Shining Rays Chronicle

The Shining Rays Chronicle is one of the chronicles of Ceal. It tells the story of the Rediscovery of Iserialogy, the Four Great Wel Nations, and the Iserial War. It takes place around 734 BN and can be divided into three parts.

## Part 1 ~ The Iserial Propagation

In the preface of the war, Iserialogy had been lost to the Wel due to the Loss of Iserialogy in the last Iserial Calm. Instead, the Four Great Wel Nations that had formed were all centered around conventional technology and were on roughly the same technological level. However, as each of these four Nations held fundamentally different beliefs, relationships were tense at best, and occasionally small border conflicts broke out between two of the nations.

It was a precarious balance that was disturbed when Tyna Elocnarys - a young Draykin undercover agent - was unmasked and captured while on a reconnaissance mission in the Divine State of Mel-Erik. At this point, the Divine State of Mel-Erik - which had always been more spiritual than the other three Great Wel Nations - already had re-discovered some Iserialogy of its own, which was also the reason why they were able to discover Tyna.

Tyna as a member of a Species that was thought to have been extinct for over a millennium was taken prisoner, interrogated, and subjected to cruel experiments that served to further the understanding of Iserialogy by the Mel-Erikans. However, she was eventually able to flee with the help of Nicos Sunarebdys - a spy from the Kingdom of Jo'Wöhn - and Tell Valiens, a genius scientist Squirrel Wel from Mel-Erik who had treated her relatively kindly and was revealed to have been a double-agent for Jo'Wöhn all along.

Together, they managed to escape to Jo'Wöhn, where Tyna, honouring the deal she had struck with them, revealed to the Jo'Wöhnians the same things she had already been forced to reveal to Mel-Erik. Afterwards, her two saviours escorted her on a ship headed back to Ventana, but were intercepted and captured on the way by a strike force from the Resgrif Empire. Figuring that over short or long, her captors would get the secrets that they wanted anyway, since by now two of the Four Great Wel Nations already had access to them, Tyna volunteered to work together with them and taught them the same things she had already revealed to the other two Great Wel Nations.

This earned her the trust of Resgrif, and although she was kept under close watch, she was granted more personal freedom here than she had ever since being first captured in Mel-Erik. However, she was still denied the right to leave the country. Working together with her companions, she was eventually able to use the confusion resulting from a border clash with the Kyeéyrifra Ecotopia to flee to Jelkyera. There, she could have probably slipped back unnoticed to Ventana, but instead she chose to reveal herself to the Kyeéyrifrans and shared the secrets of Iserialogy with them as well, intent to completing the balance of power between the Four Great Wel Nations.

Afterwards, Tyna finally managed to return to Ventana, where she parted ways with her companions. She had to justify herself in front of the council of elders, but it was eventually decided that given the circumstances, as well as the fact that Mel-Erik had already started to re-discover Iserialogy on its own, and it would only have been a matter of time until the Four Great Wel Nations would have gotten to the point of what Tyna had revealed to them on their own, Tyna's actions had been justified.

However, different from what Tyna had hoped, supplying all Four Great Wel Nations with the same knowledge had not created a stable balance of power, but rather gave each of the nations a feeling of superiority over the neighbours. Each nation focused their efforts on the militarization of Iserialogy in a totally different direction, and before long, border conflicts in which the weapons were being field-tested on the enemy were breaking out all over the northwestern three nations.

Tyna tried to defuse the situation and act as an envoy, but only ended up being drawn into the conflict herself. The first phase ended when in a show of power, the Divine State of Mel-Erik used its newly completed Judgement Grid to destroy the Moebius Barrier that was keeping the Domain of Ninanjiro hidden, thus revealing the Draykin to the entire world once again. However, even faced with Mel-Erik's power to rain down orbital destruction on its enemies, the other three Great Wel Nations refused to bow down to Mel-Erik, and thus the Iserial War truly began.

## Part 2 ~ The All-Out War

With all Four Great Wel nations in the war and on one another's throat, the Iserial War was soon shifting into a higher gear. Originally, the Divine State of Mel-Erik also waged war on on Ninanjiro, but after an invasion attempt was beaten back by the people of Ninanjiro, who were significantly better-versed in the ways of Iserialogy, Mel-Erik shifted its focus against the other three Great Wel Nations.

By now, each of the four Great Wel Nations had also developed their own speciality of Iserial Warfare. The Resgrif Empire used Iserialogy to augment its conventional warfare, the Kingdom of Jo'Wöhn breached the World Wall and focused on summoning Demons to serve as deadly soldiers, the Kyeéyrifra Ecotopia focused on using organic Iserialogy to create Chimerals, and the Divine State of Mel-Erik could rely on its orbital Judgement Grid to rain down rays of Iserialogy on its enemies.

The Domain of Ninanjiro - being located right in the middle of the Four Great Wel Nations - was occasionally also subject to tentative attacks, but was able to defend against all attempted invasions. Eventually, each of the Four Great Wel Nations tried to get Ninanjiro and the Kingdom of Phryconia on its side to shift the scales in its favour, but both Ninanjiro and Phryconia - fearing a repetition of the Genocide War - chose to remain neutral. Phryconia did not participate in the war at all, while Ninanjiro actively tried to reconciliate the Four Great Wel Nations, but also carried out a number of operations to ensure none of them grew too powerful, as well as to keep civilian casualties to a minimum.

