the chronicle explains why it no longer appears on any chart.
• The Aviary: The legendary flying citadel of the Kohkra, the eagle-folk the old histories called Aarokokra, and keeper of the Well of Worlds, a guarded nexus of pathways between planes.
• The Cube: A drifting geometric stronghold of the Autrones, a clockwork people of unknown origin, housing the crystal records of the Library of Xing Ju.
• Dinos: Alluria's small second moon, which sheltered the fey after the Incursion beneath the rule of Baba Yaga and the benevolent King Zinn.
• Mnol: The Demiplane of Commerce, a spiked orb of stone concealing cavern-cities of trade. Home of the numistians, merchants sustained by currency itself, and of the economancers, mages who tune markets the way others tune instruments.
• Murka: A distant world-empire governed by tyrannical dictator named "The Don," long Mnol's great rival in the trade lanes of this sector of space.
• The Neogi: A spider-bodied slaver empire of the void between worlds, and deservedly the most hated name in it.
• The Hutaakans/Anpuatens: A jackal-headed people the old histories counted extinct, keepers of funerary rites older than any living nation. The chronicle explains where they were.
• Castle Dowelloft: The island fortress and trading floor at the heart of the Dowelloft Trading Company's ocean-spanning enterprise.

Everything else, the Builders and the Titans, Mysterra and the Return, the chronicle explains as it goes. Read on.

I. A Chronicle of the Years

Set here in brief, before the long telling, are the hinges on which the last two centuries turned.

• 220 years past: The Voidfury Incursion. The vampire Malik Voidfury, ridden by the mad Builder Anthraxus, erases a great portion of the Book of Creation. Most of the gods are unmade, the Outer Sphere shatters, and the Builders Primus and Asmodeus destroy one another in the aftermath. Mortal heroes halt the Unmaking at terrible cost.
• The two centuries after: The Age of Dominions. A group of adventurers including the Hierophant and the founders of the Dowelloft trading company quietly patch the wound in the divine order. Five dominions rise under the Mystic Conclave, faith is kept alive through the Domain churches, and the guilds bind every profession to its homeland.
• 20 years past: Lance Dowelloft charges the Feinting GOATs with an expedition into Mysterra, the hollow world. They return carrying the Anpuaken Box, and within it the essence of Titans and of old gods, Hades and Zeus and Baba Yaga among many others.
• That same season: The dam breaks. Divine power floods back to the old pantheons, the Domain churches collapse, and the Great Beyond begins to resettle into a new shape.
• The years that followed: Athas, overrun by the Autrones, is drawn into the Outer Sphere and remade as Axis. The Aviary departs the world without farewell. Baba Yaga ascends, and the fey realm leaves the moon Dinos to anchor over Alluria as the First World. Zik'Chak's smuggled arsenal turns the Shaxan liberation.
• 10 years past: Mnol and Murka go to war over commerce rights in Alluria's sector of space.
• Recently: Murka takes the Neogi as allies, and the Shaxan Dominion enters the war on Mnol's side. The tide turns.
• Today: The Age of Titans.

II. The First Days

For most of history, what follows was known only to the Builders themselves and, much later, to the handful of mortals who pried it loose. Since the Return it is taught openly, because nothing in the modern world makes sense without it.

Before there were worlds as mortals know them, there were the Old Ones, vast and self-contained, expressing themselves in two polar forms: unfathomable Order and maddening Chaos. The Lawed Ones codified reality until their domains grew impossibly intricate, then cast their lawless cousins out into the fathomless dark. There the exiles took root, and to keep their untamed realms from dissolving back into infinity, they shaped the Elemental Titans: immense beings of storm, stone, tide, and flame who held the young worlds together. Alluria began this way. So did Athas, and Murka, and every familiar world besides.

Eons later, when the Old Ones of both temperaments had slipped into slumber, the master builders of the lawful worlds grew restless. These were the Aphanc, and they went looking for open ground. To their eyes the resident Titans of the chaotic worlds were not guardians but wellsprings of power, ripe for creative use. Most Aphanc, starved for individuality after eons among their own kind, struck out alone; Athas was raised by a single one. Alluria was raised by four who called themselves brothers: Jazirian, Primus, Asmodeus, and Anthraxus.

