History of Ahvantir

DM Only — Contains Spoilers
This article contains historical truths not available to the public or to most scholars of Aru'Mas. The official history taught in the city omits the Drorn'Duur, sanitizes Marduk Sunspear, and conceals the true nature of the First Pact's darker terms. Handle accordingly.
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Mythic Prehistory — The Divine War

Undated. Treated as mythic history with no fixed point in the Marducian Calendar.

Before the Drorn’Duur, before any mortal settlement, before the calendar that now marks Ahvantir’s years, the gods walked in the mortal world. The conflict known as the Divine War was not fought between mortals — it was fought between divine powers using the mortal world as their terrain. The spirits of Ahvantir resisted the gods during this war, a fact considered historically remarkable: native spirits standing as equals against divine forces represents a concentration of spiritual power found almost nowhere else in the known planes.

The war ended not through victory but through sacrifice. Imwei, the Green Mother — acting against her own kind — worked alongside an unnamed spirit of compassion to create the Divine Gate, a sentient being whose existence enforced permanent separation between the divine and mortal planes. The Gate was not built. It was born. With its creation, the gods withdrew to the Ranjergon, and Ahvantir’s spirits became the sole governing power of the archipelago — a position they have held for longer than any mortal record reaches.

The spirits who later negotiated the First Pact with Marduk Sunspear were heirs to this history. Their willingness to negotiate at all was considered unusual. That they negotiated as equals with a people carrying divine faith reflects the depth of their claim to this land.

The Drorn’Duur Era (~-275 to -15 MC)

Approximately two and a half centuries before the Marducian Calendar begins.

The land of Ahvantir was not wilderness when the settlers arrived. The Fend — the only natural gap in the Mountain Wall that rings the archipelago — was home to an ancient dwarven civilization known as the Drorn’Duur, whose name meant Keepers of the Deep Stone.

Their dynasty lasted approximately two and a half centuries. They were a subterranean people whose halls rose to meet the surface in fortified terraces and stone sanctuaries. Their stone-priests maintained deep relationships with the native spirits of the archipelago, translating the shifting moods of the land’s ancient guardians and codifying those relationships into formal pacts. The spiritual landscape of the Fend — the ancient agreements that still give spirits power and purpose across that territory today — was largely their creation.

They did not merely coexist with Ahvantir’s spirits. They were woven into its spiritual infrastructure.

When Marduk Sunspear and his fleet arrived on the southeastern shore, weary and desperate after forty-nine years in the Astral Sea, the Drorn’Duur met them with open arms. They offered food, shelter, and guidance through the complexities of spirit diplomacy, asking for nothing in return but peace.

The Arrival and the Betrayal (-16 to -13 MC)

The Days of Encroachment.

Marduk Sunspear was not a conqueror who chose Ahvantir. He was a refugee fleet captain who had watched his homeworld destroyed, spent forty-nine years adrift in the Astral Sea collecting other people’s losses, and finally found a place that could hold all of them.

Official History The official record presents Marduk as a visionary explorer drawn to Ahvantir by legend, who approached the land’s spirits with humility and won their respect through diplomatic genius. The Drorn’Duur are not mentioned. The official history treats Ahvantir as untamed wilderness at the time of settlement. True History Marduk’s fleet experienced forty-nine years of travel by his home planet’s orbital record. During that time, his people felt the constant sensations of hunger and thirst without the biological need to eat or drink — a form of psychological starvation sustained across five decades. The fleet grew from roughly 680 able-bodied adults at Ahvantir’s shore (a military tally; the true total population was likely higher) to 1,486 adults by the Year 0 census, through births, additional refugees encountered during travel, and the widespread use of resurrection magic during the Landing War. When the Drorn’Duur welcomed Marduk’s people, they welcomed a population that had been psychologically starving for fifty years. Marduk’s subsequent betrayal — a sudden, brutal assault on Drorn’Duur settlements during the Days of Encroachment — likely reflected a calculation: that a people who understood Ahvantir’s spiritual landscape better than he did represented an unacceptable risk to his claim on this land. By approximately -15 MC, the Drorn’Duur’s above-ground civilization had been destroyed. Their spirit-temples were defiled. Their clans were eradicated or scattered. The survivors attempted to reclaim their settlements and failed. The desecration of Drorn’Duur spirit-temples did not go unnoticed. The native spirits of the archipelago had standing pacts with the Drorn’Duur — obligations that the defilement of those temples activated. Drorn’Duur survivors who had not yet withdrawn underground allied with the spirit coalition. Their knowledge of the land’s geography, their legitimate grievance, and the formal breach of ancient agreements gave the spirit response both cause and structure.

