Overview
For three centuries, the Portals of Avalon were open to all worlds. Scholars, seekers, and the desperate came through. The island grew rich in knowledge and strange in custom. To speak of the Era of Portals now is to speak of a kind of cultural high tide whose precise extent no one can any longer measure. The Chronicler keeps the rosters he can. The Veil keeps the recitations. Everyone else keeps fragments — songs without verses, words without referents, customs without origins.
The era began with the opening of the first stable Portal, in what would become Portal Clearing. It ended, by general agreement, with the sealing of the last functional gateway some ninety years past — though the closing was not a single event but a long, painful tapering. Portals had been failing for years before the official end. The Chronicler dates the era’s true death not to the last closure but to the moment a scholar in the Forgotten Fortress decided that a single memory was worth attempting to erase.
What the Portals brought was strange in the way that opening a sealed jar is strange: the contents were not necessarily exotic, only impossible to anticipate. Pilgrims from a coastal world arrived speaking a language that the Sanctum’s linguists could understand only in dreams. A delegation of mathematicians from somewhere drier brought a proof that Avalonian arithmetic had forgotten to write down. There were also less benign arrivals: warlords looking for unmapped territory, ascetics whose disciplines bordered on contagion, traders whose goods had teeth.
The Avalonian response was institutional. Faculties were founded. The Order of the Veil was chartered to stand at the dangerous thresholds. The Order of the Seer was endowed to interpret the dreams the Portals provoked. The Memoria Stone was commissioned. The Ancient Library’s shelves grew quietly, then noisily, then dangerously full.
History
The era is conventionally divided into three centuries, each with its own character. The First Century is remembered, where remembered at all, as an age of cautious cataloguing — every new arrival was met, recorded, and quarantined for a season. The Second Century is the era’s flowering: the trade routes opened, the universities grew, marriage across worlds became fashionable in some Realms and quietly forbidden in others. The Third Century is the era of its slow undoing — the wars that erupted, the gateways that began to refuse passage at random intervals, the first reported cases of unaccountable forgetfulness in returning travellers.
The catastrophic war that the late-era consortium of scholars later tried to unwrite occurred in the final decades of the Third Century. By the time the survivors decided that the memory of it must be erased, the era was already ending of its own weight. The Forgetting did not so much close the Portals as ensure they could not be reopened.
Significance
Almost everything strange about modern Avalon is a residue of the Era of Portals. The languages spoken in the back streets of the Court of Shadows. The medicinal practices of the Forbidden Garden. The architectural patterns of the Labyrinth of Minds. The very fact that Avalon possesses four such culturally distinct Realms is a function of three centuries of unfiltered influx. The era is also the source of the island’s vulnerability: a culture this porous, this dependent on continuous import, was structurally unprepared for an event that sealed it shut.
For the traveller, every Codex unlock at the Chronicler’s desk is, in effect, a recovered fragment of this era. The XP bonuses are mechanical. The lore is what the bonuses are paying for.
Connected Stories
- The Mirror Collector — his trade depended on imported glass that has not arrived in his lifetime.
- The House That Remembers — built by an off-world architect during the Second Century.
- Voices in the Salt Marsh — the marsh was a Portal site before the seal.
Related Codex Entries
- The Forgetting — the catastrophe that closed the era.
- The Order of the Veil — founded to make the era survivable.
- The Four Seals — commissioned in the era’s twilight.
- The Origin of Shadows — an unintended import of the open age.
In-Game Reference
The era is named in The Chronicler’s codex unlocks, in Vara’s exposition, and in many environmental texts: faded notices in the Ancient Library, inscriptions on Memoria Stone Chamber pillars, and the unreadable banners over the Forgotten Fortress gate. Portal Clearing itself is a literal remnant of the era — the only Portal still capable of allowing a traveller in.