Personal System Calendar: Year 00015, Day 1-28, Month VIII: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6859, 1st to 28th day of the 8th Month
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Movements of the Enemies
For thousands of years there have been forces just as powerful as anything found in Arkanus, forces of near-peer equivalence, at least during the last heyday of the old Arkanus Empire. The current Empire of Elms-Arkanus couldn't claim the same. They dominated the three divided subcontinents, certainly, but their influence stopped there. Part of the reason was technological. The current Empire had lost most of its ancient, more advanced technology, especially after its destruction overnight centuries ago, and had spent the ages since regressing, still trying to catch up to what had once been standard. The massive magical shields now activated throughout the capital of Aethelgard, the same shields that had once halted the Great Evil's advance outright, and the Imperial Wayportals besides, were relics of that older, more advanced age. The Empire had also lost most of its dragons and dragon riders, with only a handful scattered across imperial territory now, wyverns filling in as a substitute for true dragons in every place a dragon once stood.
Emperor Janus knew all this because Dragon King Ignis, his foster father, had been friends with Janus's grandfather, the Wise Emperor Arkanus, and had personally seen the ancient Empire in its prime. By Ignis's own account, the Empire of now had diminished considerably by comparison. It wasn't simply the shields or the dragons, either. Entire branches of the old Empire's magical engineering, ways of shaping mana at a scale no living mage could replicate, had been lost overnight along with everything else, leaving behind only fragments: half-understood ruins, texts written in dialects of the old tongue that modern scholars were still slowly reconstructing, and relics like the Aethelgard shields and Wayportals, technology that had only recently been reverse-engineered to function again in the current age, after having worked perfectly well for millennia without anyone alive fully understanding how they'd been built in the first place.
A great archive had survived, held in the hands of the noble line of the House of Elms, the one bloodline that survived the old Empire's destruction. They had managed to preserve some of the most important technologies of that fallen age, though much had still been lost over the centuries that followed, during the long onslaught of attacks they endured after their Empire fell. Many of ancient Arkanus's old enemies had simply been lying in wait, and once the Empire collapsed, they seized their chance and turned on the House of Elms directly. It took them hundreds of years, slowly and patiently, to wear down what remained of Arkanus's imperial bloodline. When they finally managed to capture the Elms household and overwhelm what defenders remained, they went looking for the old imperial technologies. Some had been destroyed outright. Some had been hidden too well even for the Elms themselves to recover in time. Some had been repurposed by the very enemies who'd taken them. What survived wasn't easy to decipher either, and much of it remained locked away or deliberately destroyed rather than risk it falling into the wrong hands.
Not everything had been lost beyond recovery, though. Janus had spent thousands of years working to bring human civilization back toward that old heyday. If one compared scale directly, the current Empire of Elms-Arkanus was, in fact, significantly larger than the old Arkanus Empire had been, at least measuring by the capital alone. But there was a real disadvantage working against that comparison: the continent itself was now split into three, West, Central, and East, divided by the rivers that filled the continental rifts that set it apart, where it had once been whole. A unified Arkanus of 2.1 billion square kilometers, with the old Empire's reach extending even into the farthest corners of it, had also sat at the continent's center. The current Empire, by contrast, held only the west.
Still, they weren't helpless. The Empire had taken advantage of the region's turmoil to slowly and patiently claim territory from both the Central and Eastern subcontinents, and now dominated the entirety of the west outright, following the destruction of the Fresco League of Kingdoms, the House of Elms's own mortal enemy, the very faction of humans most responsible for attacking them after the old Empire's fall and enslaving what remained of the Elms people.
Though the pace of it might have looked slower than an outright bloody, continuous and costly conquest, it bought time to properly cement imperial influence across all three regions. Whenever the Empire conquered new territory, they made certain to stabilize it fully first, accounting for the wider ripple effects that stabilization would send through the rest of the Empire, before ever moving on to the next conquest.
The farthest east of the Central Subcontinent stood as a recent example of exactly this, liberated from the Great Evil's dark forces clutches and now sitting under what the Empire called the Hundred-Year Helmas Project, a long-term reconstruction and pacification effort. It would've been six years since its liberation.
All of which brought the matter back to the original continent where this particular threat, the Great Evil and its Dark Forces, had first spawned, the same continent it had dominated entirely, much the way ancient Arkanus once had. That threat had continued expanding outward ever since, trying Arkanus more than once across history, and failing every time, leaving it with no true foothold on the continent. Their ambitions in the east had failed just as thoroughly, the territory retaken despite the speed of their execution, with the Emperor himself lending aid to that effort, taking a larger share of the reclaimed continent as his own payment for it.
Except, now, for one group: the CABAL, who after all this time had patiently watched from the sidelines while all of it unfolded, staying carefully out of the Emperor's sight and hearing. Sleeper agents, left behind and waiting, even after every one of their comrades before them had failed. Now, at last, they were almost certainly working to open a gate of their own, a shortcut that would let the Great Evil's forces bypass the costly ocean voyage entirely and simply step through.
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The Continents Beyond Arkanus
There are 22 continents beyond Arkanus within the wider world of Centuury, 25 in total once the split Arkanus itself is counted.
Among them: Elphe, currently under threat of being fully consumed by the Dark Forces. Saharr, the island kingdom Zahran Ishmar Noor came from, itself a casualty of the Dark Forces' influence, the very reason it had become the desolate, dying place it was when Ishmar was born, except that Ishmar had regrown most of the Saharr island by now. Titris, home to the kingdom of Tiamerith, where a World System Prospect (Benny McTown), one distinct from August's own unique Personal System, currently lives. And the origin point of the Great Evil itself, a continent known formally as Kadiliman, though most simply call it the Darkness. Its true name, older still, is the Kavira Continent.
