Before the war
The First Celestial War did not begin in an empty world. Veridia had already grown from Aethelgard’s first permanent settlement into a prosperous multi-species civilisation. Formal government brought stability, but it also hardened the distinctions between mortal society and the higher Celestial powers that had helped shape the city.
Across the centuries, competing ideas of order and change became increasingly difficult to reconcile. The Aeterna and Khaotari came to embody opposing answers to that dispute, while Veridia itself became the place where celestial philosophy, mortal government and access to higher power collided.
A war beyond the city
Once the conflict became open war, its scale exceeded anything Veridia’s inhabitants could contain. Lower-realm peoples fled or were caught between powers capable of altering the world around them, and even the Tier III orders were divided by the crisis.
The struggle spread beyond ordinary armies. World-shaping magic scarred land and water, turning the conflict into a catastrophe whose consequences survived long after the fighting ended.
The fall of Veridia
Veridia was destroyed during the war. Its once-fertile coast was devastated, its surviving structures broken and its surrounding environment rendered hostile. The old Veridian Shore was transformed into the poisoned region later known as the Sunken Coast.
The Aeterna emerged from the war with a costly victory, but the conflict had reduced the great Tier IV powers on all sides and shattered the political order that had gathered around the First City.
Legacy
The First Celestial War left Aethelgard fragmented. Survivors dispersed, Celestial powers became rarer and more distant, and the ruins of Veridia stood as evidence that even the most celebrated civilisation could be broken by forces above it.
In the centuries that followed, survivors began gathering again. Their attempt to create a new centre of cooperation would eventually produce Concordia—a city shaped in part by the memory of what Veridia had lost.