Sanctorum¶
"Sanctuary of the Sun." — a title of Amu'Solk, whose name is said to derive from the city (S132)
Contested
Named in the open question Sanctorum's destruction and the Sancturi rising: the Fifth Age sources give different years for the city's destruction and for the rising in its ruins.
Sanctorum is the first city of the Fifth Age on the Broken Sea and the capital of the Sancturi Empire, which took its name from the city's ashes. Founded two years after the Sun returned, destroyed by fire from the earth five centuries later, reclaimed by the rebels who became the Sancturi, and finally overrun by the Araxians in 904 SM, its story brackets the whole Sancturi age.
History¶
Sanctorum and Angorra were founded in 2 SM "by Telgrim and the followers of Anariel", the Lady of the Morning who had restored the Sun at the end of the Age of the Dark Sun. The calendar itself, Solis Mani, "Morning Sun", counts from that restoration.
In 513 SM "Sanctorum is destroyed in a massive volcanic event". An earlier account dates the destruction to 514 SM and adds that there were "conflicting reports between agents of Necatus and Myrkan" about it.
In 522 SM "rebels organized around a new faith" retook the ruins of Sanctorum and "declare themselves and their gods the Sancturi"; the Fae-Sancturi War began from the city. The head of the new pantheon, Amu'Solk, the Lord of the Sun, took his name "from Sanctorum, from whose ashes he arose to wrest control from the addled Riven Sun God"; the ruin is thus "the founding moment for the pantheon who rose out of chaos of the impotent Riven gods" (see the Sancturi Pantheon).
A Hollow later formed in the ruins. In 618 SM the Keepers of Abaddon "destroy the Hollow at the ruins of Sanctorum and receive an imperial charter".
By the 700s SM Sanctorum was again the Imperium's capital: the High Warlord "resides in the capitol", and the Sanctoric Cartus, the holy text dictated by the first emperor, "is held in the Emperor's city" (see the Imperial Government and the Sancturi Clergy).
Gap
No source describes the city itself, its districts or its site beyond the south-eastern Broken Sea, nor says when the ruins were rebuilt into a capital after 618 SM.
The Fall of Sanctorum¶
"Historians mark the end of the Sancturi Age in 904 SM when the capitol Sanctorum fell to an Araxian onslaught led by the Thur'arax Dread Overlord Nikee, throwing the already besieged Sancturi Empire into complete chaos that led shortly to its fragmentation." The empress was slain and "the great city of Sanctorum overrun". In those last days two High Precepts of the Houses of Sidcarnon and Barahd, with the Principate of the Sages, organised the exodus remembered as the Unholy Flight, carrying the Sanctoric Cartus north "after brutal fighting, some of it against their the other Sancturi who saw them as deserters who should ascend to Elysium with the Empress". Their descendants became the Divine Alliance. The Fifth Age Timeline places the Ascendance of the Divine two years after the fall.
Earlier accounts¶
The oldest campaign notes (S132), which their author marked "Timeline is WRONG!", have a new human faction under God-Emperor Tolac rise "in the ruins of Sanctorum" in 516 SM and the Sanctum Imperium established in 525 SM. The later timeline (S326) gives 522 SM for the rising and is followed here.