It's not always the truth that survives, but the stories we wish to believe.
Unknown
History on Nor'Ova is not a settled thing. The Great Magic War destroyed libraries, silenced witnesses, and scattered records across a continent. The rise and fall of empires buried inconvenient truths and elevated convenient ones. The gods themselves are known primarily through the texts of those who followed them - which is to say, through the accounts of people who had reasons to believe what they wrote.
What remains of the deeper history of Nor'Ova exists in fragments: documents of uncertain origin, journals of questionable reliability, accounts that have passed through so many hands that the original and the copy are no longer distinguishable. These are not authoritative histories. They are stories - some true, some partially true, some believed true by those who recorded them, and some that have simply survived long enough to be taken seriously.
They are also, often, the most interesting things ever written about Nor'Ova. A perfectly accurate account of an event tells you what happened. A document that has been lost, rediscovered, disputed, and argued over for centuries tells you what people have needed to believe about what happened, which is sometimes more revealing.
What follows are such documents. They are presented here as historical and lore artifacts, with the caveat that the reader should bring to them the same healthy skepticism that any serious scholar of Nor'Ova brings to everything: what is the source, what did the author stand to gain, and what has been lost or changed in the years between the writing and the reading?
In This Section
A Tale of Two Worlds: A scholarly account of the events surrounding the Dark Paralysis - one of the most catastrophic events in the history of Nor'Ova, in which the boundary between the living world and something else entirely became dangerously thin. The account draws from multiple sources, none of them entirely in agreement.
The Journal of Emperor Killian Xerxes: The personal journal of Killian Xerxes, Emperor of the Nor'Ovan Empire during one of the most consequential periods in Nor'Ovan history, the Great Magic War. It is presented here as found, with minimal editorial intervention, because editorial intervention would require a level of certainty about Xerxes's intentions that no scholar has yet achieved.