Tephora

### Inhabitants

8,675,215,543 (Humans), 266,717 (Mutants), N/A (Blightspawn), N/A (Sunstone Golems), N/A (Robots)

## Summary

**Tephora** is the world on which the entire series takes place. It is three continents, close to each other, in a shape resembling Yin and Yang, with a comparatively small island in the center.

## Geography

Tephora is split into three large continents and one large island:

### **Edria**

Edria is the continent to the west of Refuge. The top fourth of the continent is covered with lush forests and grasslands, and is where the Kingdom of **Regaiviel** resides. The Scorching Prairie, which takes up two fourths of Edria's landmass, is an expansive desert where few live. The Blighted Forest takes up the bottom fourth of Edria, and is the single largest concentration of the **Azure Blight** in Tephora.

### **Egrus**

Egrus is the continent to the north of Refuge. It is an icy wasteland, covered in glaciers, mountains, and blankets of snow year-round, and is home to the largest concentrations of the single most valuable resource in Tephora: **Sunstones**, which can be found in ore deposits and in the **Sunstone Golems** that roam the continent. Some Sunstone Deposits are large enough to make entire islands float, and one deposit runs directly beneath a river, keeping it in a liquid state across the entire continent.

### **Efron**

Efron is the continent to the southeast of Refuge. It is a hellish wasteland, covered in basalt, obsidian, pumice, ash, and lava, along with a yearly ash cloud that often creates severe weather. Volcanoes dot the continent, the largest of them also being home to the most people, though few even live to maturity in this area, and most inhabitants are prisoners and immigrants. Almost no living thing can survive here, and it is considered the only continent that is completely safe from the Azure Blight.

### Refuge

Refuge is a large tropical island with a tall mountain in the center. Almost no urbanization exists on the island, and is inhabited by the Aerois, a clan of monks who devote their time to peace and understanding, studying nature passively as they work to keep the three continents' climates separate from each other, both to prevent a global winter and to prevent the spread of the Azure Blight through the air. The wildlife is at its most diverse on the island, and all three continents have signed a treaty to leave it be.

## History

### Creation

Tephora was created by three **Gods**, those being **Ituna**, the Goddess of Life, **Bedos**, the God of Death, and **Nuien**, the God of Spirits. Together, the three Gods worked to create a world where each continent would be devoted to one of them. Ituna created Edria, a lush paradise, to easily give life, Bedoes created Efron, a burning hellscape, to kill anything that walked upon it, and Nuien created Egrus, a frozen wasteland, to signify a barren place upon which either life or death could thrive. Refuge was the only place on the planet to arise without the Gods willing it, and they allowed it to remain, as a testament to the will of evolution and entropy.

### First Age

The three Gods would then make their residence on Tephora, each living on the continent they created as Ituna dictated the evolution of life on Edria, Bedos prevented the existence of life on Efron, and Nuien allowed life to naturally develop on Egrus. For the first billion years, they didn't much interfere with each other, but eventually, Ituna and Bedos became tired with each other's way of existence, and came to wage war on each other, causing trillions of deaths of many living creatures as they did so, Nuien stepping in each time they fought to break up their battling, each battle between Ituna and Bedos being a mass extinction event.

### Cataclysm

After another few billion years, Bedos came to battle Ituna again, this time having amassed an army far larger than her own. The battle that resulted was the largest mass extinction yet, as Nuien stepped in once again, this time deciding that Bedos was too much of a threat while conscious, as they and Ituna seal Bedos inside Tephora, rendering him dormant as his armies of the undead immediately crumbled. After this, Ituna went on to govern the evolution of all life on Tephora, Nuien returning to a hermitic lifestyle and watching over the progression and evolution of life.

### Rise of Humankind

Some time after, Ituna decided to create a species in her image, which she named humanity. This species was created using a previous hominid, which she also split off into other species as well. Unlike her other creations, humanity could consciously think, and thus act in accordance to more than just instinct, and act with an actual preconceived plan. It wasn't long before humanity began to spread across the world, reshaping it as they went to create massive cities and structures, to form governments, weapons and treaties.

One day, one human had discovered a means to life after death, naming himself a Lich and a Necromancer, as he raised armies of the undead once more, while Efron's volcanoes began to erupt. To combat this, Ituna selected four warriors, each one from a different part of the world, to receive elemental powers. Edria's warrior would receive the power of Earth, Egrus' warrior would receive the power of Water, Efron's warrior would receive the power of Fire, and Refuge's warrior would receive the power of Air.

Together, Ituna's Champions of Light would destroy the Necromancer's army, and permanently destroy him, before being given various missions to each protect their own continent, as the Champion of Air would forever control the world's climate to keep the continents' climates separate, the Champion of Water would keep the oceans steady, the Champion of Earth would keep the land fertile, and the Champion of Fire would guide humankind into an age of metal and discovery.

However, the Champion of Fire would seek more power, and believed they had the ability to take it from Nuien, so they ventured off to Egrus, and to Nuien, demanding their power. Nuien would simply ignore the Champion of Fire, having had no stake in the conflicts of humanity. The Champion of Fire would have none of it, however, and began to, over the course of decades, build a device around Nuien meant to siphon their power away.

Nuien would continue to ignore this, until the device was finished, and the Champion of Fire activated it. However, rather than granting the Champion Nuien's power, the device seemed to simply kill Nuien, and the Champion of Fire along with it. Ituna, wishing to always have these Champions be present, decided to have the Champions' powers reincarnate into random residents of their corresponding locations.

After this, Ituna decided to add one more ability to humankind before departing from the world to watch it from her own realm, the ability to randomly evolve one power for the soul, and one power for the DNA. Then, she left, leaving a statue of herself, Bedos and Nuien in the center of Refuge, giving the Champion of Air the additional mission to protect the statue at all costs, as it could summon all three Gods back to the world.

### Founding of the Kingdoms

An unknown amount of time later, both Edrius and Egrus founded **Kingdoms** to govern themselves, as they established trade with each other and expanded to all available land. Due to the harsh conditions of Egrus, the Kingdom of **Aevilia** as it was known was forced to adapt, developing advanced technologies for survival and extraction of the Sunstone deposits they had found around the area, building cities across the river. At one point, Aevilia had decided to invade Regaiviel, causing the countries to go to war.

Aevilia developed dozens of advanced technologies for both communication and combat during this time, and were on the winning side of the war for most of it, as Edrius at the time had just entered its Renaissance Age. However, the people were unhappy with the cold and heartless way that Aevilia was run, and rebelled against the government, **Adrian Dehnert** becoming the Kingdom's President afterwards, as the Kingdom became an Oligarchy, the war ending shortly after as Aevilia, now known as **Ailieq**, began distributing their technology over to Regaiviel, both nations prospering for the next roughly three hundred years.

### New Enemies

Roughly one hundred years before the start of the series, two new threats reared their heads. One was **Tattannu**, the son of the Lich of old who had by now created his own Empire in Efron, naming it **Bedosi** in honor of the God he worshipped. The other was the **Azure Blight**, a plague that had at that point been largely dormant, but made its way to the bottom forest of Edria, mutating it into a nightmarish jungle of fungi.

Soon, **Sunstone Incorporated**, which had been founded a decade earlier, discovered that Sunstones could remove the Azure Blight from one's system, and destroy the **Blightspawn** monsters that the plague created, and such became one of the most powerful entities in the world. At the same time, Edria established a secret police force, hidden from the public, that would keep order in every way possible.