Not much is known about this lost age, besides the state it left the world in. The region now known as Monax’len has seen tribulations only the eldest of our order are told of. And even these cryptic histories neglect what these lands saw before our modern age.

You may ask why living cities above mirror dead cities below? Why the mages of Il-Atyr hold vigil in the desert despite its inhospitable conditions? Why great scars lace an otherwise peaceful land?

Speculation into this Age Swallowed by Time seems to vary by who is telling the Tale. After years of searching for a single answer, the most tireless lorekeepers in the land have come to four basic ideas that seem to permeate a whole region’s worth of differing points of view. Those theories, for ease of research, are boiled down to their basic components and compiled as follows.

The Wrath of the Divine

Stories passed down between soothsayers and prophets proclaim it was a desolation well-deserved by the heretics and blasphemers that dwelled throughout the land. They point to Divine Alaris, a city older than all, seemingly spared the fate of Old Lair and the ancient catacombs that remain of cities all over the region. The city has existed as a cornerstone of civilization and the home of the great holy families for centuries. They point to the blighted Craglands, at the heart of the arcane, and whisper that they could be delivered from their plight would they just forsake their blasphemous ways.

They claim it was their steadfast attribution to the Elder Eight and nothing else that protected their great city and its faithful. But not even they will share what the cataclysm was they were sheltered from. Perhaps it’s forbidden knowledge guarded by The Gods themselves? Perhaps the holy leaders are hiding that they don’t know at all?

The Rampage of the Beast

Since the beginning of time, mortals have told stories of monsters. Wings, fangs, tentacles, gaping maws, and heartless eyes. It follows in kind that in this great destruction, stories of great beasts flooding the land were rampant.

Many tales tell of gargantuan behemoths. It changes forms in every telling, sometimes a massive black wolf of bone and rotten fur. Sometimes a spineless creature the size of a mountain, risen from beyond our realm, covered in toxic slime and misshaping everything in its path. Stories even of mechanized juggernauts made of living metal and burning steam. In other circumstances, the lack of clarity would drive scholars to doubt entirely, if it weren’t such a common narrative in the few sources that survived the calamity. If such world-ending creatures really walked our planes, where are their bones? How did they wreak such havoc and then disappear entirely?

The Great Corruption

A different story lies in the back of our minds as mortals, one passed down from village elders and ancient ledgers. A plague. Not one of body per say. It doesn’t seem, from the details we have, that it would have been a regular sickness. No. A plague of the world. Of the land. People were sick, yes, but it seems that people were sick, animals were sick, plants were sick, dragons were sick, magic itself was allegedly “under the weather”. A great twisting of normalcy. Spells meant to heal that would hurt, plants meant to feed that would starve. Friends turning against each other, family parting ways, and livestock turning feral and unmanageable. Even the land itself seemed to bend and crack, tearing itself to shreds as time went on. Cities sank into the earth as sediment piled in on top of them, burying them in tombs lost to time and space.

Something must have been done to overwrite the corruption. But the most mysterious thing about this story, even moreso than how it all began, is how it came to an end. Perhaps it ran out of hosts, as a normal disease might? Perhaps the land built up an immunity, and we, as a world, have grown more resilient for it?

The Worlds, Unraveled

Something I have seen from a number of magical academics, even my own teachers, is that the world that was, simply disappeared. The planes aligned one day, and the people slipped through time and space. There was nothing that could be done, they say. No god or king was spared. A phenomenon of epic proportion, one that had to be strong and mysterious enough to leave such little trace. Those who study stars and those who study earth rarely see eye to eye, but on this they agree: the magical significance of this event should not be underestimated. Something aligned in The Weave, the tapestry that holds this great universe together, and everything was thrown into Chaos.

This explanation is possibly, at least to me, the most terrifying. An unavoidable fate delivered without warning or escape. If they did end up Somewhere Else, what became of them? Could they have even survived? Would they even want to survive it?

The Land's Great Sigh

It’s said there was a time following this cataclysm, whatever it truly was, where everything was still. A deep and impenetrable quiet filled every space as the dust settled from the air. This moment could have lasted a minute, or a millennia. But it was here that Monax’len breathed again.