The Landing War had begun.

The Landing War (-13 to 0 MC)

Thirteen years of conflict.

The Landing War was not a simple confrontation between settlers and spirits. It was a thirteen-year conflict between Marduk’s settler coalition and an alliance of native spirits and Drorn’Duur survivors, fought across the southeastern island and into the Fend. The settler forces held together through a combination of Adobban Demoranza’s divine magic — which gave mortal fighters a chance against opponents that functioned like forces of nature — and the widespread use of resurrection magic that prevented their numbers from declining despite significant casualties.

Marduk’s stated objective, never recorded in the official histories, was expansion beyond the Mountain Wall — the ring of impassable mountains and barrier reefs that encircles the archipelago’s inner islands. Access to the interior was the thing he had fought toward for thirteen years and could not let go of. The war’s moral complexity on the settler side was compounded by this drive: settlers fighting for survival in a conflict their leader’s actions had caused, for a homeland that their leader also wanted to treat as a staging ground for further expansion.

Named Events of the Landing War

The Massacre of Cascading Leaves During the middle years of the war, an unnamed spirit struck a small settler encampment in the night. Sixty-six people were killed — primarily women, children, and the infirm. The spirit was never formally identified. The massacre is remembered among the settler descendants as evidence of spirit cruelty; in context, it followed Marduk’s destruction of Drorn’Duur spirit-temples and represents the conflict’s cost falling on those least responsible for its cause.

The Battle of Hallowed Hollow A settler militia engaged the Green Man — the spirit of what is now the Neverwood — and his forces at one of the Greenwood’s sacred sites, where the settlers had discovered a spring whose waters could heal near any wound. The settlers refused to withdraw. The Green Man brought his army. Seventy-two civilian settlers and physicians were killed in the fighting, in addition to soldier casualties. The healing properties of the spring likely contributed to the settlers’ ability to sustain their numbers throughout the war. The current relationship between Aru’Mas and the Green Man carries the weight of this history.

The Primordem

The emotional residue of the Landing War condensed, over thirteen years, into eleven spirits — the Primordem. Each formed at a specific moment of moral or diplomatic failure: the point when dialogue was abandoned, when empathy was sacrificed for survival, when retaliation felt righteous, when protection became cruelty. They were not summoned. They were consequences.

The Spirit General and the Duel

He Who Was Forgotten served as the commanding general of the spirit coalition. A master tactician who inspired loyalty rather than fear, he was challenged by Marduk Sunspear to single combat near the war’s end. He accepted, diminished himself to physical form to make the terms equal, and won. Rather than press his advantage, he honored the terms he had agreed to: the mortal army was permitted to retreat. He ended the war through mercy.

This act opened the path to the First Pact negotiations. Whether He Who Was Forgotten was the Spirit King — the supreme authority on the spirit side — or a general acting under a higher power has never been confirmed in any mortal record.

The First Pact and the Founding (Year 0 MC)

The Marducian Calendar begins here.

The First Pact was the treaty that ended the Landing War. It established Aru’Mas’s legal existence, set the terms of mortal-spirit coexistence, and created the Spiritsway Passage — a joint spirit-mortal construction that serves as the only known safe crossing through the Mountain Wall.

