Once, the gods did not hide. They shaped mountains with their hands and settled arguments by moving the sea. Mortals lived in their shadow — fed by their abundance, ruled by their whim, never once doubting that the world was watched over. The cities of that age were impossible things: towers grown from living stone, roads of light, libraries that answered when you spoke to them. The people of Vaelun believed it would last forever. They were wrong about almost everything.

No one agrees on what the gods did — a betrayal, a war among themselves, a single unforgivable mercy. Only that the sky cracked from horizon to horizon, the deep rose to swallow the coast, and every shining kingdom fell in one night now remembered as the Sundering. Whole peoples vanished before dawn. The roads of light went dark. And when the dust settled, the gods were simply gone — withdrawn behind the wound they had torn in the world.

Generations have passed in the quiet after. The gods no longer rule, no longer answer prayer with thunder. They reach into the world only sideways now — through buried relics, through omens read in ruin and bone, and through the rare mortal they choose to touch. Beneath the broken cities lie the dungeons: the drowned vaults and root-choked halls of the old age, full of what the Sundering buried and did not kill. Some descend for treasure. Some for answers. Most do not return.

Draemos, god of legacy, keeps what the world would rather forget — every name, every debt, every buried deed. Selaara, goddess of secrets, hoards what the depths have swallowed and trades it to those who pay in worse. Aervyn of the open sky burns those who hide the truth and cannot abide a lie spoken in his light. Sylvara gives life with a touch and takes it back the moment she turns away. They are patient. They are watching. And every so often, they choose.

To be touched by a god is to become a demigod — blessed and ruined in the same breath. They carry a fragment of divine power and a flaw shaped to match it: the king who cannot truly die, the seer driven mad by every secret she hears, the truth-speaker who could not lie even to save a life. They walk Vaelun as living proof that the gods are not gone — only quiet, and not finished with us yet.

The Sundering did not end the world. Eight peoples endured it, and each remembers it differently.

You begin as no one in particular — a Wanderer, untested, with the broken world ahead of you. There is no class to choose and no fate written down. Warrior, mage, healer, something darker — what you become is decided only by what you do, and who you choose to be when it costs you something. The dungeon is listening. It has been waiting a long time. For you.