Jazirian, embodying Law and Good, cast the first angels, the serpentine couatls, from the essence of the Titan Apophis. Primus, the Prime Builder, shaped the Modrons from the world's own core and drafted the network of sigils that defined its moral and spiritual order. Asmodeus forged the devils from the substance of many Titans, Khumbaba among them. Anthraxus, the youngest, embodied Nature itself and spawned mortal peoples beyond counting. Siphoning the primordial power of the Titans, the four became the chief gods of the realm, and for an age Alluria was a paradise of burgeoning order.

It did not hold. The feud between Jazirian and Asmodeus tore the fabric of the universe into the adversarial concepts of good and evil, and in time Asmodeus did the impossible: he slew Jazirian, or so it was made to appear. Primus, committed above all to balance, forged lesser gods from the remaining Titans to serve as conduits, each holding a sigil that channeled the belief of ordered mortal worship back to the Builders to fuel creation. Every faith Alluria has ever known descends from that arrangement. So does every crack in it.

III. The Voidfury Incursion

Two hundred and twenty years ago, the system finally rotted through. The rule book of creation had grown too full to hold another law, the conduit gods increasingly refused to channel their power back to the Builders, and Anthraxus went quietly mad from the drudgery of maintaining it all. His brothers imprisoned him. It did not take. He slipped his cage by possessing the vampire Malik Voidfury, and by the time Primus and Asmodeus discovered his plan to erase everything and begin again, they had grown so disillusioned with their own creation that they helped him.

The Incursion erased a great portion of the Book of Creation before the mortals of Alluria stopped it. The damage was past counting. Most of the gods were simply unmade; only the oldest divinities endured, their roots too deep for the erasure to pull, along with, though no one then knew it, every power that the hidden world of Mysterra had quietly collected. The Outer Sphere shattered, whole planes of the afterlife burning away with the gods who kept them. The destabilization claimed the last two Builders as well: Primus and Asmodeus destroyed one another in its wake, and the Modrons went extinct with their maker.

Because Malik Voidfury had worn a mortal, human face, the blame settled on humankind and clung there for two centuries. Only with the Return, when the truth of Anthraxus became public, did that stain finally lift.

IV. The Age of Dominions

The heroes of that age patched what they could, and a handful of them spent the next two hundred years holding the patch in place. They were the founders of what came to be called the Dominion Concept, had found flaws and hollows in the design of reality itself, and through them they redirected the orphaned power of the dead gods toward entities and institutions they judged most beneficial to Alluria. The public face of this work was the Pantheon, the wandering Clockwork Citadel, whose army of clerics maintained the Domain churches: functioning faiths built on carefully propped scaffolding, honoring gods who were, in the oldest sense, no longer entirely there. It was a mercy and a lie in equal measure, and for a long time it worked.

The same two centuries remade the political world. As Krydodan and Mupalan expanded and smaller nations faced the choice between assimilation and annihilation, the threatened peoples answered with alliances, first the Austral Accord, then the full Dominion system: five great compacts grouping nations of cultural kinship, governed by the Mystic Conclave, an assembly of elders and scholars drawn from every dominion. The United Realms joined Krydodan, Kor, Grazan, and Milea. The Empire of Mupalan stood alone as both nation and dominion. The Austral Alliance united Azcana, Nyambe, Haukburia, Nithia, Fiskheim, and Feldorheim alongside ten thousand sovereign tribes. The Midnight Consortium sheltered the peoples who had fled the Underdark, and the League of Aliens gathered the displaced of other worlds and planes.

The dominions decided more than politics. A person's dominion of origin determined which professions they could lawfully train in, and the guilds, chartered as a branch of the Mystic Conclave, enforced those class restrictions from apprenticeship to mastery. Advocacies rose in parallel to speak for individual peoples, the Human Advocacy foremost among them, fighting the long stain of the Incursion. Above the whole arrangement, the Dowelloft Trading Company grew until it commanded half the sails on Alluria's oceans and began petitioning for dominion status in its own right. This is the world the old histories describe, and it lasted almost exactly two hundred years.

