History

Extensive history of AquilaPRJ.

Prior to Era Nova

It is widely known that a prosperous world before Era Nova had existed. A world filled with many various people and nations, mythical beasts and magics, all thriving together in harmony. Until a sudden horrible apocalyptic event took place. The worlds most tragic event, which caused all previous civilizations to fall. Everything had gone up in flames. Realms, nations, magical creatures, one by one they were all either slain, or fell to whatever horrors the tragedy brought with it. No one knows how it started, or what lead to it. In todays day and age, all that is left are traces & cinders of the old world.

Era Nova ; Year One

It has been thousands of years since the Cataclysm.

Thousands of years since the old world burned, its kingdoms fell silent, its great civilizations were reduced to ruins, and its wonders became little more than stories passed between generations. In the ages that followed, the world did not remain empty. New nations rose from the ashes, civilizations took shape, cultures evolved, and kingdoms that once seemed eternal eventually met the same fate as those that came before them.

The world continued.

Yet despite the passage of countless generations, it remained a world of fragments.

A kingdom might know its neighboring lands, a merchant might know the roads between two cities, and a sailor might know the coastline he had traveled, but beyond those familiar places lay uncertainty. Distant shores remained unnamed, territories were known only through rumor, and civilizations could be little more than stories told by passing travelers.

Then, in the first year of Era Nova, one man decided that uncertainty was no longer enough.

His name was Percival van der Berg.

A cartographer, explorer, inventor, and natural philosopher of the newly founded Technate of Koperdam, Percival set sail with a purpose that seemed almost absurd in its scale: to discover how much of the world could truly be known.

Month after month, he traveled.

He crossed vast stretches of ocean and stepped upon shores he had never seen. He passed through deserts, forests, plains, and mountains, following coastlines wherever his path allowed. He encountered peoples whose languages he could not understand and civilizations whose customs were so different from his own that every conversation became a lesson.

And he recorded everything.

Every coastline was marked. Every settlement was given a position. Rivers were traced, mountains were measured, territories were noted, and the locations of distant nations were carefully recorded whenever they could be determined. When borders were uncertain, Percival noted that uncertainty rather than allowing assumption to take the place of knowledge.

His expedition became more than a journey across geography. It became a journey through civilization itself.

He met the Kuri//aes, observed their pastoral way of life and their adaptation to the desert. He traveled through Serrano, where independent settlements governed themselves through tradition, reputation, and the unwritten Frontier Code. He entered Kheta-Kedet, where he met a queen revered as a living goddess and witnessed a civilization that had flourished within one of the world's harshest environments.

He continued to Coronado, where proud and independent communities governed themselves while remaining united when their survival demanded it. Further south, he encountered another unfamiliar land, a small village, and a strange species of fungus that had sickened its people. The discovery occupied him for weeks as he experimented with a temporary medicine before continuing his journey.

These were only a handful of the civilizations he encountered.

There were many others.

Some left only a few lines in his journals. Others demanded entire pages. But each became another mark upon the map, another fragment of the world brought into focus.

Slowly, the pieces began to fit together.

What had once been scattered observations became a picture of something immense.

A world.

By the end of the expedition, Percival had produced what was, in essence, the first comprehensive geographical survey of the modern globe. It was not perfect. There were still places he had not visited, borders that remained uncertain, and lands whose peoples he barely understood. But for the first time since the Cataclysm, there was a foundation upon which the world could be understood as a whole.

Percival returned to Koperdam carrying his survey with him.

There, the work passed into the hands of Henry Westcroft.

Where Percival had explored, measured, and recorded, Henry refined. The scattered coordinates, coastlines, territories, and observations were brought together into a more complete and standardized world map, one that could be reproduced, distributed, and studied by nations far beyond Koperdam.

For the first time in thousands of years, the peoples of the modern age could look upon a single map and see the world not as isolated fragments, but as one vast and interconnected place.

And somewhere in Koperdam, beneath the weight of countless pages of notes and measurements, Percival van der Berg could finally look upon the globe he had spent months chasing and know one thing for certain:

The world had been mapped.

What mortalkind chose to do with that knowledge would come next.