An ancient tome, sealed and floating. Click it to break the seal — then turn the pages.
A Companion to the World of Indithar
THE CHRONICLE
of Mystvale✦ Break the seal ✦
Frontispiece
The Chronicle of Mystvale
An account of the world of Indithar — a world fading from time — and of the arena where its four orders settle what words cannot.
I The Fading World
II The Three Forces
III The Hollowfall
IV The Four Truths
V The Cost of Magic
VI The Arena of Mystvale
VII Valdris, the Hollow Sovereign
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The Scribe's Hand
A Word on the Name
Indithar takes its name from an old poet's word for the state of fading away — becoming forgotten, vanishing into time. Poets once spoke it standing among abandoned ruins, naming what had been lost. It is the right name for this world: an age in slow decline, a civilization half-remembered, a light going out so gradually that most never notice the dark arriving.
The Hollowfall is the day it began — the day the rift was torn and the world started to bleed. Indithar is the world. The Hollowfall is what happened to it.
Indithar is a fictional fantasy setting. Its peoples, beliefs, powers, magic, and cosmology are part of the story world and are not intended as claims about reality. Its great powers are fictional forces within the world — not creators, not gods, and not objects of worship.
§ I · The Fading World
The World Simply Is
No living order holds the truth of Indithar's beginning. The great powers of the world are feared, followed, resisted, and misunderstood — but they did not make it. The peoples here do not kneel to creators. They revere ancestors, swear by oaths, fear what is stronger than themselves, and bind their lives to causes.
This grounds the world in something rarer than most fantasy: the central war is between peoples and their choices, not between gods moving mortals like pieces. The radiant ones are beings of light, not deities. The hungering ones are corruption, not devils. The cold court were once mortal. And humanity is simply human — caught in the middle, and refusing to kneel.
§ II · The Three Forces
Light · Shadow · Hollow
Three forces move through Indithar. The world understands them not as gods but as conditions of reality — as constant and mysterious as gravity or time.
Light — order, life, harmony, clarity. The radiant orders are made of it; healing magic draws from it. It is not always merciful: light can blind, can purify too harshly, can refuse to see shadow.
Shadow — corruption, hunger, decay, transformation. The hungering ones channel it. It is not always mindless — but they use it to consume, and that is the use the world fears.
The Hollow — the force of absence; what remains when life leaves but cannot move on. The rarest and most dangerous, for it consumes both Light and Shadow. It is not worshipped. It is feared, studied, and survived.
Mortals — humans most of all — are aligned with no single force. They are made of all three, in tension. It is why a human may become a Paladin, a Warlock, or a Lich, if they choose. The Iron Covenant calls this their burden. The others call it their weakness.
§ III · The Hollowfall
The Curious Kingdom
Long before this age there was a kingdom of unmatched wisdom and ambition. Its people were not the strongest nor the most numerous — they were the most curious. They built libraries that took generations to fill. They mapped the stars. They unlocked the patterns of magic other peoples used by instinct alone.
They came to be called the Hollow Kingdom — though that was not their name then. Their true name is no longer spoken. They erased it themselves, as part of what they tried to do. For they believed they had found the answer to death.
§ III · The Hollowfall
The Tearing
Their scholars reasoned that if the life-essence could be unbound from the failing body and re-bound to something permanent, death could be not avoided but defeated. On the day now called the Hollowfall, the whole kingdom performed the binding together — the largest act of magic in recorded history.
It worked, and it failed. Their essence was preserved; their deaths were undone. But the working tore a wound in the world — a rift between what is and what should not be. Through the wound came the Pact: beings of shadow and hunger that had waited outside, unable to enter. The door was open now. They have been pouring through ever since.
And the kingdom discovered what it had become. Not living. Not dead. Hollow. Their bodies endured, their minds endured — but the Light that warmed them and the Shadow that grounded them were gone. They had bound themselves to absence, and absence is what they became.
§ III · The Hollowfall
The Response
The radiant orders descended in answer — not to save anyone, but because a wound in the world threatens all things, and they tolerate no wounds. Their war against the hungering Pact has not stopped since. It will not stop. They are not merciful and they are not kind. They are necessary.
Caught between three immortal forces — the Pact pouring through the rift, the radiant ones burning all they suspected of corruption, the cold court preserving themselves at any cost — the human kingdoms had one choice: kneel to one of the three, or stand.
They stood. They forged the Iron Covenant. And they have been bleeding ever since.
