Teneris

Teneris is the world in which the Lands of Exile lie. It has two major continents. In the west is Canarque, a scatter of fragmented lands; Caligran stretches across the world like a sword lodged firmly in the east.¹

Teneris is ancient. It has seen the rise and fall of many civilisations and is full of forgotten legends and mysteries.² Its history is one of destruction and rebirth, in which ancient secrets come to light and are buried again beneath the sands of time, a cycle long by human standards but fleeting on a cosmic scale.³

Continents and seas

Between the two continents lies the Great Western Sea. In it the Eye of Aquaron, an endless boiling vortex, keeps them apart by the will of the gods, and so Canarque faded into the mists of history.¹ The High Church teaches that the gods placed this barrier to protect humanity and that piercing it would be ruinous. Even so, the Archon wizard Castor Onerio sailed west with the Emperor's blessing in 285 AVD, and his ship Imperius came back in 289 AVD having found Canarque, which most of the Empire now calls the New World.⁴

Most of Caligran is covered by uninhabitable deserts and barren lands that appeared after The Desolation. They are not the work of nature, and they are seen as a testament to the cost of defying The Dark One, and to the reward of still drawing breath.¹

Many of the people of Caligran, especially the uneducated, have never heard the name Teneris, or know that their continent is called Caligran.⁵

Creation

In the mythology of Teneris, the Dark One is the only god with true creative power, and all creation comes from him. The gods of the Exiled Pantheon are his children, made by a conscious decision, while everything else he created involuntarily, in his dreams, and he holds no love for it.⁶ The gods worshipped by humans sided with mortals against him ages ago and prevented their total destruction. There is no idea in this world of an all-powerful god of absolute good.⁵

A wounded world

The history of Teneris is told in four ages, and only scholars know it well: members of the long-lived races, those who have stretched their lives through alchemy and magic, and disciplined people who pass their learning on to apprentices in a chain of knowledge.⁷

In the First Age the whole of Caligran was alive with civilisations and no barrier divided the western sea, and the people of Teneris pushed the limits of magic across the world. The Desolation ended that age: gods and whole civilisations died, the continents were separated by the Eye of Aquaron, and more than half of Caligran became desert. The teachings of the Church of Alarath hold that the gods' living among mortals had left all of Teneris open to the Dark One.⁷

Ages later, as the Third Age drew to a close, the Chain Wardens found that powerful beings who commanded the voidborn had come down upon Teneris. Against them gathered the Grand Alliance, the largest union in the history of Teneris. The scars of that war ran deep in the political and social fabric of the world, and afterwards it became clear that the gods who had protected the Empire and all good folk had either perished or were too exhausted to reach out to Teneris.⁸

No scholar in the history of Teneris has ever gathered enough knowledge of the voidborn to draw consistent conclusions about them.⁹

Many truths

Beliefs and histories in Teneris vary with who is telling the story and who is listening. This is not simple propaganda: about things unknown, or impossible to know for certain, an agreed objective truth cannot exist.⁵

Sky and seasons

A year on Teneris has 304 days. Nearly all the folk of Caligran have adopted the Empire's Clora Fastis, though many peoples keep calendars of their own: the Farr Islanders follow the tides, and the Inran and Geroni of Canarque have calendars entirely their own.¹¹ Every nation, culture and faith across Teneris has its own festivals and holy days, usually timed by the cycles of the sun, the twin moons and the stars.¹⁰

Peoples and faiths

Gods and belief systems shape everyone's life, and ordinary people's most of all. The existence of the gods is held to be as certain as gravity, and atheism is almost unheard of; there are still people and communities who, without denying the gods, refuse to honour them or live by their principles.¹²

Across the Lands of Exile most people worship the gods of the Exiled Pantheon, but the Fran people and the natives of Canarque have pantheons of their own, and scattered cults and local divinities are found throughout Teneris.¹³ Magic and miracles are exceptionally rare, and a cleric able to bring someone back from the dead is very hard to find. When someone dies, the soul's journey from Teneris to The Gate takes about a minute.¹⁴

Among the peoples of Teneris are the forgotten, found in two kinds, the desolate and the gravewalker, and the venereth, found in four: moon, fire, storm and snow.¹⁵

Keepers of the world

The Order of Nus’ar are the greatest historians of Teneris, whose only passion is to record time itself.¹⁶ The druids of the Circle of the Old World see themselves as guardians of nature and of Teneris.¹⁷ In past ages, powerful mages, most of them from long-lived and wise races, performed rituals that shaped Teneris, for better and for far worse.¹⁸