The Silence of Aethelgard
History is not written in ink, but in the scars left upon the earth.
To the scholars of the Gilded Academy in Brennmark, Aethelgard is simply a map — a jagged puzzle of three nations that have forgotten how to fit together. They point to it with clean fingers and lecture about geopolitics and the inevitable mathematics of empire.
They have never understood that the map is not the world.
The world is a wound.
THE LANDS
In the North, the land imposes. The mountains of Ironhold run four hundred miles along the continent's spine, black basalt walls that claw at the belly of the sky. Lightning lives in the peaks permanently. The capital is not built on the mountain — it is built into it, a vertical city of stacked tiers and iron walkways suspended over thousand-foot drops. The Northern ethos fits into a single word, carved above every door and every grave: ENDURE. Their magic — the Will — is the act of forcing your body to exceed itself. It costs. Everything in the North costs.
In the West, the land waits. The canyons of Onyx Ridge are vast and ancient, the greatest of them seven miles wide and two thousand feet deep. The Western people are slow and deliberate, governed by a philosophy as simple as gravity: everything falls. Their magic — Gravity — is the most visually dramatic on the continent. Its cost is Calcification: every working turns the user's flesh incrementally to stone. The most powerful Stone Lords are ancient half-men of living granite. They are not pitied. They are revered.
In the South, the land seduces. The Sun Empire of Diathma is the richest and most treacherous nation on Aethelgard — two million people, golden avenues, cascading gardens, and a slave economy running beneath all of it. Politically, it is a knife fight conducted in evening dress. Their magic — Radiance — is thermal: heat, plasma, fire. The cost is The Fever. The body cooks from the inside.
The East is what remains when you subtract civilisation. The Glass Steppes are three hundred miles of silica sand fused into mirror-flat glass by a catastrophe no one fully remembers. The Free Clans who inhabit them are nomadic and anarchic. Their magic — Flux — is the ability to slip between moments of time. The cost is Whiplash: ruptured organs, burst vessels, a body adapted over generations to absorb damage no body should absorb.
THE SILENCE
Before the three empires, before the wars and the walls, there was the Age of Scribes.
The first rulers did not need armies. They had the Aether-Script — runes drawn in royal blood that could bind wind, shatter stone, and bend the world to a single will. For three hundred years, magic was not a myth. It was law.
Then the common people — the farmers, the miners, the servants who had spent three centuries living under the rule of men who were gods that bled — decided they had endured enough. The Scribes were hunted. Their libraries were burned. Their bloodlines were purged. The memory of the Aether-Script was declared a heresy.
The world went quiet.
The empires retreated into their corners and convinced themselves the Silence was safety.
They were wrong.
Magic is not a fire that can be stomped out. It is energy. And energy cannot be destroyed — only buried. Centuries later, it hides in the veins of those too stubborn, too royal, too fundamentally strange to let it die. It waits, pressurized by time, hungry for a drop of blood to wake it.
The Silence of Aethelgard is not a peace.
It is a held breath.
And in the year 1021, amidst the fires of a burning city, the exhale is about to begin.