The Shogunate

The Terrestrial Exalted now ruled in the Solars' place, establishing a Shogunate in place of the Deliberative. Yet as year followed year, the glories forged in the First Age failed and could not be replaced. For century upon century, Dragon-Blood fought Dragon-Blood for dwindling magical weapons and resources, hiding the true reasons for their conflicts behind the ideologies of leaders long since lost to history.

Throughout this era, a loose confederacy of warring daimyos ruled Creation, periodically united by a strong shogun until the next disputed succession or palace coup. It was a time of growing unrest and declining standards of living. The Terrestrials were unequal to the challenge of maintaining the wonders of the First Age—those that had not already been destroyed, sabotaged by the Twilight Caste Solars or hidden by the Sidereals.

The borders of an expanded Creation shuddered. The armies of the Fair Folk breached the boundaries of reality, sowing chaos in terrible breakthroughs. Finally, having grown mighty in their centuries of Underworld exile, the Deathlords showed their hand. These creatures of black power joined their might to conjure a vast, sorcerous disease into Creation.

The Great Contagion, as it was known, struck the world like a hammer, slaying nine out of every ten individuals in Creation, and the dead flooded the Underworld to swell the armies of the Deathlords. By the time the Contagion abated, so many had died that great holes had been torn in the fabric of Creation itself. From these holes seeped the necrotic Essence of the Underworld, pooling into gloomy shadowlands where Creation and the Underworld overlapped. The Fair Folk eagerly seized their opportunity and set upon Creation in its hour of greatest desperation. Shadowlands grew and swelled in the heart of the world, the Wyld ate at the borders of Creation, and it seemed that all might be destroyed.

In the midst of this chaos, as the world spiraled to a cataclysmic end in a welter of plague and faerie-fire, one soldier managed to win her way to the ancient seat of the defenses that protected Creation. There, at the heart of the world's power, she activated those defenses and became their master.