V. The Feinting GOATs and the Road Back

Twenty years ago, an anarchist company called the Feinting GOATs sat down with Lance Dowelloft, by then the last active veteran of the Incursion, and heard the truth of everything. That Jazirian had never died, but staged his death and built a refuge world called Mysterra, the hollow world, hidden in plain sight. That whatever is destroyed or lost in Alluria is gathered into Mysterra, where Jazirian, now calling himself Ka the Preserver, keeps every fallen culture exactly as it stood on the day it ended, forever, under a universal law that forbids change. That the erased gods were there. And that the Titans, diminished and tethered by Ka's law, were there too.

Lance had spent two centuries preparing a proof of concept alongside the Hutaakan people, and the pieces were already in motion. Poseidon had been carried home from Mysterra by the hero Spike (another veteran of the Voidfury incursion, long dead by the time of the GOATs) on the strength of Milean worship that had never lapsed. The essence of Anubis had been sealed into a Hutaakan-made vessel, the Anpuaken Box, and borne back to Alluria by mortal hands. The plan Lance set before the GOATs was simply that proof at scale: return to Mysterra and bring back the Titans. Not all of them. A chosen few, to stand as eternal champions for the championless, and to inject a necessary, lasting measure of chaos into a world dying of corrupted law.

The expedition succeeded past anyone's intent. When the GOATs came home, the Anpuaken Box held the essence of the chosen Titans, and riding alongside them came a host of old gods who refused to be left behind: Hades, Zeus, and Baba Yaga among many others. With them came living peoples Ka had preserved, foremost the Hutaakans and the elder Nithians, stepping back into a world that remembered them only as ruins.

VI. The Breaking of the Dam

What followed was negotiated, not accidental. The GOATs struck a bargain with the old gods, the Nithian and Antaleon powers chief among them, to break the dam the founders had built and let two stolen centuries of divine power flow back where it had first belonged. The Domain churches, deprived of their scaffolding, collapsed within a season. Scholars call the years after the Quiet Apostasy: congregations learning that their faiths had been propped constructions, some grieving, some furious, most simply migrating to gods who could now answer prayers in person. Out of the flood, four pantheons stood.

The Titans changed the ground rules of power itself. Wherever one of them stands guard, conquest and cultural absorption simply stop working; armies falter, treaties of annexation curdle, and assimilation campaigns dissolve back into their component peoples. The learned call it the Equalizing. Every major country on Alluria has lost significant power to it, because most of what the great nations owned was taken, at some point, from someone smaller. Ka, now robbed more than once, has sealed the ways into Mysterra. In twenty years no traveler has entered the hollow world, and none can say with certainty where the lost things of Alluria now go.

VII. The Titan Confederacies

Into the space the Equalizing opened, the peoples the old order never truly served began to organize. These compacts are collectively called the Titan Confederacies, whether or not a Titan sits at their head, because the Titans' return is what made them possible. They now hold seats and treaties the Mystic Conclave once monopolized, and they have altered the cultural, economic, and political structure of the world more in twenty years than the dominions managed in two centuries. The seven below are the greatest of them; smaller compacts form every year.

The Apophan Covenant (the Nithian Resurgence)

The Covenant guards the miracle of a culture returned from the dead. When the elder Nithians and the Hutaakans (now known as the Anpuakens) walked out of Mysterra, they met the surface Nithia that had grown up among their ruins, two versions of one people separated by centuries, and the Covenant is the compact that binds them together. Its patron is the Titan Apophis, the great serpent from whose essence Jazirian cast the first angels, a lineage that gives Allurian celestials a complicated reverence for him. The Covenant keeps the Anpuaken rites that carried Anubis home, holds the restored river-lands in trust, and enforces one law above all others: never again will a people of Alluria be erased and shelved. Its archivists catalog endangered cultures the way physicians triage the wounded.

