Three centuries ago, at approximately 3076 SD, the unbroken succession of Neferati rulers on the Tarkhon throne ended. The final emperor of the old line was not overthrown by war. The bloodline had thinned for generations through marriage into human noble families until the Neferati character of the throne was more ceremonial than substantive. When the line finally broke, the succession passed to human hands without obvious fracture.
What followed was continuity with carefully managed forgetting. The new dynasty kept the Evertorch burning, maintained the trade-fealty structures, continued the imperial titles. They handled the Neferati heritage claim exactly as every human emperor has handled it since: carefully, never directly refusing it, never fully honoring it either.
The founding families did not accept the transition quietly, but neither did they make war on the empire they had built. They withdrew south to the four Neferati kingdoms — Kabir, Gissemari, Wadiyah, and Yaif — and hardened into what they became: founders in exile, with a claim to the fire still burning in Tarkhetan's cathedral and a long memory for what was owed.
Whether the Severance was a clean succession or a coup remains the most contested question in Tarkhon's historiography. King Ulyas of Kerwin is believed to carry the actual sequence of events. He has not volunteered it.