§ IV · The Four Truths
Four Orders, Four Answers
Every champion belongs to one of four orders. The order is not a flag — it is identity, magic, territory, history, and grievance. Each believes a different answer to the long unmaking. The Arena of Mystvale is where they settle it.
The First Truth · Human
The Iron Covenant
We Stand. · Endurance · Formation · Precision
"I don't need chaos. I outlast you."
Not the strongest, not the wisest, not the most magical — the most stubborn. The Covenant was forged when the surviving human kingdoms saw that none could stand the Hollowfall's aftermath alone. Old rivalries were buried in iron oaths. It is not one nation but a brotherhood of nations, bound by a single promise: they will not kneel.
Hardship makes worth; a people who have not bled have earned nothing. They distrust the radiant ones' purity, despise the Pact's corruption, and pity the cold court's preservation. They want none of those gifts.
Iron Covenant · Champions
Sweat Over Sorcery
Warrior takes hits the others can't. Archer turns space into time — every gap a fraction of a second bought to decide what comes next. Sentinel is the wall that punishes the charge: the longer you press, the more shield charges they bank against you. None win the fastest fights. They win the war.
Humans channel no force by birth — they learn magic, slower than radiant or corrupted casters but more flexible. It is the Covenant's burden and its quiet advantage.
Covenant players gravitate to grinder ladders, defensive comp, and Warband 5v5s where formation matters more than burst.
The Second Truth · Undead
The Hollow Court
We Transcend. · Knowledge · Decay · Execution
"You were dead the moment I understood you."
Once the Hollow Kingdom — the most advanced civilization the world ever made. Now the Court: preserved, doomed, brilliant, cold. They kept their minds, their knowledge, their accumulated age — and lost warmth, sensation, the passage of time. They do not hate the other orders. They simply have very long plans, and will lose a battle to win a war no one else knows is being fought.
They believe only they have the time and the perspective to truly save the world — and that the terrible cost of their preservation will be vindicated when they do.
Hollow Court · Champions
The Long View
Lich reads your kit before you finish your first cast, drops a zone in the only place you can retreat to, and watches you walk into it. Rogue kills you from behind, after you've already committed. Necromancer raises what falls — every kill a soldier — until your team is outnumbered by its own dead.
Theirs is the rarest magic: the Hollow itself, which preserves and severs. They guard it jealously — they understand it cost them everything, and they do not want others to repeat the mistake.
Hollow Court players study matchups, hoard mastery, and play patient counter-comps. Slow setups, lethal payoffs.
The Third Truth · Celestial
The Divine Order
We Judge. · Judgment · Control · Purity
"You mistake restraint for kindness."
Radiant beings of Light — ancient, powerful, and wholly alien — who descended after the Hollowfall and never left. They are not gods and not creators. They do not negotiate, do not bargain, do not forgive; they correct. To them the corruption is not evil but incorrect, and incorrect things must be set right. They guard the Iron Covenant in pragmatic terms — but humans have learned their protection comes with edits.
White and gold; spires of singing stone; beauty too perfect to be comfortable. Necessary, never gentle.
Divine Order · Champions
Judgment as Inevitability
Paladin heals the worthy and absorbs the strikes they'd otherwise take — service as supremacy. Divine Mage fires a beam that does not negotiate. Inquisitor marks the heretic, accumulates the proof, and brings down judgment when the count is high enough that no court could rule against it.
Their Light heals, reveals, and burns the corrupted — but it costs purity: the caster must mean it. Radiance withheld is radiance lost.
Divine Order players love tanks, beams, and the satisfaction of a perfectly-timed execute.
The Fourth Truth · Demon
The Abyssal Pact
We Take. · Corruption · Aggression · Momentum
"I will pay any price — I intend to survive long enough to enjoy the reward."
They came through the rift the Hollowfall tore — the hungering force given will. They cannot create, only consume and twist; every mortal they corrupt becomes one of them. Most were once human. That is the cruelty of it: the brute lumbering toward a Covenant village was, perhaps, that village's own son, fifty years gone. The Pact remembers what it was. It simply no longer cares.
They believe the others lie to themselves — that humans pretend to be free, the radiant pretend to be just, the cold court pretend to be alive. The Pact does not pretend. It wants, and it takes.
Abyssal Pact · Champions
Hunger as Honesty
Warlock trades pieces of themselves for power to spend in the next twenty seconds — never the next minute. Axeman rages louder the longer they survive. Hexblade binds to a victim and refuses to let go — once you're tethered, the contract is signed.