The Ebon Accord

The old Midnight Consortium was a refugee's bargain: sanctuary on the surface in exchange for standing shield against the Underdark. The Ebon Accord is what its children built once they no longer needed to beg. The deep peoples, drow and duergar and deep gnomes, the fungal communes and the singing oozes, negotiate now as equals, and their leverage is the deep roads: tunnel networks that brush against the Netherworld and move goods beneath every border the surface argues about. The Accord's patron Titan dwells somewhere below the lowest surveyed dark and has never given surface records a name, which the Accord's diplomats seem to find quietly amusing. The shield-pact of the Consortium was formally dissolved years ago; the Accord defends the deep because it lives there.

The Faerie Conclave

When Baba Yaga ascended, the fey realm followed her, lifting away from the moon Dinos and anchoring over Alluria as the First World. For the first time since the Incursion, the fey are natural inhabitants and citizens of the world rather than exiles on a distant sanctuary. The Faerie Conclave is their voice in mortal affairs, presided over by the benevolent King Zinn and speaking for the seasonal courts and for peoples from pillywiggins and sprigs to sprites, trow, and the chromatic unicorns. It guards the thin places where the overlay wears through, adjudicates bargains between mortals and fey, and maintains a polite, firm distance from the Winter Court pantheon: the gods can claim kinship all they like, but the Conclave answers to its courts and to no church.

The Khumbaban Protectorate

Lance once promised that Khumbaba would fight for the islanders, and the Protectorate is that promise kept. The cinder-crowned Titan stands guard over the Azcan Isles, and within his shadow the Equalizing runs strongest: no fleet has held an occupied harbor there longer than a season in twenty years. Governance belongs to the island councils; Khumbaba merely enforces their decisions with the patience of a volcano and the finality of an eruption. The Protectorate carries an older grudge as well. Asmodeus forged devils from essence stolen out of Khumbaba, and the Titan has begun taking it back, raid by raid, from the masterless vaults of Hell. Devils do not travel to the Isles. Ever.

The Nightwatchers

The Nightwatchers hold the charter of the peaceable dead and the free created: obitu, poppets, phials, scarecrows, dhampirs, ghouls, and every thinking being the living instinctively flinch from. Their founding document was sealed in the Boneyard under the Twin Judges, Hades and Anubis, and it draws the line the old order never bothered to draw: between the free-willed, who are citizens, and the ravening, who are prey. The Watchers police that line themselves, hunting rogue undead, dismantling Void cults, and walking the plague roads and battlefields no one else will. Twenty years of grim, reliable service have bought them something rarer than affection: a grudging public trust that their members guard jealously.

The Ryujin Prefecture

Mupalan's spirits stopped asking the Empress for permission. The Ryujin Prefecture formalizes what was always true: that the kami courts, the animal peoples, the tengu flocks and shibaten riverfolk, the crane-winged benitsuru, the kitsune and the korpokkur  together constitute a nation woven through the Empire rather than beneath it. Named for the great spirit-dragon of the tides, who is honored rather than worshipped, the Prefecture negotiates shrine-lands, river rights, and festival law directly, and its standing courts have quietly become the arbiters most rural Mupalanese trust first. The Empress's diplomats call the arrangement harmonious. The Prefecture's magistrates, who keep excellent records, call it overdue.

The Dominion of Shaxa

The strangest confederacy is not of Alluria at all. Twenty years ago the thri-kreen and dozens of scattered arthropod peoples, thri-kreen and umber hulks among them, discovered common ancestry on a distant world called Shaxa, then locked in a losing war against the Neogi and worse. Zik'Chak, once of the Feinting GOATs, smuggled advanced Mysterran technology home and turned that war, liberating enslaved kin across a dozen systems and discovering kin no chart had ever recorded. Today the Shaxans stand as interplanetary defenders and regulators, and their embassy-hives on Alluria enforce a strict technological embargo: by their published judgment, the discordant mammalian minds of Alluria and worlds like it are not yet ready to wield such power. The name Dominion is their one diplomatic joke, worn like a borrowed coat. They are Alluria's shield against the dark between the stars, and its customs office.

