Lore & HistoryThree hundred years since the Fracture. The Seals are broken. The Void bleeds still.

Three hundred years ago, Aethon was a world in fragile but real balance.

Six peoples coexisted on a single continent, each master of its territory, each carrying an irreducible culture. The peace was not a peace of hearts — it was the peace of mutual interests, maintained by an ancient accord called the Pact of Seals.

The Pact rested on seven dimensional crystals, the Seals, placed at key points on the continent during an ancestral alliance between the founding peoples. These Seals were not mere symbols: they were physical anchors that stabilised the boundary between Aethon and the adjacent dimension — the Void, a space without matter, without light, without time, that existed "behind" the fabric of reality. As long as the Seals held, the Void remained on the other side.

Five Seals resonated with the cyclic elements — Fire, Water, Earth, Lightning, Wind — and their stability depended on the wellbeing of the people who were their natural guardians. The last two, the Seals of Light and Shadow, older still, sealed not an elemental manifestation but the fundamental balance between existence and the Void itself.

The Watchers were the official guardians of the Pact. Created during the founding alliance by a rite involving the representatives of every race, they belonged to no people and served all. Their role: to watch the Seals, to detect cracks before they appeared, and to intervene diplomatically when tensions between kingdoms threatened the stability of the Pact.

This was not a golden age. It was a manageable age.

The human king Aldric the First, called "the Conqueror," was neither a fool nor a tyrant. He was a man convinced he was right. His diagnosis was sound: the six peoples were weakening one another through trade wars, contested borders, and the slow accumulation of small betrayals. The Pact of Seals was creating a peace of appearances while the social fabric of Aethon slowly decayed.

His solution was catastrophically wrong.

In the secret human archives, Aldric had uncovered an ancient theory: breaking the Seals would release their energy as a unifying pulse capable of fusing the wills of the six peoples into one. A new world united, freed of borders. He sincerely believed it was a necessary sacrifice to save Aethon.

The Watchers learned of it too late. Aldric had spent twenty years preparing the rite, neutralising the guardians who could have stopped him, winning allies in every royal court. By the time he broke the first Seal, the process was already irreversible.

The seven Seals collapsed in cascade in less than an hour.

The five elemental Seals had sealed the Void's most common manifestations, while the Seals of Light and Shadow — the oldest of all — sealed the equilibrium between existence and the Void. Their breaking is what released the Abyssal Shadow — not as another elemental energy, but as the collapse of the fundamental barrier.

What was released was not a unifying pulse. It was the boundary between Aethon and the Void giving way. The Void began to seep in through hundreds of simultaneous fissures opened across the continent. Aldric died the moment the last Seal broke, consumed by the released energy.

The shattered Seals fragmented into thousands of Éclats — crystals charged with residual power — scattered to the four corners of the world. These Éclats are what remains of the barrier. Some have been recovered and are carried by heroes whose abilities they amplify. Most are still lost, hidden, or guarded by creatures born of the Void.

Three major Éclats recovered together can theoretically be used to reforge a Seal — provided one possesses the correct resonance protocol. We are halfway there.

— Working note, Sealed Floor of Thesselmark

Three centuries later, the fissures have never closed. The Fracture is not a past event: it is a permanent wound in the fabric of Aethon, bleeding still.

The Abyssal Shadow is not a being. It is the Void itself, leaked into Aethon with a singular property: in contact with living matter, it adopts.

It does not destroy outright — it integrates, absorbs, transforms. A creature touched by the Shadow does not die at once. It becomes something else, gradually, from within. Three stages of corruption are recognised.

The Abyssal Shadow has no plan. It has no king and no general. It spreads because that is its nature, the way water seeks low ground. The fissures are its doorways, the Fractured are its unwitting agents, and the regions where it has settled grow steadily uninhabitable for the uncorrupted.

What makes it nearly impossible to fight directly: killing the Fractured does not stop the Void. Closing one fissure does not stop the others. The only true solution — reforging the Seals — requires gathering enough Éclats and finding someone capable of repeating the original rite, but in reverse. No one yet knows how. The Gnomes are working on it.

Six cultures, six stances toward the same wound. None reads the Fracture in the same way. This Codex does not pretend they do.

Gnolls, Trolls, Goblins and Golems are not races in the political sense. They are beings that have been transformed, or born directly of the Void. This Codex catalogues them without embellishment.

Fifty years after the Fracture, while the racial kingdoms barricaded themselves apart, a discovery changed Aethon's political geography: on the central plateau, equidistant from the five capitals, a fragment of the broken Seals had survived. Not a whole Seal — none remained. But a fragment, dense and stable, still radiating part of the original sealing magic. A Sigil, in the ancient tongue. The only one to have held.

Around this fragment, a city was born — first a researchers' camp, then a mixed garrison, then a market, then a true town. Fifty years after its founding, Sigil had become the only place in Aethon where the six peoples meet without the encounter turning sour.

