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Riftlands
A Historical Account of Evermere and the Rupture
Compiled from the Archives of Thornwall and the Ashtongue Lectures at Dunnhaven
Three centuries ago, the world now known as Riftlands bore the name Evermere.
Evermere was a high medieval civilization shaped by ritual magic. Power flowed into the world through primordial tides from five outer realms: Heaven, Hell, the Underworld, the Great Abyss, and the Wyldelands. These forces were neither inherently benevolent nor malevolent. They represented distinct cosmic principles — currents of metaphysical law as fundamental and indifferent as gravity or erosion — and the peoples of Evermere learned, over centuries, to draw upon them through disciplined tradition.
Magical practice was formal and deliberate. It relied on rite, preparation, lineage, and place. Rituals were typically conducted at sites of accumulated resonance: shrines built over generations, ley-confluences mapped by ancestral surveyors, or threshold locations where the veil between Evermere and the outer realms grew naturally thin. A ritual performed at an unprepared site might fail, or worse, resolve in ways the caster could not predict.
No race held exclusive dominion over craft or industry; artisanship and statecraft were universal. What differed were philosophical alignments toward particular outer realms — traditions shaped by geography, cultural memory, and centuries of accumulated magical infrastructure.
The Five Realms and Their Adherents
The Wyldelands — Elves and Gnomes
The Wyldelands are a realm of relentless organic process: growth without limit, adaptation without sentiment, ecosystems of staggering complexity governed by no intelligence but their own momentum. To channel the Wyldelands is to negotiate with something alive but not conscious — a tide of biological potential that rewards attentiveness and punishes rigidity.
Elven traditions, rooted in the great forest-cities of the Thalwood Expanse and the coastal sanctuaries of Seladrine, emphasized slow cultivation. Their rites could take seasons to complete — a single working might involve the planting of specific flora, the positioning of living wards, and the patient observation of growth patterns that revealed the Wyldelands' current temperament. Elven ritualists, known as Rootsingers, did not command nature so much as propose arrangements to it.
Gnomish traditions diverged in method but not in source. The gnomes of the Coppervein Reaches and the southern hill-warrens favored rapid, iterative experimentation — small workings tested in sequence, adapted, and recombined. Where elves cultivated, gnomes tinkered. Their ritual devices, part-grown and part-constructed, were famous across Evermere: seed-engines that accelerated crop yields, spore-lamps that illuminated without flame, living bridges that repaired their own fractures. The gnomish term for their discipline, roughly translated, was "the patient fumble."
Heaven — Dwarves
Heaven, in the cosmology of Evermere, is not a place of reward. It is a realm of absolute structural integrity — pure order expressed as light, geometry, and covenant. To invoke Heaven is to impose permanence on a world defined by entropy.
The dwarves were Heaven's most devoted students. Operating from their great undercities — Greymantle Hold, Sunken Karak, and the fortress-seminary of Dûn Aethel — they developed radiant rites expressed through ordered sigils, sworn oaths, and structural sanctification. Dwarven magic was architectural in nature. A dwarven ritualist did not cast a spell; they consecrated a space, binding celestial law into stone, metal, or contract.
The most enduring expression of this tradition was the Oathforge system: a network of binding agreements between dwarven holds, each sealed with radiant sigils that made the terms of the oath metaphysically enforceable. An oath broken under Oathforge sanction did not merely carry social consequence — the sigils themselves exacted a toll, manifesting as structural failure in the oathbreaker's holdings, illness in their bloodline, or the slow dissolution of enchantments they had helped create.
Dwarven architecture from this period remains the most intact in the modern Riftlands. The radiant wards embedded in their stonework have proven remarkably resistant to Rift corruption.
Hell — Trolls
Hell is a realm of dominion and endurance — raw, hierarchical power that respects nothing except the capacity to wield it. It does not seduce. It tests. To channel Hell is to enter a contest of will with a force that treats submission as evidence of unworthiness.
Troll societies, organized into competing Bloodhold Confederacies across the northern highlands and the volcanic Scorian Plateau, developed infernal pact traditions centered on strength, endurance, and sovereign authority. Their rituals were transactional by nature: a troll invoking Hell offered something — labor, pain, territory, years of life — and received power commensurate with the sacrifice. The greater the cost borne willingly, the greater the return.
