I break from historiographical tradition by dividing the history of Teravide into five periods. The first period is known simply as the Prehistory, the time when an ancient people known to us as the Wanderers inhabited Teravide. Almost nothing is known of this period, as the Wanderers left few records. We do know that they built great empires, among them the Kingdom of the Norris, in what are now the Dwarven Realms, and the great domed city of Tustin, location unknown. From what historians have been able to gather, these technologically advanced people ruled our lands until approximately 3000 years ago, at which time their civilization simply vanished. Modern scholars have speculated that a plague, or a great war, may have been the culprit. The Wanderers appear to have been the sole masters of Teravide during the prehistorical period; the elves, dwarves, orcs, and other great peoples arrived here long after the fall of Wanderer civilization.

The First Age began 1500 years after the disappearance of the Wanderers. Waves of immigrants, both human and nonhuman, began to repopulate the two continents. The humans were represented by the Nordiques, a race of warriors who swept through the forests of the north and west and wrested the land from the dangerous creatures who dwelled there. Finding no other humanoid inhabitants, they named their new dominion Terre Vide, or Empty Land, from which the modern name Teravide is derived. The Nordique kingdoms fought frequently with one another, and with the nonhuman migrants who followed them: dwarves and gnomes in the mountains of northern Gervais; elves and halflings in the plains and forests of both continents; and orcs, hobgoblins and gnolls anywhere they could establish themselves.

The First Age was a time of great peril and great deeds. Teravide may have been "empty" as far as the Nordiques were concerned, but there were a great many creatures resident here hostile to humanoid life. This was painfully made evident in -991, when dwarven explorers inadvertently awakened the two-headed serpent known as the Linnorm in the caves of the Åhlen mountains. Some three years and two thousand deaths later, the beast was finally slain by Samuel Samuelsson (ancestor of the future High King) with the aid of a mighty enchanted warhammer at Køge. In -242, the humans, halflings and gnolls of southeast Soucy waged all-out war against an army of undead warriors; they were successful only through the intercession of the great gold wyrm Politidis, who had been posing as a Lessard beggar for some years.

The First Age was also an era of great territorial and political fluidity. Empires rose and fell, as the various clans and races sorted out their power relationships and political designs. Of particular significance to the modern era was the rapid consolidation of disparate dwarf kingdoms into a massive empire. In the year -763 (year 1 of the modern dwarvish calendar), the various clans united peacefully under Jonas Samuelsson I of Thelvenheim to create what was easily the largest polity in the premodern world. By virtue of their consolidated strength, the dwarf clans were able to withstand human wars of conquest time and again. The greatest of the human kingdoms at this time was the Kingdom of Aubry, in the far northwest. The Aubrien nobility were descended from some of the earliest Nordique migrants, and their people were fierce and expansionistic. By -669, they had carved out a huge swath of territory from the elves, orcs, goblins, and weaker Nordique tribes that had previously occupied it. For their part, high and gray elf lords created a loose confederation of states in the Great Lakes region of northwest Soucy, known generally as the Järven Empire.

A rough balance of power existed between the humanoid races, but it did not last long. Beginning approximately 1000 years ago, new waves of human migrants, known as the Whistlers, arrived from the east. The Whistlers brought more sophisticated agricultural and metallurgical techniques with them, as well as what would become the Common tongue. The initial influx of Whistlers triggered wars and unrest with the existing Nordique inhabitants, but over time, the Whistler and Nordique populations merged and assimilated. This was especially true in the areas that would become the Empire Nordique, where Whistler elites became "Nordicized" and were incorporated into the ruling classes; at the same time, Nordique commoners widely adopted the Whistlers' language and culture.

The coming to terms between Nordique and Whistler, while clearly beneficial for humankind, was disastrous for the nonhumans of Teravide. Ever-increasing human populations pushed against and ultimately overwhelmed many of the elf, dwarf, and gnome polities on which they bordered. Uncivilized and dangerous creatures were marginalized to an even greater degree; human armies and human heroes succeeded in driving such creatures to the inhospitable and isolated fringes of Teravide. This historical trend towards human hegemony culminated five hundred eleven years ago, when the elves of the Great Lakes surrendered their vast territories to human armies. Their resplendent capital of Saaremaa became Waterbury, and their old empire became the Kingdom of Mulvenna.

The Second Age of Teravide is the age of human dominance. After the surrender of the elven Druid-King Reijo in what we now call the year 1, only one great nonhuman polity remained: the Dwarven Realms in the mountains of the north. Elsewhere, the gnomes, elves, halflings, orcs, and other humanoids were relegated to a secondary role in politics. Human wars, and human nation-building, defined this period.

