The Age of Man

The current age — the age that began when the gods fell silent after the Sundering and mortal hands inherited the ruined world. Not named because humans rule, but because the gods have stopped and mortals now decide everything. We are in its late-middle: past the high-water, before the final unmaking.

The Elder Age had its gods walking and its peoples rooted. The Age of the Imperium had its god at the centre and its roads going outward. This age has no god at the centre — only the absence of one — and the roads are collapsing inward. It is called the Age of Man not because any one people has won but because the silence is for everyone equally: the Vyr watch the Design go dim at the edges and grieve without saying why; the Stoneborn feel the deep galleries emptying and work harder; the Hessk watch the drowned valley's old channels close and say nothing. Mortal hands are what is left. The age has four phases — not a prophecy, only a shape the historians will name afterward, because no one in any age can see where they stand inside it:

**The High Age** — the Imperium's long centuries, when the god still answered and the roads held. Wars of conquest and consolidation; the world being shaped. The Rampart Wars closed this phase.

**The Breaking** — the Sundering itself. Not a phase but the hinge. Everything before and everything after is measured from it.

**The Long Descent** — the present. The Unclosed gather in the emptied barrows, the good Old Work thins, the houses fail, the roads go quiet. Wars of resource and ideology: who holds the trade, who closes the barrows, who keeps the passes. No one power can hold the Vale; every power is trying. This is where the player enters. We are in the late-middle of the Descent — past the point where any honest person believes the old order will recover, not yet at the point where it has fully broken.

**The Coming Unmaking** — the end the Vale is moving toward, argued about by everyone who thinks that far ahead and confirmed by no one: the last of the old empire's power finally used up, the Vale's oldest endings finally closed for good — followed, some cranks and old doctrines insist, though nothing alive has any way to know, not by peace but by whatever comes after the last thing standing finishes standing. Some call it mercy. Some call it murder. The Vyr of Aelvyrenn call it, when they will call it anything, the precondition, and are working toward it, though almost no one below the clouds knows what that means or that it is even happening.