Troll ritualists, called Branded, bore permanent marks from their pacts — scarification, bone-growths, discoloration of the skin — which served as both record and proof of what they had endured. A heavily scarred Branded was not pitied but respected. Their marks demonstrated a lifetime of negotiation with a force that granted nothing freely.
The trolls' most significant magical tradition was the Chain of Dominion, a hierarchical system in which a chieftain's pact with Hell extended partial protection to their sworn subordinates. This created enormous political incentive to consolidate under powerful leaders but also meant that a chieftain's death could leave hundreds suddenly exposed to the raw weight of unpaid debts.
The Great Abyss — Goblins
The Great Abyss is not darkness. It is the absence of everything — a realm of dissolution, entropy, and the silence that exists between defined things. Where Heaven insists on permanence, the Abyss insists on the eventual failure of all structure. It does not destroy; it reveals the impermanence already present.
The goblins, a people widely underestimated by the other races of Evermere, became the Abyss's most disciplined students. Operating from their subterranean archive-cities — Neth Volguur, the Hollow Libraries, and the famous Obsidian Lens observatory — goblins developed a tradition of study that other races found deeply unsettling.
Goblin ritualists, known as Unravelers, specialized in the identification and exploitation of structural weakness. They could detect flaws in enchantments, predict the failure points of magical constructs, and, in their most advanced workings, temporarily dissolve the boundaries between categories of matter. Their magic was quiet, precise, and profoundly effective — and it made their neighbors nervous.
The goblins maintained the most comprehensive libraries in Evermere. Their archival tradition, the Doctrine of Measured Forgetting, held that the truest understanding of a thing came from studying what it lost over time. Goblin scholars catalogued not just knowledge but the decay of knowledge — tracking which texts degraded, which traditions were forgotten, and which ideas lost coherence across generations. They considered entropy a source of information rather than a threat.
The Underworld — Humans
The Underworld is a realm of memory and mortality — the accumulated residue of everything that has lived, decayed, and been partially forgotten. It is not a place of ghosts, exactly, but a vast sedimentary landscape where the impressions of the dead compress into new forms of half-awareness. To channel the Underworld is to negotiate with the weight of the past.
Humans, the most numerous and geographically dispersed of Evermere's peoples, most often practiced rites aligned with the Underworld. Their traditions were remarkably varied — the Pallid Convocation of Rivenmark practiced ancestral communion through elaborate funerary architecture, while the coastal Ashwalkers of Greymouth used cremation rites to distill the memories of the dead into navigational knowledge. The hill-people of the Thornwall Marches bound the impressions of fallen warriors into their weapons, creating blades that remembered how to fight.
Human magic's greatest strength was its accessibility. The Underworld responded to grief, memory, and the weight of lived experience — emotions common to all mortals. A human ritualist did not need generations of accumulated infrastructure; they needed a connection to something lost. This made human magic both the most widely practiced and the most variable in quality. A grieving parent performing a remembrance rite at a roadside cairn drew on the same realm as the Pallid Convocation's grand necropolises — the difference was in precision, scale, and the depth of tradition supporting the work.
These distinctions between races were cultural rather than biological. Affinity emerged from tradition and accumulated knowledge, not destiny. History records numerous individuals who adopted the magical traditions of other peoples — though doing so typically required decades of study and the willingness to abandon one's inherited framework entirely.
The Waning Veil
In the century preceding the fall, irregularities began to surface.
Rituals resolved more quickly than expected. Summonings required less preparation. Threshold sites that had been stable for generations began exhibiting unpredictable fluctuations in resonance. Isolated tears in the air were reported in rural regions and deep caverns — unstable breaches that collapsed without intervention, leaving behind faint scarring visible only to trained practitioners.
The first recorded breach occurred in the Dellmire Fenlands, approximately ninety years before the Rupture. A peat-farmer named Careth Unn reported a "window of pale fire" hovering above a drainage ditch. It lasted three hours before sealing itself. The local magistrate's report, preserved in the Thornwall Archives, notes that the vegetation within a ten-meter radius of the breach grew at roughly four times its normal rate for the following season — consistent with uncontrolled Wyldelands exposure.
Over the following decades, similar incidents accumulated. A collapsed mineshaft in Greymantle Hold was found to contain perfectly geometric crystal formations that had not been present during the previous survey — radiant leakage from a momentary Heavenly breach. A fishing village on the Selkmar Coast reported that their dead would not stay still for three days following an unseen event offshore — a likely Underworld incursion. The Scorian Plateau experienced a series of "dominion tremors" in which local wildlife organized into rigid hierarchies for hours at a time before reverting to normal behavior — Hell, bleeding through.