Beyond these seven, lesser compacts multiply yearly: herd-nations, island leagues, wandering charters. The pattern is set. Power in Alluria no longer flows down from five thrones. It pools wherever people gather and a Titan's shadow falls.

VIII. The Old Powers in Twilight

None of the old institutions died. All of them shrank. The Mystic Conclave still convenes, still arbitrates, still seats its elders and scholars, but it now shares every table with confederacy envoys and commands no monopoly on legitimacy; its rulings persuade where they once bound. The five dominions persist as cultural compacts and mutual-defense leagues, and the Dominion Concept itself retains real moral force: it still stops imperialism, and it still guarantees identity and representation for any people who wants civilization on the old terms. What it lost is the power to insist. The Midnight Consortium has formally dissolved into the Ebon Accord, and the League of Aliens has thinned as its member peoples found confederacies of their own.

The Dowelloft Trading Company broke apart within a decade of its chairman's forced retirement. Half a dozen successor charters now squabble over its routes, none commanding a third of the old fleet, and the golden age of piracy this created shows no sign of ending; some pirate crews fly confederacy letters of marque, and most fly nothing at all. Castle Dowelloft survives as a neutral bourse where the successors trade insults and cargo manifests. The company's famous petition for dominion status died quietly, unmourned.

The great nations remain great by any older measure, and every one of them is less than it was:

• Krydodan: Still the largest of the United Realms and the most inventive, its frontier ambitions now stop politely at every Titan's shadow. Its shipyards profit handsomely from the piracy it publicly deplores.
• Mupalan: The Empress reigns serenely over an empire that no longer speaks for its own spirits. Court etiquette has absorbed the Ryujin Prefecture the way it absorbs everything: by pretending it was the plan.
• Nyambe: The tribal council has gained enormous prestige as the living heart of the Ancient Pantheon's revival; pilgrims travel there to hear priests whose gods were never propped up by anyone.
• Kor: Its raiders have become the finest convoy escorts money can hire, which Korians consider the same profession at better pay.
• Grazan: Politically diminished and artistically ascendant. The great Grazanian chronicles, operas, and murals of the Return set the version of events most of Alluria believes.
• Haukburia: The old rites returned to the bazaars and caravanserais as if two centuries had been an intermission; its elders hold honored seats in the Ancient Pantheon's councils.
• Milea: Vindicated beyond argument. The Milean devotion to Poseidon that never lapsed is what made the first return possible, and the nation has become a pilgrimage center for every faith learning how to worship a present god.
• Nithia: Transformed most of all. The surface nation now shares its river with the elder Nithia returned from Mysterra: two versions of one culture, centuries apart, reconciling under the Apophan Covenant's patient supervision.
• Azcana: Its isles stand under Khumbaba's guard and its mainland councils coordinate closely with the Protectorate; no nation adapted to the Equalizing faster, having wanted it longest.
• Feldorheim: The polar portals have never been busier. The Winter Court found its warmest welcome in the coldest lands, and Ded Moroz's shrines now stand in half the longhouses of the north.
• Fiskheim: The squawks and thanor received the new winter gods with polar pragmatism: honors were exchanged, fishing rights were clarified, and life went on, now with better festivals.

IX. Guilds and Advocacies

The guilds survived the old order by ceasing to be its instrument. No longer chartered through the Mystic Conclave, they neither sort members by dominion nor bind anyone to a sanctioned class; the Tinkerer's Guild, the Rogue's Guild, and their hundred siblings carry on as independent trade fraternities, networks of training, tools, dues, and gossip, influential in the manner of merchant associations rather than ministries, and a young Allurian can now train in any profession their talent allows. The advocacies fared worse. The confederacies accomplish with treaties and Titans what the advocacies attempted with petitions, and the public revelation that a mad Builder, not human ambition, drove the Voidfury Incursion completed the Human Advocacy's central mission for it. A few advocacies linger on as legal-aid societies and festival committees; most have folded their banners into confederacy ministries or simply, quietly, disbanded.

X. The Four Pantheons

When the dam broke, faith reorganized itself around the powers that had always been real. Four pantheons now anchor Allurian worship, and the citadel that once regulated every church regulates none of them.