The greatest of these wars took place in southeast Gervais, where old Nordique nations fought one another in wars of consolidation. Over the period of 200 years, the number of human states dropped from 31 to 12 as smaller entities were swallowed by progressively larger ones. This process of consolidation accelerated in 284, when the armies of the hitherto insignificant House Dryden defeated the Maroon King at Dinsmore. As a result of this improbable victory, Réjean I of Dryden gained much of southeast Gervais and christened himself Empereur Nordique. Within a few more decades, the Empire had swallowed Emond, Tardiff, Corbeil-Lavalle and other medium-sized states, and now encompassed almost all of the Gervaisien continent.

By 438, only four human states remained in Teravide: the ancient Kingdom of Aubry in the northwest; the Kingdom of Mulvenna in western Soucy; the isolated Free Republic of Thorburn, in southeast Soucy; and of course the Empire Nordique, sprawling across Gervais, encompassing the Grand Duchy of Morency, the island principality of Majeau, and the great cities of Charron, Thurier, and Cossète. Only the dwarven clans, ensconced in their mountains, remained free from human domination.

By this time, however, political consolidation was effectively halted, and even began to reverse. Successive Empereurs Nordiques had sought to conquer and subjugate the comparatively freer polities to their north and south, but were effectively counterbalanced by the combined strength of Aubry, Mulvenna, and when they deigned to interfere, the dwarven clans. Over time, the Empire's external aggressiveness led to internal exhaustion. Morency and Majeau, shielded by mountains and water from the Emperor's reach, soon managed their own affairs without interference from Charron, although they ostensibly remained loyal to the crown. Even in the heart of the Empire, the throne's reach grew weaker by the year, as local nobles asserted themselves with the help of the Empire's rivals. In the absence of mitigating circumstances, massive political fragmentation was a real possibility.

The Third Age, an age of war and misery, began without anyone taking notice. In 499, the thief lord John LeClair relinquished control of the Lessard Guild and devoted himself to the worship of Drouin, god of a hitherto minor sect which was allowed to flourish in the comparatively liberal atmosphere of the Free Republic. Within only three years, LeClair's brand of virulent revolutionary faith had overthrown the established Drouiniste hierarchy and gained him a huge army of human and humanoid followers eager to baptize the world in a sea of blood. By 502, the Republic was no more; by 503, Thiffault and Waterbury had fallen to the mad religionists, and in 507, the Emperor himself was slain in his winter palace at Cossète. The Drouiniste conquest reached its apex in 510 with the sacking of Beaudin. Among the human states, only the frozen and backwards port of Mondou, the most distant outpost of the Empire, remained free. Where LeClair's armies went, all existing political and structures were exterminated, replaced by a nightmarish system of forced labor camps and reeducation in the name of machine-like efficiency. LeClair succeeded in reversing the centrifugal forces that threatened to tear apart the human states, but at a terrible price.

In nearly conquering the world, however, the Drouinistes had overreached themselves, for in February 510 the great dwarven general Per Samuelsson struck at the flank of the Grand Army of the Revolution and sundered it. This was followed by an insurrection in the forests surrounding Waterbury and the Great Lakes, wherein a motley band of humans, elves, and forest creatures under the leadership of the Grand Druid himself broke the iron grip of the purple-cloaked revolutionaries. Since then, LeClair's armies have been in rapid retreat across the continents, abandoning the territories formerly composing Aubry, Morency, and the Empire. The lands of the old Republic, along with portions of Mulvenna and Majeau are still in the hands of the Drouinistes, but perhaps not for long: as of this writing, General Samuelsson has vowed to pursue them to the very streets of Lessard.

The year 511 may be taken as the start of the Fourth Age, when civilization began to rebuild itself after the long night of the Drouiniste revolution. Political power is now far more diffuse and weak than it had been in the Fifth Century. Several of the larger cities have become hubs for remnant states, some ruled by military strongmen (Thurier, Thiffault, Fillion), others by criminal elements (Cossète), remnants of noble houses (Charron), or elected councils (Beaudin). Waterbury and Doléac have fallen into the hands of elves and orcs, respectively. The reach of most of these rulers barely extends beyond their city walls, and the only truly large organized force belongs to Clan Samuelsson. Banditry and lawlessness are major problems in much of the world, particularly in the lands of the former Empire, where large swaths of countryside are effectively ungoverned. The peasants that remain there have become free men, but live at the mercy of bandits, regional warlords, hobgoblin raiders, and worse -- dangerous monsters have begun to creep back into once-civilized areas for the first time in a millennium.

Life in modern Teravide is often bleak, and occasionally even desperate. Where once human civilization had grandeur, it is again backwards, fractured, and weak. Our moment has ended.