Year 730: Founding of Ivras. Ivras was founded as a small city-state due to its success as a trade port. Ivras’s first king was Engella, a well-connected merchant said to have ten thousand ships at her command. Magic in Ritha was largely considered to be a myth, feared by those who had seen it, and magic users were forced to operate in secrecy.

≈ Year 800: Ivras Becomes a Kingdom. In an era of prosperity, the city’s third king expanded Ivras’s territory along the coast and established Ivras as a small nation. The capital, once simply called Ivras, was renamed Faline after the reigning king’s daughter.

≈ Years 810-855: Expansion of Ivras. With the help of its then-ally Nymene, Ivras waged conquest, expanding its borders across what is now the Ivratian peninsula. Military might was enough to conquer the Northern half of modern-day Ivras, but the jungles of the South and its battle-mage clans proved indomitable to the king’s forces.

Year 856: Founding of Namarast. After being defeated by Southern battle mages, Ivras’s government began scouring its lands for mages of its own. In an attempt to control this new resource, Ivras’s fourth ruler, King Salastro, founded Namarast to research magic users and isolate them from society.

≈ Year 950: Victory in the South. After nearly a century of intermittent war with the wild clans in the South, Ivratian commanders successfully weaponized mages to take the rest of the peninsula.

≈ Year 955: Growing Fears. Despite the victory, public fear of mages was growing. Hysteria surrounding magic’s power led to the exposure and arrest of many suspected mages, and violent attacks on and by mages created a crisis among the nation’s people.

Year 958: Foundation of the Order. In response to this hysteria, it became law that all mages were required to make themselves known to the monarchy and be evaluated by Namarast’s researchers. These researchers named themselves the Order, and they began to oversee all of the magic users in Ivras. Their non-mage leaders would henceforth be known as the Archon. This precedent was set by Archon Astrophel, the first non-mage to lead the Order, and his husband Sohwa, the Order's first mage.

Year 963: A Strange Tragedy. Annals tell of a strange event in which one of the early Order's mages lost control of their magic, unleashing a horrible violence that historians of the time had difficulty describing. Archon Astrophel was presumed killed after the incident, and Sohwa was implicated and imprisoned for inciting the event. Modern scholars speculate that this charge was made in ignorance, and that this is in fact an early instance of Corruption within the Order.

Year 964: Foundation of the Academy. A school was founded in Namarast to accommodate the growing population. Young mages were trained there to control and reduce their magical ability, except in ways that would benefit the crown. Order-trained mages were brought to cities to improve infrastructure, and the mystical insight of mages was sought at court and in business. Mages were allowed to join the Order, and elected their first mage leader, the original Archmage. Order mages of high standing began to earn assignments as advisers to merchants and nobility.

Year 1020: A Secret Library Revealed. As opinions on mages and magic begins to soften, Pollux, a librarian and writer who arrived in Ivras some centuries before, opens his archives to the public. Soon it becomes one of Ivras' most important libraries, visited by scholarly researchers and common folks alike.

Year 1155: The Siregalese Rebellion. The first of many violent uprisings in the neighboring kingdom of Siregal broke out as Siregalese mages rebelled against their monarchy. To prevent a similar revolution in Ivras, it became illegal for Ivratian mages to attain magic education outside of the Order. Mages in the remote Wild Clans worked harder than ever to evade the monarchy.

Year 1157: A Disciplined Order. With the unrest in Siregal and the new laws passed limiting mage education, the Order selected exceptionally disciplined mages to act as Inquisitors, serving to model the efficacy of Namarast's training and scout out dissent among their fellow magic users. Most famous among these was the High Oracle Siofra, who foretold a natural disaster and sacrificed herself to save Ivras from it (as any loyal Order mage should).

Year 1170: Instatement of Mage Protectors. Several of the Order’s most powerful battle mages were made the realm’s first Mage Protectors. They were tasked with maintaining Ivras’s defenses from both internal and external forces alongside the existing non-mage military, and were considered the ultimate weapon for the crown.

Year 1172: Mage Influx From Nymene. Seeing that Ivras had successfully domesticated its mages, the leaders of Nymene made a treaty with Ivras’s king and began deporting Nymene’s mage population to Ivras en masse. In exchange for magical protection provided by the Order, Nymene supplied Namarast with an endless train of new recruits.

Year 1215: The Siregalese Civil War. The Siregalese Civil War. In the neighboring realm of Siregal, half a century of unrest became civil war. Rebel mages stormed the Siregalese capital and destabilized the monarchy, inciting a conflict that would last for another ten years.

Year 1223: The Monster of Faline. In a terrifying turn of events, a monster of incredible size and power attacked Faline from the Mirror Bay, sinking navy ships and killing a dozen Mage Protectors before it was defeated. An entire trade depot was destroyed, and many Ivratian lives lost.

Year 1224: A Revelation on Monsters. In the wake of the horrific attack on Faline, the academics of Namarast were charged with determining the origin of the monster. It became clear to the Order’s scholars that the creature was a corrupted mage, and Mage Protectors seemed the best weapon against future attacks. Magic users who sought power beyond their control would pay the price by being twisted into terrible forms, only to be hunted by their former colleagues.

Year 1225: Assassination of Siregal’s Monarchs. After a decade of war in Siregal, its king saw his certain defeat at the hands of the mage rebels and fled his palace. The royal family believed themselves to be safe in their remote summer home, but a band of dissenters led by Enn Marren’Vik found their hiding place and assassinated them all. With the final nail in the monarchy’s coffin, a new government formed with the instatement of a senate of mages who declared the former kingdom a magocracy. The assassins were never found, and their leader is believed to have fled to Ivras.

Year 1230: Marriage of Gladius and Sabora. King Gladius shocked the kingdom by announcing his engagement to Sabora, the mage who had served as his Order-appointed adviser for years. They were married on the 500th anniversary of Ivras’s founding. To some, the union was a clear sign that the monarchy had let mages run amok.

Year 1233: Mage Protector Rank Opens. Facing the crisis of not having enough mages to combat the growing threat of attack, King Gladius made the unprecedented move to open the ranks of the Mage Protectors. For the first time, mages from outside the Order were permitted to join the fight to defend the kingdom.

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