The Wyrm Deep

Approximate span: deep geological time to c. 120,000 years before AF 1.

The Wyrm Deep is the oldest recoverable period of Vareth’s history. It spans an immense and unmeasured stretch of time before dragons, drakes, or any known sapient people.

No calendar survives from this period. What is known comes from geology, fossils, ancient nesting grounds, and the marks left upon the landscape by wyrms.

Ancient Vareth

Vareth is already recognizable as a continent, but its geography changes repeatedly across the Wyrm Deep. Glaciers advance and retreat, rivers abandon old courses, coastlines shift, and mountain systems continue to fracture and weather.

The basin containing the Mereth Sea also changes substantially during this period, though its earliest forms cannot be reconstructed with precision.

The Wyre is already part of the natural world. It exists independently of dragons or mortal magic and has no intrinsic visible color.

The Age of Wyrms

Wyrms dominate many of Vareth’s most difficult environments.

Sea wyrms occupy deep coastal waters, straits, and major feeding grounds. Sky wyrms establish nesting territories along cliffs, islands, and rugged coasts. Deep wyrms inhabit mountain roots, fault systems, and vast subterranean networks.

Their territories shift over enormous spans of time as climate, prey, competition, and the landscape itself change.

Conflicts between wyrms can alter entire regions. Nesting grounds are abandoned, migration routes shift, and old subterranean territories expand through generations of deep-wyrm activity.

Despite their intelligence, wyrms develop no language, civilization, or accumulated culture.

What Remains

The surviving evidence of the Wyrm Deep is almost entirely physical:

• fossil beds;
• ancient nesting grounds;
• abandoned migration routes;
• enormous deep-wyrm passages;
• extinct prey populations;
• buried coastlines;
• old feeding grounds;
• landscapes altered by generations of wyrm activity.

Some subterranean passages are so extensive that they can be mistaken for deliberate construction, but no known civilization exists during this period.

The Wyrm Deep ends when dragons become unmistakably present in Vareth.