A fractured age
By the later Second Cycle, Aethelgard had again built prosperous cities, trade routes and complex political systems. Yet old celestial divisions had never fully vanished, and mortal alliances carried tensions of their own. The peace before the Second Celestial War was therefore real, but increasingly fragile.
Unlike the earlier conflict centred on Veridia and the highest powers, the later war spread through the wider world. It became known as the War of All Species because mortal peoples and their cities were drawn directly into a struggle that no longer remained distant from everyday civilisation.
Ragnarok
As the war expanded, settlements were isolated, armies fractured and old political arrangements failed under the pressure. The conflict combined mortal warfare with Celestial power, leaving regions damaged and communities displaced across Aethelgard.
The name Ragnarok survives because the war was experienced not as a single battle but as the collapse of an age, remembered through shattered alliances, ruined cities and the scars left across Aethelgard.
The fall of Concordia
Concordia entered the final years of the conflict already weakened by internal division and the loss of the balance that had once sustained the City of Harmony. During the war the city was breached and sacked, and by Edict 3350 it had ceased to exist as a functioning civilisation.
Its destruction removed one of the great multi-species centres of the Second Cycle and left the strategic river delta in ruins.
The end of the war
The Second Celestial War ended in Cycle II · Edict 3350. A fragile peace returned, but victory did not restore the world that had existed before the fighting. Cities, populations and institutions had been damaged or erased, while magical and environmental scars remained.
What followed was not an immediate return to prosperity. Aethelgard entered the long reconstruction remembered as the Silent Years.