Eldervale
Eldervale
Browse a skill, then choose an activity to train. A coloured marker shows what is running.
Enemies drop chests and keys. One key opens any chest; tougher enemies drop better chests.
Villagers gather in the background, even while the game is closed.
The township of Eldervale is taking shape as you build in Hearthfell Vale. The Vale is a gentle stretch of ground the Sundering left standing, and little else; everything you build here is the first real claim anyone's staked on it in longer than anyone in the Vale can say.
Long before the first house rose in Hearthfell Vale, the world was whole — one unbroken land beneath a single sky, its people bound by no borders but the reach of their own two feet. The old chronicles call it simply the Whole Age, and say it ended in a single night.
No two accounts agree on the cause. Some blame a quarrel among the old wardens of the land, their bickering curdling into something that tore the earth apart. Others speak of a wound in the sky itself, a wrongness that seeped down into stone and root alike. The Cindermark's fire-keepers tell it as a punishment; the Vigil of Ash's oldest oaths call it a trial. What every telling agrees on is the result: the Sundering. In one night, the Whole Age's single land cracked into the fractured country that stands today — the gentle bowl of Hearthfell Vale torn from the tangled dark of Greywood Marches, the cliffs of the Sundered Coast wrenched from ash-choked Ashfall Steppe, the frost of Frostmark Peaks pushed high and cold, and beyond it all, the Blightreach, where the wound never fully closed.
Something of that old wrongness still lingers at the world's edges. It is there in the restless dead who walk the Sundered Coast's tide-lines, in the raw aether that gathers thickest where the Blightreach's sky hangs lowest, in every old ruin that turns up ore no living smith remembers naming. The founders of Hearthfell Vale built their first house on the one patch of ground the Sundering seemed to leave gently — not because it was safe, but because it was survivable — and every generation since has pushed a little further out from that first hearth-fire, reclaiming the world one region at a time.
Whether the wound will ever close, or whether the fractured country is simply what the world is now, is a question no chronicle has yet answered.