The Codex is where the worlds live.
Lore, characters, deleted scenes, and the hidden corners of every realm The Forgemaster has built — from the continent of Vareland on the world of Salemor to territories yet unnamed.
The World of Salemor
Salemor was not discovered. It was prepared.
For whom, and by whose hand, depends on which fragment of which text you trust — and most of those texts no longer exist. What remains are echoes. Whispers preserved in languages older than any empire currently standing on Vareland’s soil. They agree on very little. But they agree on this: Salemor was not an accident. It was set aside. Designated. A world made ready for a purpose that was never fully realized.
The door was opened before its time.
By whom, and how, and at what cost — these are questions that men have buried wars beneath without finding satisfactory answers. What is known, in the vague and uncomfortable way that foundational truths tend to be known, is that those who were meant to cross never did. The crossing was broken before it could be completed. The keys that would have made it possible exist in pieces — some lost in Salemor itself, some lost elsewhere entirely — and no one living on any of Salemor’s continents has the full picture of what was stolen, or from whom, or why the world they inhabit feels like a place still waiting for something that has not yet arrived.
Salemor is vast. Its oceans are treacherous and its continents separated by distances that have swallowed entire fleets without record. People exist on every landmass — how they arrived, and when, belongs to histories that were never written down or were lost long before anyone thought to preserve them. What those people built in their isolation bears little resemblance to what their distant cousins built elsewhere. The continents do not communicate. They do not trade. They are aware, in the dim way that all humans are aware of the world’s edges, that something exists beyond their horizon. They simply cannot reach it with any reliability. And so each continent has become, over long centuries, its own entire world.
On the continent of Vareland, whatever arrived through that broken crossing became the Darkening.
What it became elsewhere is not yet known. Perhaps it never will be.