The Rift through which the desperate column of refugees that would become Vershellen escaped led to a place quite unlike the old homeworld. The sky – luminous and lit with strange stars and streamers of incandescent energy that tugged and played with the mind – stretched off into sanity-twisting infinity. The land, by contrast, was reassuringly familiar, although shattered and scattered through the hostile heavens as though by some uncaring god’s hand.

Everything from lone mountains to continental landmasses, complete with cascading rivers, forests and rolling plains, all of it hanging suspended in the immaterial firmament. The air was full of raucous, alien calls and the land carpeted in unfamiliar plants.

More than that, though, magic roared through the plane. An endless torrent, a vast ocean needing but the faintest touch to leap to hand; every spellcaster found their power profoundly magnified. Spells that used to require days of ritual and many skilled participants giving their all now needed a word and flick of the hand from a mediocre practitioner, and wonders that previously defied conception were now within reach – if the refugee-colonists could survive long enough to make them.

Which was not at all a given; quite aside from the mind-bending luminous reaches of the endless sky that took more than one refugee into their endless grasp, sanity and reason erased by the poisonous light, practically every local life-form had some form of arcane power. Even the plants were infused with it, their powers and properties unlike anything the refugees had experienced. Gaia’s nature had been fecund and kindly, whereas their new home was an altogether wilder thing. Enslaver orchids, bloodroots, vampire thorns…and they were just some of the tamer flora the first unfortunate expeditions found. Even the more beneficial finds were, often as not, a double-edged sword, made so by the energy that infused them.

These days, the plane looks far different from that untamed wilderness – at least, in the nearer reaches. Skyships ply the trade lanes between vast and shielded island citadels, whilst the pleasure-palaces of the sorcerous aristocracy gleam, filigree-fragile, in the poisonous light. Cities bloom on the islands, the once-wild forests cut and coppiced into submission, and docks festoon the aerial coastlines.

Not all, though, is a triumphal sign of imperial prosperity though; in the far distance, visible on a good day from the Gate itself, a sullen abyssal wound bleeds purple, eye-searing unlight – the Black City. Once one of the most powerful and influential Principalities, back before the imperial unification, now an impossible ruin swallowed by the success – or failure – of their last experiment with Rift magic. Staring at the abyss for too long is unhealthy; it draws the eye in with tantalising glimpses – a spire here, windows ablaze with purple reflections, a colonnaded promenade there, a skyship dock with tyrian-scrawled pennons flying proud…enticing reminders of what the Black City once was, and drawing a perennial tithe of the young and the desperate to plunder the possible riches there.

None have ever returned.

Then, too, there are the arcane currents that rush through the endless sky; the squalling Rose-Wind, sweeping in from the western expanses, full of flowers and glass knives; the insidious Roaring Deeps that deafen with internal thunder, others.

Following their landing and the destabilization of the Gate which had brought them away from the Cataclysm, the refugee chain fractured into factions, each aligned with a sufficiently powerful sorcerer or sorceress able to protect them from the mind-twisting planar illumination and the magically-charged flora and fauna. Each group laid claim to an island of their own, and for a time there was the peace borne of a desperate need to survive.

The isles of Vershellen were, at that time, entirely wild and untamed. Forests of millennial growth dominated the largest islands, never having known the chop of an axe or the hum of a buzzsaw, nourished to truly gargantuan size by the plentiful mana. Lakes teemed with monstrous fish, the rivers ran wild and free, and powerful animals utterly unknown to the settlers roamed the plains and high mountain passes.

It was only through enormous effort and relentless application of arcane might that the settlers had any chance at all. Even the light of the plane was inimical, in time, the uncertain illumination of possible stars in the endless sky slowly warping unshielded minds to insanity and unprotected flesh to glass. Many of the oldest tombs in Vershellen are more like sculpture galleries than crypts, housing rank upon rank of exquisite glass statues.

Naturally, as the protectors and providers for the rest of the refugees, the mages rapidly assumed positions of power and prominence. Hard to gainsay the sorcerer whose power keeps you from vitrifying, after all. The islands, separate and isolated in the endless sea of stars, all went their own separate ways, raising stained-glass spires to the sky and digging deep into the flying bedrock. Towns and cities grew up under the glittering aegis of the mage towers, whole communities born and raised in service to their sorcerous overlords.

Magic flourished, too; more and more Vershellese developed the talent as time wore on and births began in a plane saturated by it. Many took up service with the princely Houses founded by the original magi, forming the start of the middle classes of Vershellen, but others found their skill and ambition too great to be satisfied with mere service.

There were plenty of other islands, new territories to be conquered and jealously defended; waves of explorers left the first isles on rudimentary skyships, heading for distant lands to raise their own banners, their own Houses.

Although the plane itself appeared infinite, no-one wanted to venture too far from the safe havens of established islands, too far out where skyships could fall prey to the myriad and undocumented horrors of the Deep Sky. Thus came the first true conflicts, first between pioneers claiming the same piece of floating rock and then, later and more seriously, between lesser scions of princely Houses seeking to expand their House’s power and prestige.

