The Deep Past and the Three Great Extinctions
Long before any living record, Elshore was shaped three times over by catastrophe. Two asteroid strikes and one unnamed collapse killed nearly all life on the planet across a span of tens of millions of years, birthing both moons and sundering the ancestral supercontinent. Only one sapient lineage survived the full arc to carry life forward into the ages of stone and metal.
Key traits
- The First Great Extinction (~22 million BTC): a massive asteroid impact scars the planet, births Liir Cosmology The Two Moons Two moons attend Elshore: Liir, the near and swift one, and Ressor, the far and slow one., Elshore's first and greater moon, and splits the supercontinent Pandaara along ancient fault lines into Elandra in the south and Tarkdaara Place Tarkdaara The northern continent of Elshore, called Northland in common speech, on which every chapter of the story so far unfolds. in the north, raising the spine of the Infinite Mountains.
- The Second Great Extinction (~620,000 BTC, Middle Stone Age): an unnamed catastrophe drives the two known sapient peoples, the Iru People Iru The progenitors, and the only naturally evolved people of Elshore. and the Imbir People Imbir A vanished people of the deep past: the Iru's sibling hominids, and the first on Elshore to raise true cities and councils that spoke for the many rather than the strong., to the edge of oblivion; only scattered tribal survivors cling to a broken world.
- The Third Great Extinction (~140,000 BTC, Late Stone Age): a second asteroid strike births Ressor, Elshore's smaller and darker moon; the Imbir are wiped out entirely; continental drift quickens as Tarkdaara pulls further from Elandra; the Iru alone carry forward as the world's surviving naturally evolved people.
- The Iru first emerge alongside the Imbir in the Elder Stone Age (~5 to 7 million BTC); the Imbir are the earliest to raise true settlements and councils, long before the Iru leave their riverbank villages.
- After the Third Extinction, the New Stone Age (~475,000 BTC) sees the first true Iru settlements; the record of the extinctions becomes readable in fossil layers, in the moons themselves, and in the shape of the continents.
- The Wars of the Races (~1,252 BTC, also Year 584 of the Inarin Reckoning) complete a long narrowing of biological diversity: the white-skinned Iru annihilate their yellow- and grey-skinned kin, leaving a single ancestral Iru population to carry forward into the age of empire.