In the current reckoning, the Age of Magic is remembered as the first great era of ordered history in Rhaedwyn, though most of what survives belongs more to myth than to careful record. It begins, in almost every tradition, with the Dawnsong at the Shardspire: the long rite in which Mythrael and, in most later accounts, the other Gods were sung into the world. From that starting point until the fall of Lavellor and the destruction of the Shardspire, we speak of an unbroken Age of Magic. What actually filled those centuries is far less clear.
Sources and distortions
The chief problem facing any student of the Age is simple: almost all primary material is gone. The archives of The Luminarchate were shattered during the Age of Shadow, either burned by Darksworn agents or deliberately destroyed by those who feared their misuse. What we have now are secondary and tertiary witnesses. Later temple chronicles, fragmentary Dwarven ledgers, oral histories from the western steppes, and theological commentaries written centuries after the fact all gesture at a common shape, but contradict each other in the details.
To some, the Age of Magic was a time of impossible abundance. These accounts speak of cities linked by stable gates, of weather steered by choir-sorcery, of diseases removed from whole regions by a single working. To others, it was an era of quiet, constant fear, in which a handful of Sorcerer-Kings adjusted the world like a board game and ordinary lives bent under their experiments. Both perspectives likely hold a sliver of truth.
The Luminarchate and High Sorcery
It is generally agreed that the political body known as The Luminarchate took shape during this Age, emerging from alliances between Mythrael’s early priesthood and the rulers who commanded High Sorcery. The great city of Lavellor grew around the Shardspire as its capital, and the “Halls of Magic” there became the center of advanced study in what we now call High Sorcery and early Aethercraft.
Descriptions of High Sorcery from this period are colored by nostalgia and horror in equal measure. Later writers speak of “world-works”: spells laid across entire regions, semi-permanent enchantments woven into rivers, hills and even bloodlines. The exact workings are lost. What remains are lingering phenomena, occasional artifacts, and a scattering of unstable texts whose diagrams are more dangerous than enlightening.
Crossings of the Gods
The Age of Magic is also the period of the so-called Crossing of the Gods, when the other great deities were brought into the world through extended rites modeled on the Dawnsong. Whether these were truly separate events or later attempts to organize a much messier process is impossible to determine. The cults agree that their Gods were made manifest during this Age, but disagree on dates, omens and even basic sequence.
What seems consistent is the pattern: large, coordinated gatherings of voices and power, always anchored around the Shardspire and supervised by the early Luminarchs. In each case, a new divine presence enters the known order, and new rules or boundaries for magic and the world are established. By the close of the Age, the four-God pantheon that dominates the current Age of Cyrathis is already in place, though framed in more rigidly Luminarchate-centric terms.
Decline and collapse
The ending of the Age of Magic is clearer than its beginning. The late chronicles describe rising tensions inside the Luminarchate, increasing dependence on a small circle of Sorcerer-Kings, and growing unease among those who felt that the world had been bent too far from its natural state. It is in this climate that Sorcerer-King Virulan hears the whisper of the Endless Night and takes the first Dark Oath. From that moment on, the Age is, in effect, living on borrowed time.
The wars and in-filtrations that follow belong more properly to The Age of Shadow, but their root is unmistakably in the overreach of the Age of Magic. The final act comes at Lavellor, when Virulan leads the army of Ulthrak and the forces of the Endless Night against his former peers and, through rites now lost, shatters the Shardspire itself during the Last Battle.