Less is known about the Lost Ages than any comparable span of time, as the period was marked by years of hardship and despair. It spans 30,000–10,209 BSD, beginning with the Laughing Plague that ended Craggus' reign and closing at the threshold of Hykravones the Shattering. The Lost Ages are where the civil record begins: the round years-ago figures of the deep prehistory give way here to the dated BSD reckoning, which runs unbroken to the present.
Whatever Craggus' age had relearned of the lost aetherial craft, and whatever the empires after him rebuilt upon it, was burned, poisoned, and at last forgotten across these millennia. This is the span over which the older world's recovered heights were lost for good, and it is why the world that followed never climbed back to the level whose ruins still litter the ground.
The Laughing Plague: 30,000–28,800 BSD
The Laughing Plague was a brutal disease from the plane of Glyssen. How it arrived on Alaria remains unknown. It drove all those exposed into a fevering, maniacal madness that incited them to horrible acts of violence — all while uncontrollably laughing. It spread through prolonged exposure to the laughter and brought nearly all of Alaria to bloodthirsty insanity. For 1,200 years, the Alarian population dwindled as people went into isolation and trade and progress stopped. Entire cities lay barren, their citizens dead at each others' hands. Most written history was lost, and technology regressed to a primitive state, the aetherial works of Craggus' recovery among the first things to go.
A few among the population held a natural resistance to the plague. Although immune to its violence-inciting effects, the disease stunted growth and permanently changed those who survived it. These survivors became known as dwarves, and entire communities of the immune formed — many of them underground. It is rumored that the Laughing Plague still circulates deep underground Alaria, among the Kackles, held at bay by the Uline dwarves.
Rise of the False God: 28,700–28,000 BSD
A pretender claiming divine authority rose in the power vacuum left by Craggus' collapse, drawing desperate survivors under a false faith. The details of this false god's identity and fall are poorly recorded; they are among the histories lost to the plague years.
Blight of Arcanus: 12,000 BSD
For a span near the end of the Lost Ages, working magic killed the one who worked it. The cause lay in the Ezz, the thought-and-emotion substrate the planes hang within. Something poisoned it. The likeliest culprit is the shadowrift that tore open in the same years and brought on the Dark Night, though no account of the disaster survived the Oblivion Years to confirm it.
Three of the four ways of working magic draw on the Ezz, and all three turned lethal at once. Kethic elementalism, Faesong, and the Psywinds each run on the substrate, so each carried the poison straight into anyone who tapped it. The Ezz that ran through a practitioner's spirit no longer ran clean. It shredded the spirit's core and drove death outward through the body. Deoric was spared the worst, because it draws on titan material and the deeper threads rather than on the Ezz. It stayed as costly as Deoric always is, paid in life, but it did not kill on contact, and whoever lived through the Blight at all may well have been its practitioners.
The empire that fell had rebuilt itself on what its mage-kings called aetherial magic, their own confident name for Kethic elementalism. When the fuel turned lethal, the foundation went with it.
The Dark Night: 12,000–11,500 BSD
A 500-year-long night caused by a shadowrift. A period of great fear and loss for the world, when the sky went dark and what little civilization remained struggled to survive without sunlight.
The Oblivion Years: 11,500–10,400 BSD
All information was lost. The survivors of the Dark Night possessed no written records, no oral tradition that reached back more than a generation. The world began again from nothing.
The reason it began from nothing, as the modern Kethic reading has it, is that a void-heavy leyline convergence collapsed in this span and the coherence that lets a people hold a continuous memory wore away with it. The void took the structure out of the spirit, slowly and across a whole population, until a name no longer fixed the person who carried it and a generation could not reach back past the living. No one inside the era understood this, and no account of it survived to be understood later; the cause is named only now, run backward from the instability the collapse left in the ground.
The Hel Dynasties: 11,400–10,900 BSD
A series of tyrannical dynasties that achieved complete dominion over the world, each ruling as total overlords. The period ends with the Killing Moon, which destroyed them.
The Blood War: 10,900 BSD
The dynasties, weakened by the Killing Moon, turned on each other in a final conflagration. There were no winners. This left Alaria in ruins on the eve of Hykravones' return.