A number of scholars warned that the veil separating Evermere from the outer realms was thinning. The most prominent among them was Tessavine of Neth Volguur, a goblin Unraveler who published a treatise titled On the Structural Fatigue of Bounded Planes approximately sixty years before the Rupture. Tessavine argued that the veil was not a wall but a living membrane, and that centuries of ritual extraction had weakened it in the same way that over-mining weakened stone. Her models predicted progressive destabilization culminating in "cascade failure" — multiple simultaneous breaches exceeding the veil's capacity to self-repair.
Tessavine's work was debated in academic circles but not widely heeded. The Conclave of Rethmar, a cross-racial body of prominent ritualists, issued a formal response acknowledging the data but concluding that ritual discipline would compensate for any fluctuation in magical tide. They recommended monitoring, not restriction.
In retrospect, these anomalies marked the beginning of what historians now call the Waning Veil — and Tessavine's models proved remarkably accurate.
The Schism of Evermere
Political fracture followed philosophical divergence.
The thinning veil presented two fundamentally opposed interpretations of the future.
Humans, elves, and dwarves increasingly advocated for Ascendance — a cooperative synthesis of traditions aimed at elevating mortal beings to demi-divine status independent of exclusive realm reliance. The theory, developed jointly by scholars of the Pallid Convocation, the Rootsingers of Seladrine, and the seminary at Dûn Aethel, held that by harmonizing the five realm energies within mortal vessels, practitioners could transcend the limitations of the physical plane entirely. Proponents argued that Ascendance would not only elevate the races of Evermere but would stabilize the veil by establishing a mortal presence within the realm structure — anchoring the membrane from both sides.
Trolls, gnomes, and goblins rejected this initiative. To them, transcendence lay in deeper communion with their respective affinity realms, not in the dilution of all five into a single vessel. The goblin philosopher Urvek the Hollow called Ascendance "the vanity of those who mistake breadth for depth," arguing that true understanding of any realm required total commitment. Troll chieftains viewed the proposal as a transparent attempt at consolidation — politically, territorially, and metaphysically. If the three most powerful nations controlled the framework of Ascendance, they would effectively dictate the terms of all future magical development. The gnomes, characteristically, were less concerned with politics than with methodology: their own experiments suggested that harmonizing five realm energies in a single vessel was not just dangerous but fundamentally incoherent. The realms were not complementary forces. They were contradictions held in tension by the veil.
Tensions escalated over the course of approximately fifteen years, punctuated by trade disputes, border skirmishes, and a series of failed diplomatic summits in Rivenmark.
The breaking point came with the assassination of Varekh Gorefist, chieftain of the largest Bloodhold Confederacy and a figure of enormous political significance among the anti-Ascendance faction. Varekh was killed during a diplomatic visit to the border town of Kell's Crossing by a single arrow fired from an elevated position. The perpetrator, identified as an elf bearing sigils of the Thalwood Expanse, was killed by Varekh's guard before interrogation could clarify motive or affiliation. Whether the assassin acted alone, under orders, or as a deliberate provocation by a third party remains one of the great unresolved questions of pre-Rupture history.
Retaliation followed within the week. The governor of Rivenmark — Aldric Vane, a human who had maintained the city's neutrality for over a decade — was murdered in his chambers. Responsibility was claimed by a troll warband, though later accounts suggest goblin involvement in breaching the governor's wards.
Civil unrest consumed Rivenmark. Trolls, gnomes, and goblins were expelled from the city in a series of violent purges that lasted three days and claimed an estimated four thousand lives. Many of the expelled were civilians — merchants, scholars, and laborers with no involvement in the assassination or its retaliation. The expulsion hardened positions across the continent.
The conflict that followed is remembered as the Schism of Evermere. It lasted approximately twelve years before being overtaken by a catastrophe that rendered its political aims irrelevant.
The Rupture at Rivenmark
Years of escalating warfare placed unprecedented strain on the already weakened veil.
Both sides employed rituals of increasing scale and intensity. Realm energies were invoked in concentrations previously unrecorded. Battlefield workings that would have required weeks of preparation in prior generations were attempted in hours, fueled by desperation and the veil's reduced resistance. Scholars now widely agree that the war did not create the instability but accelerated a long-developing condition — a conclusion Tessavine had predicted decades earlier.
