Noraena (setting)

Noraena (pronounced: /nəreɪnɑ/, *noh-REI-na*, or /nəre:nɑ/, *noh-REH-na*) is a fictional fantasy setting, focusing on the planet of the same name - mainly on the southern region of the Aiyothai continent during the Era of Kingdoms, where Kingdom of Ayn and its neighbours were located.

### The Old Era

The first inhabitants of Noraena came from another world: they were humans, who arrived by way of spaceships in order to terraform the planet and adapt it for life. Before their arrival Noraena was in the habitable zone of the Sun, but without life. Thanks to those humans, who lived exclusively in Linnea, Noraena became lush with non-intelligent life within a millenium, and the next step for the colonists was to populate it with the sentient humanoid races they engineered during that time, as part of the Batchett-Praxter project. However, the colonists weren't a homogeneous group, and around that time a political conflict led to a military one. Colonists and their cities were wiped out by rockets and bombs, leaving Linnea covered in rubble and dead bodies, and Aiyothai inhabited by all the races they engineered, but none of the technology they had.

This event was linked to the Godswake and magic awakening on Noraena. The freed magic subsequently suffused every aspect of life and every living being of the world, changed the environment, and led to accelerated evolution of many magical and quasi-magical species, as the conditions of living on Noraena changed. The gods, on the other hand, took a long time to do anything meaningful, unwilling to deal with the primitive tribes left alive at that time. Instead, they used this time to establish their spheres of influence and relationships, as well as create a plethora of demigods and lesser powers to delegate their tasks to.

Given that the sentient races engineered by the people of Linnea were not given any knowledge of technology, it was many hundreds of thousands of years before any society was redeveloped by the Noraenians, and still many more before the first proto-empire: the Old Elvish Empire, a magocracy of elves who managed to partially tame some of the most dangerous beasts that evolved in the magic-rich environment, including dragons which they used as intelligent mounts.

Around that time the gods made an appearance, and quickly became a vital part of the culture of the Old Elves, some of the minor ones even coming into relationships with members of the elves' higher castes. This ended, however, in a magical catastrophe brought about by conflicts within the ruling family. This not only destroyed the whole Old Elvish Empire and killed the vast majority of elves and dragons on Noraena, but also changed the geography of the eastern side of Aiyothai, making the large mountain range that divided those lands from the rest of the continent even higher and more treacherous - enough to be quite effective in prohibiting other races from discovering those desolate and unpopulated lands later.

### Era of Tribes

On the other side of <old-elvish mountain range>, it would be thousands of years before races with weaker links to magic would develop enough to form their own societies. Every time that happened, the gods made their presence known, but remained detached from the daily affairs of the young empires, mindful of the fate of the old elves. One of those realms was the Empire of the Sun. Located in central Aiyothai, it became a military power and swallowed the surrounding nations over the next few hundred years. But it, too, was doomed to end in flames of magic, this time due to a failed political coup, which resulted in the destruction of the empire's capital. Seeing the chaos, the goddess of Void, Raven swooped in, hoping to establish her own realm in the mortal world. She was stopped and sealed away by a group of warriors and mages who arrived at the place of her descent onto Noraena from another world. The group - called Hanari by the witnesses - remained as an important part of Noraena's politics and history throughout hundreds of years to come.

People of the Empire of the Sun cultivated strong cultural identities to their aboriginal nations throughout the empire's existence. These nations were most often referred to as tribes, and frequently associated with one of the fourteen elements of magic. The Tribe of Darkness was mostly obliterated in the catastrophe that crippled the empire, and the other tribes decided to leave the cursed land, dispersing in every direction in search of new homes, each accompanied by a few of the Hanari. The human-dominated Tribe of Fire traveled south, and during the next couple hundreds of years split multiple times, giving birth to multiple realms along the southern side of Aiyothai, among them the Karimdor Empire and the Kingdom of Ayn.