The Nithian Pantheon

Restored from Mysterra alongside their people, the Nithian gods returned with their temples already standing and their rites unbroken by so much as a day, preserved exactly as Ka had shelved them. Anubis came home first, borne in the Anpuaken Box, and holds a place of honor as the pantheon's opener of ways. Nithian worship centers on judgment, the river's cycle, and preservation rightly practiced: keeping what matters while letting the living change, a creed sharpened to a fine point against Ka's eternal taxidermy. Its priesthoods work hand in glove with the Apophan Covenant, and its funerary courts are respected far beyond Nithian lands.

The Antaleon Pantheon

The Antaleon gods returned loudly, which surprised no one who knew the stories. Poseidon was the first god home, drawn back from Mysterra years before the expedition by the unlapsed devotion of Milea, and his return was the proof that made the whole design credible. Zeus and Hades followed with the GOATs, and around them the storm-lit family of old Antaleon worship reassembled: sky and sea, hearth and forge, the dead and the vine. It is a demanding, theatrical, intensely present pantheon, fond of omens and arguments, and its temples double as courts, theaters, and lighthouses across the United Realms.

The Winter Court

The Winter Court is the newest pantheon and insists, correctly, that it is also among the oldest. Baba Yaga and Ded Moroz ascended to full godhood in the years after the Return, and their rising carried several demigods up with them, Svarozhich, Wodan, and Mat Zemlya among them: powers of hearthfire, the wild hunt, and the patient earth. The Court governs the turning of the year, the bargain of the long dark, and the courtesies owed to whatever knocks in winter. It keeps deep, complicated kinships with the Faerie Conclave and the First World, and its liturgies read equally as prayers and as contracts. In Feldorheim and Fiskheim it is already the faith of the majority.

The Ancient Pantheon

The oldest gods needed no returning, because they had never entirely left. The divinities of the world's eldest cultures, Nyambe, the Azcan Isles, and old Haukburia among them, were the ones whose roots proved too deep for the Incursion's erasure, and they endured two centuries of the Domain churches' polite scaffolding without accepting a plank of it. Freed of the mock religions that had crowded them, their worship has surged back into the open across the lands of the former Austral Alliance. The Ancient Pantheon is less a family than a parliament of very old neighbors: ancestor courts, sky-keepers, jaguar lords, and oasis saints, unified chiefly by the shared memory of having outlasted everything.

XI. The Great Beyond Remade

The Voidfury Incursion did not merely kill gods; it burned away much of the Outer Sphere they kept, leaving ruin where whole afterlives had been. For two centuries that wreckage lay fallow behind the founders' dam. When the dam broke, the Great Beyond began to resettle, and the rebuilt colleges of Alluria, drawing fresh charts, gave the settled shape fresh names. The map below is the cosmos as it stands twenty years on: part survival, part reconstruction, part unabashed land rush.

The Inner Sphere

• The Universe: The material expanse, called on older charts the Material Plane. It holds Alluria and its moons, Mnol, distant Murka, far Shaxa, and the empty berth where Athas once hung.
• The Elemental Planes: The oldest surviving work of the Titans, the coherence the Lawless Ones commanded them to impose. To the ancient courts of Air, Earth, Fire, and Water, the restructuring added two more: Metal, calved from Athas when the Autrones drew that world's tantalum-threaded core-stuff into the Outer Sphere, and Wood, which took root when the First World anchored over Alluria and green growth overflowed the overlay.
• Creation's Forge: The fount once charted as the Positive Energy Plane. The surviving pages of the Book of Creation are said to burn here without being consumed, and every new soul is a spark off that fire.
• The Void: The scar once charted as the Negative Energy Plane, grown deeper and hungrier since the Incursion; where the erased pages went, and where they pull. Void cults court it. The Nightwatchers hunt them.
• The Netherworld: The dim country once called the Plane of Shadow. The Ebon Accord's deep roads brush against it, which is why deep freight arrives faster than surface freight and asks no questions.
• The First World: The fey realm, lifted from the moon Dinos and anchored over Alluria like breath on glass since Baba Yaga's ascension. Its overlay is why the thin places multiply, and why the Faerie Conclave keeps wardens.
• The Ethereal Plane: The mist between, unchanged. Some things are too simple to break.

