Before the Citadel
CANON — Pre-History of Athernyx
The Naming of Years
Year 247 is not when the Alkin began.
It's when they started counting.
The founding of the Archon Citadel — the first unified government, the first democracy, the first time scattered peoples called themselves one nation. Everything before that is "the time before," passed down in oral tradition, fragments, and the stones that still stand.
What the Alkin Believe
They evolved here. This is their world. Their ancestors walked these forests, fished these coasts, built the first shelters from Network-wood and stone. Generation after generation, thousands of years before anyone thought to write it down.
The Temples are old. The ruins in the East are older. The Starforge... they don't know about the Starforge.
As far as the Alkin know, they're indigenous. Children of Athernyx. And functionally, they're right.
The Tribal Era (Pre-247)
Before unification, the continent held dozens of peoples. Not nations — tribes, clans, villages. Connected by trade, separated by distance, occasionally warring over resources.
Regional Cultures
| Region | Pre-Citadel Character |
|---|---|
| The South | Fertile coast. Largest settlements. Where unification would begin. |
| The East | Forest dwellers. Independent. Suspicious of outsiders. Helga's ancestors. |
| The Northwest | Coastal traders. Proto-Gale Haven. Already sailing, already dealing. |
| The Northeast | Island peoples. Would become Veradyn. Already building with the Network. |
| The Valkara | Sparse. Hardy. Mountain folk who kept to themselves. |
What Connected Them
- Trade: Goods moved. Slowly, but they moved.
- Language: Regional dialects, but a common root tongue.
- Magic: The schools existed before the Temples. Raw, undisciplined, but present.
- The Network: Everyone lived on it. Everyone sensed it, even if they couldn't name it.
What Divided Them
- Distance: The continent is vast. Walking took weeks.
- Resources: Good land meant conflict. Bad land meant isolation.
- Distrust: Outsiders were dangerous until proven otherwise.
The Four Temples — Older Than Nations
The Temples predate the Citadel by unknown centuries.
No one knows who founded them. The stories say mages who mastered a school "became" the first Temple — their students building around them, their teachings crystallizing into tradition.
| Temple | Origin Story |
|---|---|
| Barrier | A mage who shielded a village from a mana-storm for seven days. Died standing. Students built around the spot. |
| Star | Born from a child whose blue fire wouldn't stop burning. Taken to a remote peak. Taught control. The peak became the Temple. |
| Life | A healer who walked from village to village during a plague. Where she finally rested, students gathered. |
| Enchant | A smith who bound runes into metal that never dulled. His forge became a school. |
These are stories. The truth is older and stranger. But the Temples themselves are real — ancient stone, ancient traditions, ancient knowledge.
The Unification (Year 247)
The Problem
By the late pre-Citadel era, the southern coast had grown crowded. Resources strained. Conflicts increased. The old tribal ways weren't scaling.
The Solution
A council of leaders — southern chiefs, Temple masters, merchant princes from the northwest — gathered to propose something new:
One city. One law. One voice.
The Archon Citadel. Named for the council that would govern it — the Archons.
The Democracy (Brief)
The founding was democratic. Elected Archons. Representation from regions. Laws written and debated.
It didn't last.
Within a generation, the Council of Eight had consolidated power. Scholars, architects, generals — the brilliant and ambitious. Democracy became oligarchy. Oligarchy became... Lazerin.
But for a moment — a single generation — they tried.
The Ruins in the East
Scattered through the Eastern Frontier: structures that predate the Temples.
Stone foundations. Carved pillars. Writing no one can read.
What the Alkin Think
Old settlements. Ancestors who built in stone, then moved on or died out. Curiosity pieces. Nothing more.
What Eyuun Suspects
The writing isn't ancestral. The proportions aren't quite right for Alkin. Someone else was here.
He's never had time to investigate properly. 271 years of hiding doesn't leave room for archaeology.
What Lazerin Knows
The ruins were observation posts. Monitoring stations. Built by the Architects who seeded life across the galaxy.
The Alkin aren't an accident. They're one of many experiments. And the experimenters left long before Year 1 of anyone's calendar.
The Starforge — Before Everything
Deep underwater. Far side of the planet. Ancient beyond measure.
The Starforge isn't Alkin technology. It isn't even planetary technology. It's part of a network spanning galaxies — transmitters and receivers connecting worlds the Alkin can't imagine.
What Eyuun Found (Year ~250)
He was researching deep-sea mana concentrations. Following patterns no one else noticed. And he found it.
A structure. Clearly artificial. Clearly not Alkin.
He spent thirty years studying it. Reverse-engineering it. Building the Soul Well as a receiver for its energy.
He never learned who built it. Never found records, instructions, explanations. Just the machine itself — still functioning after unknowable ages.
What Lazerin Learned (Years 600–1672)
Pyramid Zero is the original receiver. A ship-sized pyramid that predates the Citadel's Soul Well by epochs.
Inside: archives. Texts. The accumulated knowledge of the Architects.
Lazerin read for a thousand years. Learned things that made his life's work look like a child's drawing. Understood, finally, how small the Alkin truly are.
The Starforge network spans galaxies. Athernyx is one node of thousands. The Alkin are one species of countless.
"What I considered genius... the texts made look like cave paintings."
The Architects — The Unknown Builders
Who were they?
Gone. That's all anyone knows. The Starforge still functions. The ruins still stand. Pyramid Zero still orbits. But the builders are nowhere.
Theories (Lazerin's, Unshared)
- They seeded life deliberately — experiments, colonies, something else
- They connected worlds through the Starforge network — communication, travel, energy transfer
- They left — or died — or evolved beyond recognition
- The Alkin were never meant to find the Starforge; Eyuun stumbled onto infrastructure
The Silence
No messages. No return. No guidance.
The Architects built something magnificent, left it running, and vanished. The Alkin inherited a world they didn't build, connected to a network they can't comprehend, watched by ruins that keep their secrets.
What This Means
For the Alkin
They don't know any of this. They believe they're indigenous — and emotionally, they are. This is their home. Their history. Their world.
The cosmic truth doesn't change daily life. Farmers still farm. Merchants still trade. The Network still pulses beneath their feet.
For Eyuun
He knows more than most — but not everything. He found the Starforge, built the Soul Well, and spent 271 years wondering what else he missed. The ruins haunt him. The questions have no answers.
For Lazerin
He knows the most — and can tell no one. A thousand years of reading changed him. The man who feared death now hosts tournaments because nothing else is interesting anymore.
He returned to warn Athernyx about the universe. But he can never explain why he knows what's out there.
For Kael
He'll never know any of this. Not in Year 600. Maybe not ever.
But when he ignites the Starforge, he's touching something older than his species. When he walks through ruins, he's passing monuments to beings who watched his ancestors crawl.
And the world — indifferent, beautiful, alive — just keeps turning.
Timeline (Reconstructed)
| Era | Events |
|---|---|
| ??? — Ancient | Architects build Starforge network, seed life, construct monitoring posts |
| ??? — Ancient | Architects vanish. Machinery keeps running. |
| ??? — Pre-Temple | Alkin evolve. Tribal era. Thousands of years of scattered development. |
| ??? — Temple Era | Four Temples founded. First organized magic. |
| Year 247 | Archon Citadel founded. Democracy begins. History starts being recorded. |
| Year 247–329 | Golden Age. Rise and fall of the Council of Eight. |
| Year 329–600 | The Dying. |
| Year 600 | Kael's story. |
"The world was here before us. Someone else was here before the world. And they left no note."