The final engagement occurred on the Pale Fields, a broad plain southwest of Rivenmark where the two largest remaining armies met in what both sides intended as a decisive confrontation. Historical estimates place roughly sixty thousand combatants on the field, supported by several hundred ritualists on each side.
What happened next has been reconstructed from peripheral accounts, since no one at the epicenter survived.
A convergence of all five realms tore open in a single catastrophic Rift. Witnesses at a distance described it as a vertical wound in the sky, roughly two kilometers tall, from which poured light, darkness, sound, silence, and sensations that survivors struggled to articulate for the remainder of their lives. Entities of immense and incomprehensible power emerged in the opening moments — beings that belonged to no single realm but appeared to exist at the intersection of all five.
The breach, however, proved unsustainable. The magnitude of energy required to maintain such a convergence exceeded the plane's tolerance. The Rift collapsed within minutes.
The resulting magical backlash — a shockwave of undifferentiated realm energy — killed every known practitioner within a fifty-kilometer radius. The Pale Fields were scoured to bare stone. Rivenmark's outer districts were flattened. An estimated thirty thousand people died in the initial event, with tens of thousands more in the days that followed from exposure to uncontrolled realm contamination.
Simultaneously, smaller Rifts manifested across Evermere — tears in the veil ranging from a few meters to several hundred meters in diameter. Unlike the central convergence, these individual Rifts each connected to a single outer realm, and they endured.
The event is known simply as the Rupture.
The Twenty-Year Invasion
For two decades following the Rupture, Evermere endured open incursion.
The Rifts were not mere openings. They were zones of active realm influence, reshaping the land and atmosphere around them. A Rift to the Wyldelands could transform a temperate valley into impenetrable jungle within months. A Rift to Heaven imposed geometric perfection on its surroundings — buildings restructured themselves into crystalline symmetry, organic matter calcified. Abyssal Rifts eroded everything nearby, reducing stone to powder and memory to fog. Infernal Rifts established hierarchies among local fauna, creating organized predator-kingdoms. Underworld Rifts layered the present with the residue of the past, producing landscapes where the living walked among the impressions of the dead.
Entities emerged continuously. Most were minor — creatures of instinct operating according to the logic of their native realm. Some were not. The Siege of Greymantle Hold, in which a Heavenly archon attempted to restructure the entire undercity according to a geometry incompatible with mortal habitation, lasted three years. The Spreading — an event in which Wyldelands flora consumed the entirety of the Dellmire Fenlands and began advancing on surrounding farmland at a rate of two kilometers per day — was only halted when a coalition force managed to collapse the source Rift through sustained bombardment.
Settlements fell. Trade networks dissolved. Populations fragmented into isolated communities defended by whatever magical resources remained available.
Approximately fifteen years into the invasion, a new phenomenon became widely documented.
Individuals — most often adolescents — began manifesting direct affinity to a single outer realm without formal ritual induction. A human girl in the ruins of Kell's Crossing was observed speaking with the dead without rite or preparation. A troll youth in the Scorian highlands survived a fall from a cliff face, his bones knitting with Heavenly light — a realm with which his people had no traditional affiliation. A gnomish child in the Coppervein Reaches dissolved a stone wall by touching it, exhibiting Abyssal entropy through bare skin.
These individuals, later termed Riftborn, exhibited hereditary traits that had lain dormant for generations. Evidence compiled by surviving scholars — notably Maren Ashwell of the Thornwall Marches — suggests that centuries of repeated realm-channeling had gradually altered mortal bloodlines at a fundamental level. The Rupture, with its massive influx of undifferentiated realm energy, accelerated this latent condition, activating dormant potential across thousands of individuals simultaneously.
Riftborn abilities typically emerged during puberty or in moments of extreme stress. Unlike traditional ritualists, they channeled realm essence intrinsically — through their bodies, their emotions, their instincts — rather than through formalized rite. This made them powerful but volatile, particularly in the early years before any framework existed for training them.
Crucially, a Riftborn's affinity did not always correspond to their culture's traditional alignment. A dwarf might manifest Abyssal affinity. A goblin might channel the Wyldelands. This cross-alignment, more than anything, challenged the philosophical foundations of the Schism — and provided the first real evidence that realm affinity was not, and had never been, a matter of racial destiny.
Their emergence materially altered the balance of the conflict.