What the Sigil does, concretely: its presence stabilises a vast area around it. No major fault has opened within fifty kilometres of the city since its founding. The Fractured instinctively avoid the region. Bearers of Éclats, however, perceive it from hundreds of kilometres away — like a silent beacon. This is the main reason Sigil has become a point of convergence: people come not because it is convenient, but because the Éclats lead them there.

What the Sigil is not: it is not a repaired Seal. It closes no fissure. It is not enough to mend the Fracture. It is a relic — precious, irreplaceable, but isolated. The Gnomes of Thesselmark have studied the fragment from every angle; their conclusion is that its preservation is miraculous, but that it reveals nothing about how to reforge the seven lost Seals.

Governance: Sigil has no sovereign. No standing army. The city is governed by a tacit pact between the six peoples: weapons are laid down at the gates — bearers of Éclats are the only exception, their Éclat being their weapon — no faction may claim the territory, no racial conflict may be carried within the walls. Three centuries of history have seen this pact hold not by force, but because no one has any interest in seeing it fall.

On the central square, the Sigil itself is set into the stone: a crystalline mass shot through with luminous fissures that pulse to the slow rhythm of an ancient heart. It is the only place in Aethon where one can approach a fragment of the original Seals and touch what should have held.

The six quarters of Sigil

| Quarter | People | Description | |---|---|---| | The Hearthstone Quarter (Le Foyer-Pierre) | Humans | Beige stone houses, red-tiled roofs, broad squares. The most populous and commercial quarter. | | The Living Spires (Les Spires Vivantes) | Elves | Cultivated wood, no straight lines, growing staircases. The only towers that bloom in season. | | The Camp of Banners (Le Camp des Bannières) | Orcs | Tent streets, never rebuilt the same way twice. The quarter's geography shifts with the clans in residence. | | The Lowforge Wards (Les Forges-Basses) | Dwarves | Squat halls, orange smoke at every hour. The noise never stops — it is said this is where Sigil keeps warm. | | The Crooked Floors (Les Étages Tordus) | Gnomes | Workshops stacked at improbable angles. The density of inventions is such that no alley is level. | | The Veilward (Le Veilliage) | Watchers | No buildings of their own. The Veilward is everywhere and nowhere — a few discreet alcoves in the other quarters, a single silent cloister near the central Sigil. |

"One does not come to Sigil because one wills it. One comes because the Éclat leads." — proverb attributed to the first Wandering Watchers

The Cycle is Aethon's unified unit of time. One cycle = one solar day on Aethon, from sunrise to sunrise. It is the reference measure for everything: narrative events, competitive seasons, historical archives.

Origin of the count: Cycle 0 is defined as the day the seven Seals were created by the founding rite of the six peoples. The whole calendar of Aethon is reckoned from that event.

Landmarks of Aethon's history

| Cycle | Event | |---|---| | 0 | Creation of the Seals — birth of the Order of Watchers | | ~109,740 | The Fracture: Aldric the First breaks the seven Seals in cascade | | ~109,748 | The drowning of Maerath | | ~109,790 | Discovery of the Sigil — founding of the crossroads-city | | 411,021 | The game's present — 300 years after the Fracture |

This unified clock gives Aethon a temporal coherence: a replay dated Cycle 411,015 represents a battle six days before the present. Competitive seasons, meta snapshots, tournament archives — every record carries a cycle identifier that ties it to the world's history.

Three centuries after the Fracture, Aethon is in what one might call a slow, controlled decline. No abrupt collapse. No stabilisation. Just a gradual loss of territory to the Sunken Lands, offset by the increasingly organised resistance of bearers of Éclats.

What sustains this precarious balance:

Bearers of Éclats are the real line of defence against the Void's expansion. An Éclat grants its bearer an elemental power that makes them effective where ordinary armies fail. Every Éclat recovered is one more point of resistance.

The political fragmentation of the kingdoms is paradoxically a partial protection: there is no single head the Shadow can sever to paralyse the entire continent.

The Gnomes of Thesselmark recently published a partial result: they know, in theory, how to close a single fissure. The technique requires the simultaneous presence of several bearers of Éclats of complementary elements, coordinated very precisely. Closing every fissure and reforging the seven Seals remains the long-term horizon — a goal that reveals itself chapter by chapter.

The player takes on the role of a Seeker of Éclats — an adventurer with no particular allegiance, capable of gathering heroes of every race and persuasion. Their singularity: they can sense Éclats at a distance, a rare gift that makes them, naturally, a point of convergence for bearer-heroes.

The long-term goal, revealed gradually through the Adventure Mode: to gather enough Éclats and enough heroes to attempt to reforge the seven Seals and close, definitively, the fissures of Aethon.

What no one yet says aloud, but Seraphina knows and Zharkon has understood: reforging the Seals will cost something. Perhaps as much as breaking them.