Their Shadow curses, drains, and transforms — and always costs the user life: years, blood, sometimes more. They consider it the only honest price in a world full of lies.
Abyssal Pact players run aggressive, lean snowball comps, and live for the first-blood window.
§ V · The Cost of Magic
All Magic Costs Something
Magic in Indithar is never summoned from nothing. It is drawn from the Three Forces — and each demands its price, paid by the one who casts.
Light costs purity. The caster must mean it. Radiance offered with a divided heart simply does not come.
Shadow costs life. Years, blood, and sometimes more. The corrupted pay it gladly; the desperate pay it once.
The Hollow costs presence. To preserve or to sever, the caster forgets things — sometimes important things — to make the working hold.
Immortality, in this world, is not a triumph. It is the most expensive mistake ever made — and the whole age is still paying for it.
§ VI · The Lands That Fade
The Realms of Indithar
Four fortress-realms ring the vale, one to each order, and between them lies a country growing thinner every year. Roads that once ran to a hundred towns now reach forty; the rest the fading took, and took their names with them. Travellers still carry maps a generation out of date — the new ones are only shorter.
It is the truth the orders share and never say aloud: the world is not theirs to win, only to slow. Each fortress is a wager against the dark — the Iron Covenant's walls raised again on their own rubble, the Hollow Court's cold archives where nothing is permitted to be forgotten, the Divine Order's high cathedrals of unbending light, the Abyssal Pact's chasm-holds that grow by swallowing whatever borders them.
No order will say which realm the fading reaches first. Each is certain it will be one of the others.
§ VI · The Contested Grounds
Where the Wider War Is Settled
The Arena settles single quarrels; the great battlegrounds settle the rest. Three points held or lost, a warband whole or broken by nightfall — this is how an order presses its claim on more than one champion's worth of ground.
Riftway Hollow. The Hollowfall did not tear the world only once. It left lesser scars, and the deepest runs through this hollow — two ruined spires flanking the wound, a heart of pale light pulsing at its centre. Hold all three and you hold the Rift itself. No order has kept it for long.
The Warroad. The old supply road between two dead kingdoms, now three fortified holds with cinders smouldering in the gaps between. Whoever owns the road owns the rotation; whoever loses it learns the long way around.
Three points. Two warbands. One that holds — and one that learns the way around.
§ VI · The Arena
The Arena of Mystvale
Mystvale is the proving ground of Indithar — a contested vale beneath a fixed eclipse, ringed by the four orders' fortress-realms. Here the war is fought in miniature and in the open: each order sends its champions to settle, blow by blow, what centuries of argument could not.
To enter the Arena is to answer the long unmaking with your own two hands. A win is not just a win — it is one order's truth pressed, for a moment, over the others'. The Chronicle keeps the tally. Your name is the next line.
Seven arenas, twelve champions, four truths. The eclipse never moves. Neither, it seems, will the war.
§ VII · The Hollow Sovereign
Valdris, King of the Withered Crown
"He will not be stopped by one champion."
A king from a time the other orders have forgotten or refused to record. The Iron Covenant struck his name from their stone — the only name they ever did. The Hollow Court never struck it. They count him their sovereign still.
The Court of Withered Crowns
The Raid
Six chambers. Three phases. Up to eight champions enter; not all leave. The first chamber is a corridor — he waits to see whether you survive the entrance. The next four are his courtiers, who will not yield even after he does. The sixth is the throne. By then he is not pretending to be a king.
Chambers6
Phases3
Party1 – 8
LootSovereign's Veil · Sovereign's Bane
I · Crown Mark. The marked champion takes everything until the crown passes.
II · Spectral Judgment. Hollow Courtiers spawn each cycle. Ignore them and lose by attrition.
III · Pulse. He drops his guard and breaks the room. Burn him before the pulse reaches you.
Dev dispatches and the full patch chronicle, kept beneath the tome. Newest first.
Recent News
Feature · Mode
Conquest — 3v3 Domination Arrives
A wholly new way to fight joins the arena. Conquest is a 3v3 objective mode in the Domination shape: your warband contests three control points across a vast lane-built battleground, and the team that holds more ground watches its score climb until the threshold breaks. Two maps debut with it — Riftway Hollow, a center-swing struggle over the Rift and its flanking spires, and The Warroad, a split-push road where three holds and the cinders between them decide the rotation. It runs on the same fully server-authoritative simulation as ranked, with a solo-versus-bots path to learn the ground first.