The Pact mandated that access to the interior of the archipelago must be granted but also restricted and protected. The Spiritsway Passage was built as the physical expression of that mandate: a portal, not a gate, erected at the northern edge of what would become Stonegate. The city of Aru’Mas grew around it as a strategic and treaty obligation — concentrating the Crown’s forces at the point it was most obligated to defend. Breach of the Pact’s terms carried documented consequences that the city’s leadership took seriously enough to build an entire governance structure around preventing.

The first true census, taken at Year 0, recorded 1,486 adult citizens — nearly double the military tally from the fleet’s arrival, reflecting births during the war years and the sustained use of resurrection magic.

The Suppressed Terms The official history records the First Pact as a generous and honorable agreement. Two of its terms are not publicly known:

  1. The Primordem sealing — the twelve spirits sealed beneath Ahvantir as a prerequisite to the treaty. Their existence is known only to the ruling council of Aru’Mas.
  2. The erasure of He Who Was Forgotten — the removal of the spirit general’s name from all records, written into the Pact as a condition. Whether this was demanded by Marduk’s side, agreed to by the spirit delegation, or some combination of both has never been documented. He Who Was Forgotten was not directly involved in the negotiations. The extent of what he knew before stepping willingly into the seal is unclear. The Drorn’Duur were not party to the negotiations. The peace made at Year 0 did not acknowledge them, restore their land, or recognize what had been done to them. Adobban Demoranza's vision of the Pathite Pantheon had come during the war years, providing the settlers with a divine framework that both sustained their fighting capacity and planted the seeds of the Church’s post-war structure. The Church of the Threefold Path was formally established in the years following Year 0, giving institutional form to what had been a battlefield faith.

The Early City (1 — ~100 MC)

Year 1 MC — The Vael Recordings

Archivist Ilyrana Vael, Third Circle Pact Scholar, recorded two sequences into an Arcanum Cryptex in the year following the sealing. Her accounts — covering all eleven original Primordem individually and collectively — predate the full political suppression of that knowledge. They represent the closest first-hand documentation of the sealing that survives. See: Ilyrana Vael Cryptex Recordings.

The Death of Marduk Sunspear

Date unconfirmed; estimated early post-founding period.

Marduk died in battle against a rampaging spirit. The details of the encounter are vague in the historical record — whether this reflects genuine ambiguity or deliberate suppression is unknown. His elder son Darod Sunspear assumed leadership. The Sunspear line continued for an unspecified period before the Ilderas Dynasty rose to power.

42 MC — The Resurrection Ban

The widespread use of resurrection magic during the Landing War had sustained settler numbers but generated consequences that the Pathite Faith judged incompatible with its principles and with the spiritual stability of Ahvantir. The Church of the Threefold Path formally banned resurrection magic outright. The ban was ratified into Aru’Mas law in 42 MC and has remained in force since.

Middle History (~100 — 400 MC)

This period is sparsely documented in the vault. The following are known anchor points.

  • The Shattered Strand event occurred during an unspecified era of expansionist ambition — city leaders attempted to claim a peninsula north of the harbor in defiance of the First Pact. The spirits responded catastrophically. The peninsula broke apart into the reef that still bears its name. Survivors were pulled into the Faded Veil rather than killed. The one intact remnant became the island on which the Gilded Bastion was later built.
  • Captain Varrick was executed for treason at some point in this period, becoming a bound spirit in the harbor. Described as “centuries ago.”
  • Arielle the Lantern-Bearer died in a market fire in the Far-Farewell Market District. Described as “centuries ago.”
  • The Ilderas Public Archive was established by the Ilderas royal family “centuries ago,” placing it well within this period.
  • The Ilderas Dynasty rose to power at some point, replacing the Sunspear succession. How this transition occurred is not documented.
  • The Spillway expanded at some point, physically dividing Hearthstone into Upper and Lower — a significant urban event with no confirmed date.

Recent History (400 MC — Present)

Connections

Source Notes

Source Compiled from DM canon sessions (2026-05-12 and 2026-05-13), world-anvil articles, primordem-doc, and the Marducian Calendar (themrbeasley, canon). This article synthesizes confirmed lore from multiple sources. Where dates are estimated, they are marked accordingly.