The Frostveiled Age

The ice age spanning almost four millennia following the Sundering. A period of low magic, as the weapons activated in the final days of the Sundering Wars drained most of Altheris's available mana. Elves began to refer to the world as Talusethra - "the sundered plane"; the phrase was adopted or poorly translated by other races into "Talus", and within a few generations, most of the world's people had forgotten the name "Altheris." The fallout from the magical and technological weapons employed near the end of the Sundering resulted in significant environmental damage and scarring to the planet, including constant heavy storms, violent earthquakes, and longer winters with colder temperatures extending much further towards the equator from both poles. Civilizations, or what fragments remained after the Sundering, were largely reduced to iron age technology, and a more primitive, survivalist lifestyle. With the destruction of most major cities and collections of knowledge, histories of the Age of Artifice Arcana were largely forgotten or misremembered. Certain places on Talus were rendered completely inhospitable.

The Age began with the fallout of the Sundering, as well as its survivors. Altheris had been radically altered and shaken to its core. Across the globe, survivors banded together in the first few decades, quickly abandoning their previous lives of affluence and magical power. The ruins of the previous ages now served as convenient bastions, where the various peoples of the world - newly dubbed "Talus", after the elvish phrase for "Sundered Plane" - struggled to eke out a rough living. The sky was almost always covered in at least a thin layer of smoke and dark clouds, depriving much of the land of sunlight and casting most of the planet into an ice age. Glaciers moved forward from the poles as snow and freezing temperatures approached the equator.

The Drendal Empire
A vast dominion ruled by a long line of iron-fisted human emperors tracing back to Harvick Drendal. Capitalizing on the latent magic left in the Origination Nexus within the ruins of Avalon from the Age of Artifice Arcana, the Empire was constructed to be a crude recreation of the former civilization that had occupied the land. The Emperor was historically surrounded by an elite society of those with vast intellect, wealth, or resources, who were privileged in the further planning of the Empire's expansion. Those at the bottom rungs of societal castes were utilized first as indentured servants - and ultimately as slaves - to perform the brunt of the Empire's expansion, and dragons were utilized as an alternate source of power when the Origination Nexus stopped producing mana.