Kadiliman is covered in pitch black, devoid of life, its life force and mana entirely sucked away long ago. From that emptiness, the darkness eventually erupted outward, producing beings born of darkness and mana, creatures of unknown origin and history, resembling the worst of imagination, monsters that made even the darkest bedtime stories parents told their children feel tame by comparison. They are grotesque, morally incoherent things, driven solely to consume, conquer, and repeat, until everything else has been folded into their corruption. Elphe is only the latest continent now being drawn into that same fold.
In total, the Great Evil and its Dark Forces have conquered five continents outright, six if counting Kadiliman itself as their point of origin, with Elphe now standing as a seventh candidate. The five conquered continents are called Oruus, Ize, Y'man, Tezeth, and Qizon.
By scale:
- Arkanus — 2.1 billion km². The greatest continental landmass known to civilization.
- Kadiliman — roughly 892 million km². The largest of the other continents, and the source of the Great Evil.
- Oruus — 487 million km². The largest of the five continents conquered by the Great Evil.
- Elphe — 428 million km². The seventh continent, currently under threat.
- Ize — 365 million km².
- Y'man — 311 million km².
- Tezeth — 279 million km².
- Qizon — 240 million km².
The Great Evil never needed to conquer five continents the size of true supercontinents. What it conquered instead were five enormous but varied worlds, each potentially home to dozens or hundreds of nations and civilizations in their own right; it was now lost, corrupted and consumed by the Darkness that had also consumed Kavira. Kadiliman alone is nearly twice the size of Oruus, and yet ancient Arkanus, before its own sundering, was more than twice the size of Kadiliman. When Dragon King Ignis remembers the old Arkanus, he is remembering something monstrous in scale, a thing the current world has no true equivalent to.
Titris — 156 million km². Home to the kingdom of Tiamerith and its own separate World System Prospect. Whatever politics and power structures govern Titris remain almost entirely unknown from Arkanus's side of the world, filtered only through the occasional trader's rumor or scholar's footnote, the kind of secondhand fragment that made its way into imperial archives without ever being properly verified. Whether Titris even knew of Arkanus's existence in turn was itself an open question among the handful of scholars who studied such things.
Saharr is a different case entirely, not a single landmass but an archipelago sitting atop a vast submerged continental shelf, roughly 75 million km² in total, most of it drowned beneath shallow seas rather than exposed as dry land. The largest island in the chain, the Island of Saharr itself, accounts for 30 million km², roughly 40% of the shelf's total area, and is Zahran Ishmar Noor's homeland, a kingdom the Royal Archives once described as supporting millions, before a slow-collapsing ecological catastrophe, one now understood to trace back to the Dark Forces' own influence, reduced it to the dying landscape Zahran was born into. The remaining 45 million km² is scattered across dozens of smaller islands and shoals, most too small or too barren to have ever been independently settled, though a handful nearer Saharr's coastline once served as fishing villages or waypoints along trade routes long since abandoned. The shallow shelf makes the surrounding waters treacherous, reefs, sandbars, and unpredictable currents combining to make it one of the most feared stretches of water among sailors familiar with the region.
Sixteen further continents remain, beyond Arkanus, Kadiliman (Kavira), Oruus, Elphe, Ize, Y'man, Tezeth, Qizon, Titris, and Saharr. Their names, cultures, and histories are undetailed within the story so far, but their approximate scale, drawn from the same old Arkanus Empire cartographic fragments that first catalogued Kadiliman and its conquered continents, remains on record:
- Continent (unnamed) — 147 million km²
- Continent (unnamed) — 142 million km²
- Continent (unnamed) — 130 million km²
- Continent (unnamed) — 107 million km²
- Continent (unnamed) — 98 million km²
- Continent (unnamed) — 92 million km²
- Continent (unnamed) — 88 million km²
- Continent (unnamed) — 73 million km²
- Continent (unnamed) — 69 million km²
- Continent (unnamed) — 63 million km²
- Continent (unnamed) — 55 million km²
- Continent (unnamed) — 70 million km²
- Continent (unnamed) — 82 million km²
- Continent (unnamed) — 203 million km²
- Continent (unnamed) — 322 million km²
- Continent (unnamed) — 50 million km²
What little the Empire's own cartographers and scholars knew of them came almost entirely secondhand, filtered through centuries-old trade records that had long since been cut off from the rest of the continents, the occasional survivor's account, or fragments preserved from the old Arkanus Empire's own more far-reaching maps, maps now held within the House of Elms's own archives, ones the current Empire had never fully recovered or reconstructed. In practical terms, most of Centuury remained as much a mystery to Arkanus as Arkanus itself likely remained to whatever civilizations lived on those sixteen unnamed shores.
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The Kavira Continent Stirs
Now, speaking of the Kavira Continent specifically: the enemies of the world are moving once again, their goal, as it has always been, to finally conquer Arkanus. They have already activated their last remaining cell embedded within the continent, the CABAL, and it's safe to say they've been patient enough this time to make another real attempt.
Currently, a general of this new expedition has taken on a more bipedal form, though it remains an abomination all the same. One could reasonably call it a demon, or the devil's own spawn. Nothing about its shape suggested it had once been mortal in any conventional sense; its proportions ran subtly wrong in ways that were hard to place at a glance, joints that bent a fraction too far, a stillness to its posture that no living creature could hold for long without discomfort. It commands a legion of seven hundred fifty thousand skeleton soldiers, though these aren't the typical fantasy skeleton made of nothing but bone and magic. These are creatures built with actual muscle, joint, and ligament structures wherever the bones need them to function, hollow of organs, most muscle, and skin, but built with just enough anatomy to genuinely move rather than simply be puppeted.