Thus did Vershellen settle into its Principalities; vast constellations of islands bound together and moved by magic, all under the rule of a sorcerous House. Each warred against the other, as often as not, with words and trade embargoes and sabotage, espionage, all-out warfare with skyships and landing marines and, at the last, with magic enough to split the skies and rip whole islands apart. Proud and fiercely independent, it seemed as though the seething, simmering cauldron of rivalry and splendid isolation would last forever, the Principalities expanding endlessly through an infinite sky, each one jealously hoarding secrets and lore, sorcerer-lords and ladies sniping with one another over arcane minutiae whilst their oathbound lessers spilled blood and treasure in their name.

No lore too dangerous, no arcana too forbidden; in the bright, mad heavens the ancient magi soared to dizzying heights and plumbed the very darkest depths. The catalyst for empire arose out of the internecine warring between the Principalities; the proud island-citadel of Scintillance, home and fortress since time out of mind for House Hellebore was assaulted by their enemies in a particularly brutal clash. For five days the colossal landmass wore a corona of weeping flame as the cities burned and the proud spires melted like candles in a furnace. Hurricanes of razor-glass butterflies scythed through the city streets, turning them into charnel ruin as hordes of summoned and bound monstrosities rampaged as they willed, wrecking years of painstaking spellwork in moments and letting the poison light pour down, untrammelled and untamed onto unprotected Hellebore citizenry. Skyships bristling with cannon and mortar tumbled aflame from blazing Hellebore docks, and in five Red Days the heart of the ancient and princely House of Hellebore was left a tumbling wreck. The other princely Houses – even those entirely uninvolved in the attack – were quick to capitalise on weakness, vassalizing and taking by main force what they willed even as Hellebore reeled in shock.

It was not a common fate, to be sure, but hardly unheard of in the Principalities. The older and larger realms had a gentleman’s agreement – now lying in tatters – but such upsets had occurred before, and life carried on as usual after a period of adjustment. However, the young ruler of House Hellebore was a sorceress of uncommon talent even amongst the Vershellese sorcerer-lords, and had no intention of taking the attempted extermination of her House lying down. From a hidden border citadel, she laid her plots and plans, carefully hoarding and husbanding her power and her intentions, all the while forming alliances, pacts, oaths of assistance and internal networks that spread all throughout the domains of the very Houses that had laid her own so low.

The final spark to the catalyst was an event as perplexing as it was catastrophic. It may, perhaps – and the imperial archives remain stoically silent on this – have been the result of a Hellebore saboteur, an infiltrating agent seizing their chance, but whatever the impetus the final result was undeniable. Megara was one of the original Principalities, ancient and vast and glutted with centuries of accumulated wealth. Its sorcerers were skilled, very skilled, and had for near a century turned their bright gazes towards the inactive Gate, working diligently at unravelling the mystery of mysteries – for the grand sorcery which had forged them and in so doing had brought an escape from their doomed world had been lost in the chaos of the evacuation. However expansive a cage – and to all intents and purposes, Vershellen was infinite – it was still a cage, and the lordly rulers of Megara could countenance no shackle or limit to their ambition. Thus, their mages laboured in libraries and laboratories throughout the great city-continent, working to unpick a dimensional puzzle few could even wrap their heads around.

Megara – and the loose association of Principalities it led, by default if nothing else – had been the primary instigators of the attack on House Hellebore. What the hypothetical infiltrator did – or whether it was supremely unfortunate coincidence – no-one can say, but one day the entire island conurbation…twisted. Millions of tons of rock and metal and glass shrieked a dreadful death-cry as blackness ripped its way into existence across the luminous sky, a voracious and hungry abyss that consumed the ancient Principality – and many of its closest attendant vassals – whole. The wound and the ruin – the Black City – remain to this day, a visible reminder of the dangers of Gate magic gone wrong (or worse, horribly right).

Into this power vacuum stepped the resurgent House of Hellebore. It wasn’t enough to regain their former status, oh no. Hellebore skyships were suddenly everywhere, and their immaculate envoys negotiated ceasefires, trade deals, alliances, sweeping up lesser Houses in a new and building movement. It wasn’t plain sailing; many and proud were the Principalities who wanted nothing to do with the frightening new thing the House of Hellebore was becoming. Those – with the characteristic ruthlessness of a Vershellen magister – were made examples of.

Skyships turned lesser strongholds to burning rubble with their cannons and spells, whilst the greater ones found themselves fighting an unending tide of metal. Golems, cast and sculpted like humans writ large, engraved with spelleater wards, unfeeling and unflinching and unaffected by the poison light. And all, to a perfectly-formed legionnaire, loyal to Hellebore and her dogs. Still worse were her spells, shatteringly powerful and breaking even the most potent shields like glass.

Before such puissance, the Principalities bowed or were destroyed, one by one.

At the end, from the smoking husk of the Vershellen Principalities, the empire was born, and has so far endured for two centuries.

