The cities and civilizations built in the Third Age were all destroyed in the Mage Wars. A few things remained, including towers and tunnels crafted of a metal unknown on Adnati, a few statues, and extremely rare magical items more powerful than anything that could be created in the Seventh Epoch.
The Seventh Epoch
The Seventh Epoch, which extends to the present time, began when survivors of the Great Cataclysm regrouped and slowly began to rebuild civilizations. This period is also known as the Post-Cataclysmic Civilizations.
Much had been lost, both in knowledge and ability, for surviving mages only had a fraction of the Dream Force available to the mages of the Fifth Epoch and Sixth Epoch Epochs.
The Fourth Hominid Age
The Fourth Hominid Age is sometimes called the Age of Rebuilding. During this time, survivors of the Great Cataclysm began to come back together and rebuilt towns, cities, and civilizations.
It also marked a period when Dream Force was no longer as abundant as it had been during the Fifth and Sixth Epochs. For the first time, some hominids were born without the instinctive and innate ability to use magic. Some retained that instinctive ability, but they became increasingly rare, and the ability often skipped many generations.
Hominids compensated in two ways: studying lore to learn magic that had once been innate, and developing tools to ease labor that once could be done by magic. Humans had to learn to forge metals and craft weapons rather than conjure them or transmute them from other substances. House that could at one time been created by magic had to be assembled with tools and hard labor.
The Fifth Hominid Age
The Fifth Hominid Age is sometimes called the Age of Modern Magic. It was during this period that scholars began classifying magic into the eight schools of magic known today: Abjuration, Conjuration, Divination, Enchantment, Evocation, Illusion, Necromancy, and Transmutation.
This period lasted for nearly ten thousand years. The age ended with a mysterious event now called the Minor Cataclysm.
No one appears to know what caused the Minor Cataclysm (or if they know, they’ve kept it secret). It appears to have begun with rippling waves of light and energy coursing over Adnati. These ripples came in pulses that filled every hour of the day and night. These pulses slowly decreased day by day, month by month, until they finally disappeared entirely more than a year after they started.
Ultimately, the waves appeared to have been largely benign, though a few things of note occurred. During this year, sorcerers of Wild Magic triggered surges with virtually every spell cast, large or small. And babies who had been gestating during this period were invariably found to have some sort of innate magical abilities, though their abilities were not always strong and were not always passed along to their descendants.
Though scholars understood very little about the Minor Cataclysm, they chose to use it as the mark of the end of the Fifth Age and the start of the Sixth, the present age.
The Sixth Hominid Age
The Sixth Age, which is the present age, began more than three thousand years ago with the mysterious Minor Cataclysm.
It has been called the Age of Standards. During this period, seafaring travelers and traders, along with travelers aided by magical means, began to foster the Common Calendar, a standardized solar/lunar calendar system that drew from the elven religion for the names of the days in the week and the human Almagest faith for the names of the months. A common language among humans in particular emerged known as the Common Tongue, or simply Common, though regional accents and slang persist. And though kingdoms and empires had their own coins, standardized weights and metallurgy were developed for gold, silver, and copper coins.
It is currently the year 3121 in the Sixth Age, which is in the Seventh Epoch in the Third Era of Adnati.