Tyna, determined to somehow remedy the chaos she had inadvertently caused, first joined and eventually became leader of one of the task forces employed by Ninanjiro for these missions. Thanks to her efforts, the war, cruel though it was, remained somehow contained, and civilian casualties could be kept at a minimum. Tyna also met Nicos again, though he apparently had no recollection of Tyna or their adventures together. Tell, meanwhile, remained mysteriously absent, though rumours existed that he was working for one nation or another.

Near the end of the second part, it became apparent that someone or some organization was actively invested in making the Four Great Wel Nations fight one another. Knowing as much, Ninanjiro was able to finally get the rulers of the Wel nations to talk to one another, and for one short moment, it looked like the conflict could finally be brought to an end.

However, it was just then that Tell revealed what he had been up to. Over the course of the war thus far, he had helped in the development of four superweapons, one for each nation, and had secretly put people and mechanisms into place that would ensure that all those four superweapons were ultimately under his control. He demonstrated this by powering up the Iserial Cannon, and although Tyna and her companions reacted quickly, they arrived just a moment too late to stop it from firing and tearing a cleft right through half of Pelagia and all of Rida, destroying most of the Jo'Wöhnian capital of Vaught, and leaving the Vaughtfall in its wake.

Though Tyna and her companions were able to defeat Tell, he managed to escape and threatened that if the world did not give in to his demands, he would unleash the remaining superweapons on Ceal on-by-one.

## Part 3 ~ The Unification

faced with a common enemy, the Four Great Wel Nations were finally ready to work together. However, they soon found out that Tell had not only compromised the Iserial superweapons, but also formed a world-spanning secret society of powerful Wel that were all sympathetic to Tell's notion of uniting the world under a technocratic regime that Tell would preside over. They declared the formation of the Kleyrogyez Technocracy and began their simultaneous assaults on the governments of the Four Great Wel Nations.

Bereft of the strongest parts of their Iserial technology as well as some of their best fighters, and faced with an enemy that combined the strengths of all four nations' Iserial technology as well as their best fighters, the Four Great Wel Nations were at a considerable disadvantage. They tried working together to master this crisis, but were ultimately also forced to turn to Ninanjiro to help.

Tyna, who had by then become a war hero in her own right, was on the forefront of the troops sent by Ventana to beat back the Kleyrogyezian forces and liberate the governments of the Four Great Wel Nations one by one. However, in doing so, she also caused Tell to unleash the second superweapon - the Wyvern Celerity - before she was finally able to corner him at the Judgement Grid and defeat him even though he had awakened the third superweapon - the Ultima-Unit - to help him fight.

After her fight with Tell, Tyna and her companions were trapped on the Judgement Grid for several days as their shuttle had been destroyed during the fight with Tell. They eventually managed to secure another shuttle at a different part of the Judgement Grid and made their way back down to the surface, only to find that an entirely different war was going on.

This time around, it was powerful Draykin Iserialogists fighting the battle-weakened Wel. Tyna soon found out that everything up to here had been orchestrated by a Draykin secret society that had existed ever since the Genocide War, and had always waited for the time when they could have payback against the Wel who almost eradicated them over a thousand years ago. This Secret Society called itself the Broken Wings, and its members held high positions in Ninanjiro.

Even the organization that Tyna belonged to had all the time worked to further the Broken Wings' ambitions, and deteriorate the relations between the Four Great Wel Nations, intent on causing a war sooner or later that would leave the Wel weakened. Even Tyna's seemingly accidental capture in Mel-Erik had been planned, and her later missions, which had officially been in order to preserve the balance between the Four Great Wel Nations, had actually only been in order to draw out the war even longer. Finally, Tell's world-spanning rebellion had been the last thing the Broken Wings needed in order for them to be able to position their agents openly all around the Four Great Wel Nations. Then, at the very instant that Tyna defeated Tell, they struck.

Tyna, however, did not agree with their methods at all, and neither did her companions. Tyna knew very well that most Draykin just wanted to live in peace with the Wel, and that the Broken Wings, while powerful, represented only a small proportion of Draykin society. As such, Tyna and her companions took it onto themselves to stop the Broken Wings and bring peace back to Ceal. In the process of the resulting conflict, the Broken Wings finally unleashed the fourth superweapon, summoning Archdemon to wreak havoc on the lands of the Wel. Despite all this, Tyna and her companions, eventually managed to seal Archdemon away, and finally confronted the leaders of the Broken Wings and restored peace on Ceal. This was cemented by the Four Great Wel Nations putting aside their differences altogether, and joining to form the Republic of Cetara.

Finally, Nicos revealed to Tyna that he was actually one of the Timedrivers, a group of Mortals serving Kronos, The Ancient of time. He had first met Tyna during the second phase of the war, and then travelled back in time to save her at the very beginning, before travelling forward t help her again in the third phase. Revealing that Kronos had sent him here to limit prevent the extermination of the Wel at the hands of the Draykin, Nicos also told Tyna that he had come to offer her a place among the Timedrivers. Tyna gave it some thought and accepted Nicos' offer, becoming one of the Timedrivers, and since then has - under a number of different names - played many important roles in key events throughout the history of Ceal.