The Astral Sea

Between the spheres, the silver Astral is scarred and strange. The husks of erased gods drift there like dead leviathans, and around them has grown a grim economy of salvage crews, relic-prospectors, and things that wear salvage crews afterward. The Shaxan Dominion patrols the shipping reaches. It does not patrol the husks. Nothing does.

The Outer Sphere

The Outer Sphere took the worst of the Incursion, and twenty years of reconstruction have made it the strangest real estate in existence.

• Axis: The plane of perfected order, and the newest. Athas, overrun by the Autrones and dying under its red sun, was drawn whole into the Outer Sphere and remade as the lawful anchor the cosmos had lacked since Primus fell. Scholars note that the new name rings of the old one; the Autrones do not comment. At the plane's core, the Cube pursues its great work: rebuilding Primus himself a body from the world's own substance. It is not finished. Everyone with sense hopes it stays that way a while longer.
• The Boneyard: Raised jointly by Hades and Anubis, the Twin Judges, where every soul is weighed on two scales that have never yet disagreed. The Nightwatchers' charter hangs in its gatehouse.
• Heaven, Nirvana, and Elysium: The bright realms, refounded by returned and surviving gods upon celestial ruins. The oldest spires of Heaven coil rather than climb, in honor of the couatls who came first and of the Titan whose essence they were cast from.
• Hell:  The archdevils' war of succession is two centuries old and freshly urgent, because Khumbaba has begun raiding the infernal vaults to reclaim the stolen Titan-essence from which devils were forged, and Hell cannot agree on who is entitled to stop him.
• Abaddon: Anthraxus's old haunt, now a hungering waste where daemons sieve the residue of the Unmaking for anything that still ends. Travelers do not.
• The Outer Rifts: Once charted as the Abyss, now swollen with the wreckage of every plane the Incursion destroyed. Demons breed in the ruins, but they are no longer alone: returned gods raise new realms on the rubble, Autrone survey-frames grid the stable reaches, and confederacy charter-shrines stake claims. The colleges call it planar homesteading. The demons call it lunch arriving.
• The Maelstrom: The formless sea from which the Lawless Ones first raised the worlds, resurgent now that Titans wake and walk. Its proteans regard the Titan Confederacies with something adjacent to family feeling, which the confederacies find useful and unsettling in equal measure.

Mysterra

The hollow world appears on no chart, because Ka permits no chart to hold it. Since the theft of the Titans, the ways in have sealed; in twenty years no traveler has crossed, and none can say whether the lost things of Alluria still arrive there or drift, unclaimed, somewhere between. Ka keeps his frozen museum of everything that ever ended, and waits, and does not change. He is very good at waiting.

The Laws Rewritten

The restructuring reached deeper than geography. When the sigils released, the old brands of good and evil stopped marking souls from outside; the colleges retired the ninefold compass of alignment and speak now of edicts and anathema, of the holy and the unholy as callings a soul takes up rather than natures stamped upon it. Magic reorganized in the same convulsion. The eight scholastic schools, always more bureaucracy than truth, collapsed with the Conclave monopoly that maintained them, and casters now describe four traditions: arcane, divine, occult, and primal. The psionic disciplines, which never bowed to the schools in the first place, carried on unbothered and slightly smug. Practitioners of the older generation insist the magic itself never changed, only the paperwork. The magic, characteristically, declines to confirm.

XII. The Wider Sky

Shaxa Ascendant

The liberation of Shaxa is the great foreign epic of the age. What began with Zik'Chak's smuggled Mysterran arsenal ended with the Neogi broken across a dozen systems and thousands of enslaved arthropod peoples freed, many discovering kin they had never known on worlds that had never met. The Shaxans emerged from victory with a conviction and a mandate: advanced technology must never again pool in the wrong hands. They enforce that conviction as interplanetary defenders and regulators, and their judgment on Alluria is published, polite, and immovable. The embargo has a thriving shadow, of course. Offworld contraband moves through pirate holds and deep roads alike, and confiscation raids by Shaxan wardens are now a fixture of port gossip.

