Chronicle of Aureth

From a falling star to the age of a failing candle.
How to Read This Timeline

The dates below are not numbered years but remembered eras: how the people of Aureth talk about their own past. Most accounts were written in Lysora, beneath the glow of the Eternal Candle, so they lean toward basin legends and Candlekeeper records.

The final entries lead up to the beginning of The Last Candle of Lysora. They stop where the story starts – nothing here reveals how that tale ends.

Eras of Fire & Shadow

Before the Candle
Age of Quiet Sky
Long before the Candle, the sky over Aureth is dark and crowded with stars. Fires belong to hearth gods, mountain spirits and small ember cults scattered across forests, coasts and highlands. Light is local, fragile, and tied to a hundred different stories.
The First Ember Shrines
In the north, small temples rise in the Whispering Forest and along the river routes of the basin. Pilgrims carry coals from shrine to shrine, believing that a flame shared between strangers can keep the night itself from listening too closely.
The Falling Star Serpent
A burning shape tears across the heavens, folding the sky in its wake. Sea and stone convulse as the Star Serpent strikes the world. Mountains buckle, a wound of humming glass opens in the east, and entire faiths are erased in a single night of fire.
Years of Ash & Glass
In the aftermath, ash dims the sun and strange lights walk in the wreckage. Refugees flee toward the sheltered basin that will one day hold Lysora, while in the shattered east the land cools into black glass plains later called the Shatterlands.
The Binding & the First Light
The Covenant in the Basin
Survivors gather in the Golden Basin. Scholars, hedge-priests and ember seers forge a desperate agreement: the Serpent’s raging fire will be chained beneath the earth and raised in one place as a guardian instead of a roaming catastrophe.
Raising the Eternal Candle
Over the sealed wound a tower of stone is built, its foundations threaded with bindings. The first Eternal Candle is coaxed from the captured fire – a colossal, ever-burning flame that throws a dome of warm light over the basin. Night retreats. Monsters withdraw. The age of hearth gods begins to fade.
Founding of Lysora
Houses, markets and walls grow ring by ring around the tower until the settlement becomes a city. The people name it Lysora, the City of the Eternal Candle. From here, Candlekeepers oversee the bindings and regulate how much of the serpent’s fire may ever leave the basin.
Dimming of the Old Embers
As generations pass, the small ember shrines lose influence. Some are repurposed as Candle outposts, others crumble into moss and rubble. A few remote temples keep their own fires and quietly refuse to bow to the light in the basin.

Torchbearers on the Roads of Aureth

The First Torchbearer Line
Choosing the First
When distant wards begin to fray, the Candlekeepers discover that some souls in the basin carry a faint echo of the bound fire. One such soul is chosen as the first Torchbearer, entrusted with a shard of the Candle’s flame and sent to relight shrines and renew forgotten bindings.
Journeys Between Shrines
Over the following centuries, a line of Torchbearers walks the roads of Aureth. Each carries a staff or lantern that holds part of the Eternal Candle’s light. Their journeys keep the worst remnants of the Star Serpent’s fall contained in forest, mountain and sea.
The Missing Torch
One Torchbearer is sent toward the Hall of God’s Sparks in the Ashwind Range and never returns. Officially, records speak of a tragic accident. Unofficially, a few Candlekeepers note that the great flame burns a shade lower afterwards – and that certain bindings in the world feel thinner.
Quiet Generations
For a time, nothing catastrophic occurs. The Candle burns steadily, fields stay warm, and the city grows comfortable. The stories of the Star Serpent and the early Torchbearers begin to sound less like history and more like distant myth told to children on stormy nights.
The Edge of the Age of Flicker

By the time The Last Candle of Lysora begins, the Eternal Candle has burned above the basin for roughly seven centuries. Few living souls remember a night without its glow. Many Candlekeepers devote their lives to tending it without ever questioning what lies beneath.

Outside the basin, however, things are less quiet. Abandoned ember temples stir. Rumors of strange lights in the Shatterlands spread among caravan trains. Along the Hollow Coast, the sea is said to glow in answer to a sky no one in Lysora has seen for generations.

These are the last calm years before the Candle does something it has never done in recorded history: it falters.

Torchbearer line Hall of God’s Sparks Whispered unrest

The Age of Flicker · Prelude to Book I

The First Flicker
Unsettled Omens
Unusual dreams ripple through the basin. In the Whispering Forest, old paths wander farther than usual. Candle moths—small creatures that have always stayed close to the tower’s light—are seen flying north, as if chasing a glow that no one else can see.
A Momentary Dim
On an otherwise ordinary night, the Eternal Candle’s light thins for a heartbeat. Most citizens do not notice. Those who keep the tower do. For a breath the dome above Lysora shows a handful of real stars before the glow surges back, a shade more strained than before.
Whispers in the Tower
Senior Candlekeepers quietly review old binding scripts and half-forgotten prophecies. The official line is that nothing has changed. Behind closed doors, arguments flare over whether the Candle is weakening, waking, or simply demanding something it has not asked for in centuries.
The Search for a Spark
Tests are performed in back rooms and sanctums, looking for those whose souls resonate with the Candle’s light. Among the apprentices who polish brass and trim lesser wicks, one quiet boy’s spark answers louder than the rest.
Where the Story Opens

The narrative of The Last Candle of Lysora begins in the days after the first true falter of the Eternal Candle. The city has not yet admitted that anything is wrong, but the edges of the basin grow colder, and those who watch closely can tell that the great flame is not as effortless as it once seemed.

A new Torchbearer is chosen. A streetwise runaway who should have died in an experiment with stolen fire is still alive. A soldier who walked away from the Candle’s orders is offered one last job. A keeper who knows too much about what lies beneath the tower is forced to act.

From this point on, the timeline belongs to the story itself. To see what happens next, you’ll have to walk the road with them.

Beginning of Book I No spoilers beyond setup

Following the Thread

This timeline will grow as the Aureth saga expands, adding side tales, legends and distant histories that don’t fit on the page of a single novel. For now, it marks the road up to the first step of The Last Candle of Lysora—the moment when a centuries-old light flickers and refuses to pretend that nothing has changed.

To explore the places tied to each era, visit the Lore and Map pages, or head to Books for a glimpse of how future volumes may walk further into Aureth.