The centuries that followed the Shattering were marked not by a single catastrophe, but by the slow, arduous unraveling of a world struggling against the weight of its own wounded harmonics. What had begun as a rupture in the leygrid became, over generations, the defining condition of life on Terra. No region remained untouched; no people escaped the consequences.
In the early decades, Vyrnos pressed deep into Lycéyan territory, achieving swift and violent gains. Their advance faltered only when they reached lands steeped in the oldest harmonic disciplines—regions whose stones and waterways still remembered the world before the fracture. There, the invaders found resistance not only from defenders, but from the land itself. The leylines, though broken, still retained enough memory to complicate every assault. Thus the initial surge of conquest cooled into a grinding stalemate.
Over the millennia that followed, the conflict evolved into a vast tapestry of siege, counter‑siege, and uneasy truces. New doctrines emerged from both sides. Vyrnos refined its Mangalan‑shaped ideologies into intricate strategies that prized efficiency above all else. Lycéya, pressured into desperation, rediscovered forgotten depths of its ancient harmonic arts. The muralmasters of the period depict engines of war shaped from fractured crystal, resonant towers built to stabilise local leythreads, and great defensive labyrinths carved into mountainsides.
As ideologies deepened, populations shifted. Traditionalists within Vyrnos—those who still held to the quieter ways of listening—migrated steadily toward Lycéyan lands. At the same time, Lycéyans seduced by Mangalan philosophies crossed in the opposite direction, seeking the promise of unfettered advancement. These migrations seeded fractures within both cultures. Some border provinces splintered entirely, declaring fragile independence before being consumed by the conflicts that followed.
The environment, strained by the broken leygrid, grew increasingly volatile. Seasons drifted unpredictably. Pockets of wild arcana coalesced in forests and deserts, creating regions where beasts transformed or where fragments of wandering souls drifted through the air like silent rain. Storms rose from clear skies. Rivers changed course overnight. Travellers reported the appearance of beings whose forms corresponded to no natural law. Many such anomalies became warzones in their own right, as Vyrnos and Lycéya each sought to control or contain them.
Civil wars erupted sporadically within both councils. In Vyrnos, factions formed between rigid adherents of Mangalan doctrine and those who resented the abandonment of older Terran principles. In Lycéya, internal disputes centred on how much of the old harmonic arts could safely be revived in a world whose foundation trembled. The muralglyphs from these centuries show an unending cycle of rise and ruin, progress and collapse.
Against this backdrop, a single power slowly gathered prominence: the city‑state of Atlantis. Situated far from the major fronts, it became a refuge for those who retained an innate resistance to Mangalan influence—a quiet clarity of mind that neither coercion nor ideology could unseat. Over time, this rare disposition became the city’s defining feature. As migrants from across Terra sought safety behind its walls, Atlantis evolved into a metropolis unlike any other: a place where the oldest ways and the newest crafts coexisted, where the voices of many cultures blended without losing their distinctiveness.
Its councils grew increasingly wary of the spreading instability. While the rest of Terra fractured, Atlantis focused on preservation—of knowledge, of culture, of balance. Whispers circulated of quiet preparations, of great works undertaken beneath its foundations and across the chain of islands that sheltered it. The nature of these works remained concealed from all but the most trusted of its people, for Vyrnos and Mangala alike watched the city with interest.
By the final centuries of this age, the war between Lycéya and Vyrnos had settled into a cold stalemate, but the world around them continued to decline. Climate patterns destabilised entirely. The leylines spasmed in unpredictable waves, sometimes granting brief moments of unnatural clarity, sometimes unleashing violent surges that shattered mountainsides. Entire regions became uninhabitable. And still the great councils fought, each convinced they might yet restore or dominate what remained.
Amid this backdrop of exhaustion and decay, Atlantis reached its quiet conclusion: Terra could not be saved as it was. The world had entered a twilight from which it would not return. And so its leaders began the work that would one day reshape the heavens—the awakening of the dormant spirit within the Moon of Lupa, the forging of a new refuge beyond the reach of Terra’s failing chords.
The murals that survive from this era do not name this decision explicitly. They speak instead of a “second cradle,” a “worldsevering,” and “the lifting of hope into the night sky.” Yet their meaning is unmistakable.
The Sundering Millennia had prepared the way for the greatest gamble in the history of Terra: the attempt to shepherd the last remnants of its people into a new world before the old one finally succumbed to its long undoing.
