The Golden Age of Man spans 200,000–75,000 years ago, within the late Gaeaic Eon. It was preceded by the Birth of Man — a longer framing period from 500,000–200,000 years ago, during which Gaea created the beastmen and humans, jealous of the elves' success and intelligence.
Of the races of Gaea, humans were by far the most versatile and ambitious, and it was not long before they had covered Alaria. This began the Golden Age — 125,000 years of flourishing civilization. Technology reached incredible levels that have never been equaled since: flying machines soared across the skies and beyond the planes, civilizations stretched from deep within the seas to high in the clouds, and magical knowledge was common and plentiful.
The Rise of the Daemons
This time also gave rise to the daemons of Celestia. As Gaea's children explored the world, the nature of the bond between Celestia, the material realm, and the psyic energy enveloping them both became known. People began crossing the boundary in droves, and the population dramatically shifted away from the material realm to Celestia.
Each migrant preserved their soul and shadow on the material side through anchor-vessels — kept bodies that maintained the threads binding them to the world they had left. Return was difficult but not impossible for those who tended their anchors across the approximately 125,000 years of the Golden Age.
But crossing into Celestia did not make a daemon, and most of the dead who gathered there became nothing at all. A daemon is a dead soul that carried the grammar of Deoric across its death, and grammar is the exact word. Reciting a fixed set of commands, the way a rune-cutter recites them, was never enough. What sets a daemon apart is the power to compose: to build a working never spoken before, to nest one clause inside another and bend the language as a speaker bends a sentence. That power has to be held in life. It cannot be gained among the dead, where Deoric falls silent. For close to twelve million years after the Ezz Rift, no mortal held it. The dead crossed into Celestia in their untold millions and faded there, none of them worshipped long enough to remain, and not one rose. The silence before the Golden Age was a graveyard.
The threshold was first crossed by the Vyanoweir. Their reconstruction of Deoric, pieced together from the titans' weathered inscriptions over generations, was the work that finally let mortal scholars hold the whole grammar instead of a recited fragment of it. They did not invent the language; they recovered it, clause by clause, until a few among them could speak it new. Those few died with that command intact, and where the living kept their names in worship, they woke in Celestia as the first daemons. Every daemon since descends from that labor, including the many who would never credit a mortal library for their power.
The reconstruction's reach had already turned on its makers once. Late in the age, a school of Vyanoweir cartographers turned the grammar on the leylines and tore open a seam of time, the disaster remembered as the Torn Hour. It killed them and took a part of the corpus into the ground with them, a first loss the tradition absorbed long before the fire took the rest.
The burning of the Vyanoweir libraries, fifteen thousand years later, was the catastrophe the reconstruction never recovered from. The corpus that had carried mortals across the threshold was lost to the fire, and the path narrowed sharply behind those who had already crossed it. The eldest daemons studied the full reconstruction before it burned, and they carry structures of the language that no living scholar can read any longer. Those structures survive now only in the daemons themselves, kept beyond the reach of the very tradition that first assembled them.
The gods of the age
The gods of the Golden Age were daemons. There was no separate order of divinity standing above them. A god was a daemon whose worship held, and almost no daemon's did. Of the dead who crossed into Celestia, the overwhelming number faded there unremembered. A few did not. Where the living kept a daemon's name in steady worship across the generations, that daemon stayed bound to the world and reachable from it, and in time people called such a one a god. Worship was the whole of the difference. The pantheon was not the wisest or the strongest of the dead. It was the set of them that had never been allowed to go quiet.
At the center stood Krathokh, the Lord of Murder, and his place there was a matter of structure more than of rank. The pantheon's grip on the living world ran through the anchor-vessel rite, the priestly working that kept a daemon present and answerable on this side of death. Krathokh was the daemon of that rite. Whatever any other cult asked of its god, it first depended on the binding his priesthoods performed, which made the small orders that worshipped him the class the rest of the pantheon could not do without. The other gods held their own domains and their own faithful, and they quarreled as gods quarrel. They hung from the same thread for all that, and the thread was his.
The age came to an end when the God War shattered the anchor-vessels and plunged the world into total war. The priesthoods that kept the rite were broken in the fighting, and the gods of the age, bound to the world by that rite, went out with the priests who had maintained them. Krathokh fell first, and the rest of the pantheon followed the keystone down.