The Shattering

The King's Ambition

They called it the Shattering, as if giving it a name could contain the enormity of what greed had torn apart.

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King Soran had believed himself inevitable. For seven years, he had collected the stones one by one, each conquest feeding his certainty that the ancient warnings were nothing more than the fearful whispers of lesser men. The stones were meant to be united. They were meant to serve. They were meant to crown him ruler of not just one realm, but master of all Aethoria itself.

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He was wrong.

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The Moment of Catastrophe

The first crack appeared in the Amethyst Stone, a hairline fracture that pulsed with violet light. Aldric barely had time to register the wrongness of it—the way the stone trembled in his palm like a caged bird—before the others began to sing. Not the harmony he expected. A discord that made his bones ache.

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The stones rejected him with the fury of seven small suns going nova at once.

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The explosion didn't just destroy the throne room, or the palace, or even the kingdom. It tore through the very fabric of Aethoria itself, splitting the great continent down its spine, sundering the connection to the other dimension, and scattering the fragments of power across lands that would spend millennia trying to heal from wounds they never asked to bear.

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 The Aftermath

When the light finally faded and the screaming stopped, there was nothing left of King Soran but a shadow burned into marble that would never fade. The stones were gone. The Dragon King lay dead, his ancient role as bridge between realms severed with his final breath, his noble amethyst line—keeper of memory—thought extinct with him.

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Thousands of dragons fell from the sky like broken stars, and those who survived found their ancient bonds severed, their magic forever changed. And Aethoria—now fractured into Eldoria and Arcadia, bleeding transformed magic into the void between dimensions—began the long work of learning to breathe again.

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But power, once awakened, never truly sleeps...

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The Prophecy

In the ruins of what was, a prophecy took root, whispered by dying druids, carved into stones that predated kingdoms, spoken in the last breath of the Dragon King himself. Words that would echo through two thousand years of silence, waiting for the moment they were meant to ignite:
 

When stars are born from broken flame,
And twins arise with mirrored name,
The Circle cracks, the world shall bend—
One to begin, one to end.

The Stone of Power wakes the flame,
And calls the Seven by their name.
Terros shall quake and rivers weep,
As fire stirs the ones who sleep.

The wind shall whisper secrets lost,
And truth shall come at bitter cost.
Light will blind and shadow sting,
When crownless hearts defy the king.

The final stone, the final breath—
Shall bind the world or summon death.
For only those who break the chain
Can forge the world anew again.

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The World Reborn

In the centuries that followed, the twin realms learned to exist in their separation.

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Eldoria claimed the eastern shores, where magic flowed freely through bloodlines both ancient and new. Courts rose around elemental mastery. Dragon riders bonded with beasts whose magic had transformed in the Shattering's wake. Spellwork and blade became intertwined arts, and power concentrated in those who could wield the magic of the seven shattered World Stones: the elemental magic of Terros, Water, Air, and Fire; the moral magic of Light and Shadow; and the Soul magic of Energy.

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Arcadia took the west, where magic became precious—hoarded, refined, used to enhance rather than replace. Where magic ran thin, they learned to forge ingenuity through craft. Mechanical engines replaced enchantments. Magitek—magic fused with industrial craft—allowed creation where pure magic alone could not. Precision timepieces, ceramic-cored armor, even explosive compounds that needed no spell to ignite. What Eldoria shaped through abundance, Arcadia achieved through necessity.

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Between them lay the Sapphire Islands, existing as neutral ground.

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What Rose From the Ashes

From the chaos rose new orders alongside the old. Where once there were only courts and kingdoms, now druids walked the hidden paths, keeping wisdom the courts had forgotten or destroyed. Dragon riders emerged from bloodlines never meant to fly. Scholars became warriors, warriors became shadows, and in the spaces between what was and what is, some learned to protect what remained while others schemed to claim what was lost.

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Two thousand years have passed since the Shattering. The stones remain hidden. The prophecy waits.

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And in Terros, where every shadow hides a story, some wounds refuse to heal until the world that broke them dares to be whole again.