Vershellese society is defined by magic. Their home plane is almost explosive with it, the air and water and land all saturated with mana. Much of it was inimical to life as the refugees knew it, or at best indifferent when they first arrived, exhausted and afraid. The spellcasters who fled through the Gate, though, found their powers magnified manyfold. They were able to beat back the monsters and pacify the land with their arcane knowledge and, when that failed, through prodigious application of spellfire. Thus, the expedition coalesced around them, the first leaders who would go on to become the first sorcerer-lords and ladies.

Traditional lines of authority quickly eroded; old power and nobility and a line stretching back a thousand years didn’t matter, only the ability to shield against the invidious radiance that permeated the plane, and the powerful monsters glutted on unheard-of amounts of mana did. Those with the power and skill to do so were few and far between, prideful and insular in many cases; there was no one overarching authority that all acknowledged. The flying islands of the plane only enhanced that tendency to insularity; each wizard-lord and lady gathered to themselves a retinue of loyal – and terrified – retainers from the refugee train and struck out for the nearby islands in the sky.

Over time, each settled land developed into the personal demesne of a powerful mage. Spires soared up to the maddening heavens, even as castles and walls and defensive bastions were chiselled out of the living rock of the islands, along with colossal defensive wards and other ritual spellwork, channelling and amplifying the power of the attuned mage. Those first spellcasters founded the princely Houses of a sorcerous aristocracy, usurping within a single generation the powers and privileges of the nobility and elevating their power and control over their subjects to a degree undreamt-of. After all, they were the only ones capable of powering the wards and defences that leached the starry poison from the light and vaporised the monsters that regularly assailed the fledgling settlements.

In Vershellen, then, magic is everything. The overwhelming majority of the citizens have some ability to work it, to take the currents of mana which rampage through their plane and cast a good few spells, even without the centuries of arcane infrastructure which have been developed there.

The greater the ability to cast, or the greater the affinity for difficult forms of magic, the higher their status in Vershellese society. Indeed, to compare the regular citizen of Vershellen to one of the sorcerer-lords is akin to comparing a candle to the sun. Where the average resident might dabble in the arcane, the aristocracy positively swims in it, the planar magic changing them as much as they change the plane itself. Generations of people have spent their lives sheltering under the protective aegis of one magister or another; many Vershellese still think of themselves as sept to a particular House and Principality first, and a citizen of their empire second.

Magic both stratifies and levels Vershellese society; if you have powerful magic in Vershellen, you matter, no matter what background you have, and magic doesn’t seem to care about gender or sexuality either. If you have a mere dribble of talent, though, better learn some other useful skill and make yourself useful to a true magister.

The strange properties of the plane also influence their society in more subtle ways; magic is the sovereign defence against the sanity-stealing light and its poison glassy touch, of course, and so it is a badge of status in Vershellen to wear as little as is safe. Citizens and common mages may – and do – cover and cloak themselves, and vie for power and position in their own shadow-games that ape those of their betters through volume and colour and cut, but for the aristocracy nothing whispers power and wealth louder than skin bared to the poison light with no ill effects. What they do wear is fine, to be sure, rich and sumptuous and with all the decadence befitting their station, but no magister worth their title would ever stoop to cloaks and capes, to ermine robes and multi-layered ballgowns, to all the trappings of rank in other lands.

The Empire of Vershellen is ruled from the glittering stained-glass spires of the Whisper Palace in the grand city of Cynosure. The Court of Days dances attendance at the foot of the Constellation Throne whilst shadow wars play out between the House of Blood and the House of Commons in the opulent Parliament.

All bend the knee to the imperial throne; golems and skyships and island-shattering spellpower make sure of that, at least on the surface, but below the serene shallows the cutthroat political engine of Vershellen roars away unabated, oiled with blood and watered with tears. Princely Houses vie for position and power, new-minted magisters strike out across the infinite skies for pastures new, and everywhere the mages plumb the depths of the universe for knowledge.

Vershellen’s magic – and its princely magisters – is perhaps its most defining feature. It’s woven into the very fabric of their plane, their infrastructure wholly entwined with it; essence mills churn at every endless waterfall and mana collectors gleam on every suns-drenched hilltop, funnelling the raw possibility of creation into their owners’ grand workings. Miles of sorcerous ritual anchors honeycomb the great island citadels, crackling and snapping with cold fire as the ambient magic of the plane surges through them, hundreds of magical effects propagating from each enormous array.

Magic is as much a tool of peace as war; ploughshares draw life and nourishment through the soil as they go, whilst forges blaze to white heat at a whispered word, suckling greedily at the essence grid for the raw power to convert into flame. None of which is to say the mages of Vershellen have neglected violence, oh no. Some – like the empress – delight in golem legions, or armies of oath-bound servitors. Others, sheer arcane might manifest as the elemental forces of nature skewed to extreme violence, and every shade in between. Enchanters press skeins of power into the very artifacts they imbue; cannons roar with volcanic fury and spew magma in luminous torrents and swivel-mounted carronades scythe decks clear with barrages of razored glass.

Skyships.

Cannon and mortar-armed skyships, golems, powerful mages