The Great Expulsion
The surviving powers of Evermere, including former adversaries of the Schism, coordinated a large-scale effort to repel invading entities.
The alliance was fragile and born of necessity. The Accord of Dunnhaven, negotiated over six months in a fortified fishing town on the northern coast, established a temporary framework for cooperation. Its terms were pragmatic rather than idealistic: shared intelligence on Rift activity, mutual defense obligations, and — critically — a moratorium on all Ascendance research for the duration of the crisis.
Riftborn served as essential conduits in the expulsion effort. Their altered physiology allowed them to withstand realm saturation at levels that would have killed traditional practitioners, making them capable of anchoring complex workings for far longer than any ritualist could endure. The expulsion rites themselves were designed by the remaining scholars and ritualists — many of them elderly, all of them working from incomplete knowledge — but it was the Riftborn who stood at the center of the circles and held the lines open.
The cost was significant. An estimated one in five Riftborn who participated in major expulsion workings died or suffered permanent alteration — realm scarring, sensory displacement, personality fragmentation, or physical mutation. The survivors carried marks not unlike those of the troll Branded, though earned in a single catastrophic exposure rather than through a lifetime of negotiated pacts.
Over the course of approximately three years, the invading forces were pushed back beyond the veil. The final major engagement, the Sealing of the Scorian Breach, involved over two hundred Riftborn working in concert to collapse the largest remaining active incursion point. Seventeen did not survive.
The invading forces were forced back.
The Rifts remained.
Evermere did not recover its former identity. In common speech, it became known as Riftlands — a term reflecting permanence of fracture rather than continuity of legacy.
Three Centuries After the Rupture
Riftlands today consists of fragmented city-states rebuilding amid persistent instability.
Rifts remain active. Some expand. Others newly form, often without warning. Most political powers advocate eventual closure, though the economics of the situation complicate this position: trade in Rift-derived materials, entities, and relics constitutes a significant portion of several city-states' economies. The Breach Merchants' Guild, headquartered in Rivenmark, is among the wealthiest organizations in the known world, profiting from the sale of realm-touched materials while publicly funding closure research. Critics note the contradiction.
Rivenmark remains the largest inhabited city, though it bears deep scars. One of its districts, the Ashveil Quarter, lies beneath a persistent Underworld scar where memory and decay have permanently altered the urban landscape. Residents of the Ashveil report overlapping temporal impressions — glimpses of the city as it existed before the Rupture, auditory echoes of conversations decades old, and an ambient melancholy that visitors find difficult to endure for extended periods. Despite this, the Ashveil is home to a thriving community of scholars, Underworld-aligned Riftborn, and archivists who consider the district an unparalleled resource for historical research.
Ascendance is not prohibited. It is broadly understood, however, that the magnitude of energy required to attempt it would likely reproduce conditions similar to the Rupture, resulting in certain death for the aspirant and unpredictable regional devastation. This has not prevented all attempts. The Folly of Seladrine, in which an elven Rootsinger attempted solo Ascendance approximately eighty years after the Rupture, produced a Wyldelands Rift that consumed the eastern quarter of the city before it was contained. The ruins remain overgrown and impassable.
The ideological divisions of the Schism never fully reconciled. The unity that achieved the Great Expulsion did not erase suspicion, and the Accord of Dunnhaven — always intended as temporary — dissolved within a decade of the final sealing. Modern politics are shaped less by the original Ascendance debate than by competing claims over Rift management, territorial sovereignty, and the legal status of Riftborn.
Riftborn continue to emerge in every generation. They are regarded with both apprehension and necessity — living evidence that the forces which reshaped the world have not withdrawn, merely stabilized. Many serve in military or civic capacities. Some operate independently, drawn to Rifts by an affinity they describe as instinctive. A minority pursue forbidden research, seeking to understand or reproduce the conditions of the Rupture.
Training institutions for Riftborn have been established in most major city-states, though curricula vary widely. Rivenmark's Veil Academy emphasizes control and civic integration. The goblin-founded Lens at Neth Volguur — rebuilt from the ruins of the original Obsidian Lens — focuses on theoretical understanding of realm mechanics. The troll Scar Camps of the Scorian Plateau train Riftborn for combat through methods that other institutions consider brutal but effective.
The world is not what it was. The veil holds, but thinly. The Rifts persist. And every generation produces new children who carry the outer realms in their blood — inheritors of a catastrophe they did not cause, wielding power they did not choose, in a world still learning whether to trust them.