The Mnol and Murka War

For ten years the Demiplane of Commerce and the world-empire of Murka have fought over commerce rights in Alluria's sector of space: Mnol's economancers holding that trade is an ecosystem to be cultivated, Murka's cartels holding that it is territory to be owned. The war beggared both. Blockades strangled the spelljammer lanes, insurance devoured profit, and a decade of decline has humbled two powers that once thought themselves indispensable. The turn came recently, and Murka authored it: desperate for allies, the empire embraced the remaining villains of the known universe, the Neogi foremost among them, and the Shaxan Dominion, which had long ruled the war not their problem for the time being, revised its ruling. Shaxan hive-fleets now fight beside Mnol, the tide has turned, and Murkan markets have begun pricing in defeat.

The Aviary's Silence

Almost two decades ago the Aviary, the flying citadel of the Kohkra and keeper of the Well of Worlds, slipped out of this plane of existence entirely, without farewell or explanation, and has not been seen since. The Kohkra who remained, unhoused from their citadel's long shadow, have diversified into several distinct heritages within a single generation, a radiation so swift that scholars argue whether the Aviary's departure unlocked something in their blood or finally stopped suppressing it. The Kohkra themselves, asked which, tend to answer with a shrug and a new set of feathers. The Well of Worlds went with the citadel. Whatever doors it opened now open somewhere else.

XIII. Locations of Note, Revisited

The old histories closed with a tour of landmarks. Twenty years have rearranged them.

Castle Dowelloft

Still the busiest bourse on the ocean, no longer anyone's capital. The successor charters trade cargo and insults beneath its banners, pirates fence their takings two harbors over, and the company's old ambitions gather dust in the map room.

The Cube

Gone from Allurian skies. The Autrones' drifting stronghold was last sighted making for the new plane of Axis, the Library of Xing Ju presumably still humming within it. Sages who once tracked its wanderings for luck now track rumors of what it builds at the plane's core.

Dinos

The little second moon kept its forests and lost their lights. When the fey realm rose to become the First World, the enchanted groves emptied in a single miraculous season, and King Zinn's old hall now stands open to the stars. Pilgrims still climb to it. They report that the silence is not empty, merely patient, and that it is polite to leave before moonset.

Mnol

The Labyrinthine Bazaar endures the war the way it endures everything: by repricing it. Whole merchant-caverns now deal in convoy insurance, prize-court claims, and embargo-adjacent curiosities, and the economancers have shifted the realm's layout eleven times in a decade in pursuit of maximum economic potential under fire. The numistians remain perfect hosts. And if you have read this far, the code word is tantalum, for bonus experience.

The Pantheon

The Clockwork Citadel still walks the world with every full moon, and that is nearly all that can be said with confidence. Its Domain churches are dissolved, its army of clerics has scattered or gone strange, and the dwarven Hierophant has become a distant memory. Visitors describe halls that rearrange themselves mid-audience and a disembodied voice behind the gears. The Mystic Conclave no longer answers for the citadel. The citadel has stopped asking.

XIV. Alluria Today

Twenty years after the Return, Alluria is a world unclenching. Power that pooled for two centuries in five thrones now runs in a hundred channels: confederacy halls and pantheon temples, guild fraternities and island councils, embassy-hives and moonlit courts. The great nations remain great and have learned, with variable grace, to ask. The Titans stand where they are needed and refuse, with geological indifference, to be owned. Above it all the sky is crowded and watched: a war turning, an embargo holding, a sealed hollow world keeping its silence.

It is not a safe age. Hell is at war, the Void is hungrier, the Rifts are a land rush, and somewhere at the core of Axis a body is being built for a god of total order. But it is, for the first time in living memory, an open one. The dam is broken. The water goes where it will. And every road out of your front door now leads somewhere the old maps never dared to draw.

Welcome back to Alluria: a world of wonder and intrigue, twenty years wiser and no less dangerous. Bring a lantern.