The First City

Veridia arose early in the Second Cycle and became Aethelgard’s first permanent settlement. Founded during Cycle II · Edicts 101–300, it gathered multiple mortal peoples together with higher Celestial powers on the fertile western coast later remembered as the Veridian Shore.

The city represented something unprecedented: enduring urban civilisation built through cooperation across peoples and tiers of power. Wards, cultivated land, waterways and ambitious civic works allowed Veridia to grow far beyond the simple communities of the First Cycle.

The Verdant Accord

Growth eventually required a formal system of government. During Edicts 301–450, the Verdant Accord established defined responsibilities across Veridia’s different communities and powers. It brought order to a rapidly expanding city, but it also made hierarchy more explicit.

The Veridian Decrees regulated authority and access to higher magical knowledge. In time, rules originally intended to preserve stability became part of a more rigid social order, and the distance between lower-realm inhabitants and the Celestial powers above them became increasingly difficult to ignore.

Harmony under strain

Veridia remained prosperous, but prosperity did not remove the disagreements beneath its political system. Competing Celestial philosophies of imposed order and necessary change increasingly shaped the city, while resentment grew among those who lived under rules they had little power to alter.

By the later pre-war centuries, the First City was still magnificent and physically intact, yet the ideals that had founded it were under pressure. Veridia had become both Aethelgard’s greatest symbol of cooperation and the place where the limits of that cooperation were most visible.

The First Celestial War and the fall

The growing Celestial divide eventually became the First Celestial War. Veridia was caught at the centre of the conflict and destroyed, ending the civilisation that had stood as Aethelgard’s first great experiment in shared urban life.

The devastation extended beyond the city walls. The fertile Veridian Shore was poisoned and transformed into the hostile Sunken Coast, leaving a permanent geographical scar where the First City had once flourished.

Legacy

Veridia survived in memory as both an achievement and a warning: the first great attempt at multi-species civilisation, and the civilisation whose destruction demonstrated the cost of Celestial conflict. Later societies inherited its lessons even when they rejected its structures.

Through the World Explorer, Veridia can be seen as it stood before the war—a living city on the Veridian Shore rather than only a memory of ruins.