"The river remembers what the world forgets."
Atheria is not entered in order. It is entered by inclination. Choose the door that answers you first.
Lore Here
When Lysera gave her light to Vaessa before unraveling, it cast the world in shadow. During that specific time of darkness, the Shadow Clan was born. Formed from the twilight itself, they emerged as a people perfectly adapted to this new reality, being neither inherently good nor bad.
In the first ages, when the divine still walked openly upon Atheria, the longer the gods remained, the more their power pressed against the world’s frail shell. The planet began to violently reject their divinity; seas rose in tides of raw radiance, forests burned without flame, and the Rootmother's great current trembled under the crushing weight of unbound resonance. The Oracle of Return issued a dire warning: if the divine remained, the song of the world would not just end, it would burst, plunging Atheria not into silence, but into screaming. To prevent the world from rupturing, each god flew out from the surface toward their realms, never to return.
As the gods exited through the atmosphere, pieces of them fractured and broke away, falling back to the surface of Atheria. Each of these falling shards carried the gods' very essence in them. When the goddess Virelia's essence fractured, it was weighted with heavy emotions, as she wept on the way up and was distraught with pain, giving meaning to the shards. To make her exile more than a painful memory, she filled the shards with resonance. When these shards hit the mountains, they embedded deep within its roots. They began to crystallize into geodes, eventually giving form to the Shardborn. Because raw divinity had to be broken apart or it would have destroyed everything, the Shardborn exist because power chose mercy over destruction.
"The Fourteenth Horizon: It has been exactly 350 years since the gods renounced the Right of the Reset and humanity signed the Treaty of Ink and Men."