3v3 Domination · two 3,600×2,200 team battlegrounds · accept-and-draft lobby · solo practice vs bots.
Feature · Platform
Take It Anywhere — Install Mystvale as an App
Mystvale now installs to your device. On iPhone, Add to Home Screen and it launches chrome-less and full-screen; on Android, a one-tap prompt does the same. Underneath, a full phone-optimization pass tuned the controls, layout, and performance for real devices — the menus and login render cleanly in portrait, the arena locks to landscape for fairness, and the touch controls appear only in a live match. The browser game you never had to download now lives on your home screen, too.
The Living Grimoire, Lit — A Front-to-Back Cinematic Overhaul
The whole experience now reads as a tome you open and step into. The landing greets you with a breaking wax-seal as the codex unseals onto the world; the eclipse over the citadel breathes with real WebGL light; the World of Mystvale is a living spread where the four realms glow as you read and a painted map of the realms anchors the lore. The world's history was deepened with the true account of the long unmaking — the kingdom that tried to outwit death and tore the world open. In-game, every menu became a painted chapter plate. This Chronicle was rebuilt to match — and now opens as a floating tome.
Landing + Chronicle + ten in-game design phases. Fully responsive and reduced-motion safe.
Feature · Combat
Combat Overhaul Complete — Movement, Resources, and Earned Crits
The deepest combat pass yet shipped in stages and is now complete. Movement is decoupled from aim — WASD or arrows move while the mouse aims. Every one of the twelve classes now carries its own combat resource: melee resources build as you commit, while ranged resources drain as a finite kiting budget — an asymmetry that quietly closes the old ranged-over-melee gap. Crits are earned now, not random: strike a stunned target and the blow lands harder. A burst cap ends the rare one-shot stack; every change rewards spacing and commitment over noise.
The world found its voice. The Hollow Sovereign now speaks during the raid, and a ceremonial herald calls the moments that matter — first blood, killstreaks, the final blow. Every class carries its own cast and ultimate sounds, every faction its own voice, and all seven arenas plus the Valdris raid now have bespoke music.
Boss + herald + faction voice, fifty combat SFX samples, per-map music across all seven arenas and a dedicated raid theme.
Feature · Multiplayer
Raid v3 Goes Live — Server-Authoritative Co-op vs Valdris
The boss raid is no longer host-authoritative. Up to eight champions can now share a server-simulated raid against Valdris with full lag compensation, 60fps input, 100fps snapshots, 15-second rejoin grace, and a spectator browser. The Hollow Sovereign drops aura cosmetics and a title ("Sovereign's Bane") on first kill.
Per-tick death detection, room-advance triggers, projectile pillar collision, scaling table. 1138/1138 unit tests passing.
Patch Chronicle
v1.5Major
The Living Grimoire, Lit — Cinematic, Audio & Web
Cinematic landing. A first-load opening codex, a WebGL "living eclipse" hero, a living World of Mystvale spread, and a painted map of the realms.
Deepened lore. The true account of the long unmaking, woven through the site with a public author's note framing the fiction.
In-game cinematic UI. Ten design phases: painted chapter plates, the home reforged over a WebGL vault, gilded resource vessels, ornate gold button frames.
Full audio pass. Valdris voiced, a ceremonial herald, per-class and per-faction voice, fifty combat SFX, bespoke music for seven arenas plus the raid.
This Chronicle, reborn as a floating tome you open and read page by page.
v1.4Major
The Combat Overhaul — Movement, Resources, Spacing, Crits
Decoupled movement. WASD or arrow keys move while the mouse aims; click-to-move remains as a fallback. Server-authoritative and parity-safe.
Per-class resources — all twelve classes. Melee builds as you commit; ranged drains as a finite kiting budget. The asymmetry self-balances the ranged-melee gap.
Spacing matters. Gap-closers take reduced damage during the charge; point-blank ranged basics hit softer.
Earned crits. Random crits are gone — a hit into a stunned target lands at 1.6×. A universal burst cap (4× base) ends the one-shot stack.
v1.3Major
The Living Grimoire — Total UI Redesign
Phases 1–3: In-match HUD reborn as the Caster's Ledger; on-ramp surfaces and every deep menu rebuilt on the Living Grimoire system.
