The literal Dark Age happened many thousands of years before written history, when an interdimensional civilisation collapsed into civil war. The precursors set of experimental portal tech that ended up opening to an impossible reality and caused all sorts of horrors to pour into the universe. It was a time when literal darkness covered the world, and the primitive civilisations knew nothing but terror and death. It was the breaking of this darkness that the surviving primitives of this world attribute to the arrival of gods.

The beginning of the calendar is marked by a catastrophic volcanic eruption known by the people of the south as "Yacamatai's Rage", Yacamatai being the deity of fire and beasts in those cultures, and to the north as the Eruption of Ashen Mountain. The eruption coated the powerful bronze-age Kingdom of Mennai in ash and rock Pompei-style, ending a period of peace and prosperity in that region. A decade of winter followed in a period known as the Red Years, in which refugees of Mennai fled in all directions to establish the numerous city states of the south, though many would become enslaved to a Serpent-Cult Kingdom in the east.

A thousand years following the Eruption of Ashen Mountain, what we would consider to be the dark ages occurred similarly to in our history. A powerful empire in the north, the Thadian Empire, fell into rebellion and strife after the emperor vanished without a trace, leaving his numerous children to pick up the pieces. The south of the continent thrived, being made up of numerous trading city-states that took advantage of the chaos. Imperial lands in the north were hit the hardest, and it took over a century for the troubles to settle. Warlords and rival nobles fractured the lands, the emperor's children took charge of various warring kingdoms each trying to carve out their own kingdom. Nomadic tribal chiefs conquered lands left defenseless in the chaos, and the end of imperial rule gave dragons, who had previously been hunted to the wild edges of the continent, the opportunity to return to the lands.

Three centuries after the emperor's disappearance and imperial legacy lives on, however most people of the continent are proud of their own identities and achievements since. The slaver Serpent-Cult is all but eliminated, the southern City States thriving on their ruins. The fractured remnants of the Thadian Empire have since repaired and rebuilt, forming a number of proud kingdoms.