A world that nobody made
Eastward the water lies broken, and no one has crossed it and prospered;
waves against waves, and the wind answering nothing at all.
Twenty slow centuries turned, and the charts had an edge and no farther;
men were born knowing it so: nobody sails to the sun.
Then came a king who was young, and his kingdom was failing beneath him;
nothing was left him to lose. Therefore he turned to the east.
Reason and rumour agreed he would perish, but reason was hollow;
one of them came again home. That is the whole of the change.
Islands he found beyond number, in mist, under light without reason;
broken god-work in the shoals, fire on the water at night.
There too a people, who reckoned their years from the dawn of the Magic;
never had heard of the west. Neither had grieved for the loss.
Books he brought back, and the art that had died in the west was not dead there;
sorcery burned in the east all the long while we lay dark.
Now every crown in the west has a hull, or is building, or lying;
all of them sail for a name promised and never yet found.
Nobody living has seen it, and nobody knows that it stood once;
still they go looking. The sea keeps what it keeps, and is calm.
Welcome to the wiki for Eryndor. There are two ways in, depending on how much time you have.
The short road
A quarter of an hour, and enough to build a character or run a session. It covers the five things you have to unlearn if you are coming from other fantasy settings, the shape of the world, the four Powers, the catastrophe that ended the old age, the rediscovery of the east, how magic works and why it is dangerous, and the peoples you will meet.
Written for players, in plain language, current to the 215th year of the Age of Cyrathis.
The long road
An encyclopaedia in five books, compiled in the Annex of the Grand Library at Sobsia by an aged priestess of Mythrael who did not sign her name. It is the fullest account of Eryndor that exists, and it is not a neutral one: she marks her own doubts, records the objections against her own doctrine at full strength, and confesses in signed asides where the lamp does not reach.
Read it for the world, and read her for the world's edges.
There is no creation myth, no first day, no divine architect. Eryndor simply is, and always was.
People sang them into existence. We know roughly how it was done. We cannot do it anymore.
Four gods, and the instrument that made them was destroyed two thousand years ago. The pantheon is closed.
Not declined. Died. For twenty centuries no living hand could work true sorcery. It has been back for about four years.
A spell whose maker died still works. It simply no longer knows what it was for. A working of warmth becomes a working of burning; a ward that turned away enemies now turns away everything, or holds fast whatever enters. This is why the ruins everyone romanticises are the deadliest ground in the world.