The Record Is Continuous
The carved symbols on the Nexum are not decorative. They are Ja'ak's original language: a record of every world the Nexum has visited, every player who has opened it, every encounter with The Chaos that has been faced or surrendered to. Read in order, the carvings are a map of everywhere it has been. This is that map.
Chronicle Art · Ja'ak Shapes the Nexum · 800 × 450Before the Game
Before the game existed, there was Ja'ak: a god of confrontation, standing at the precise boundary between order and chaos. Ja'ak shaped the Nexum from compressed possibility and forged the Shattergrid inside it. Cosmic medicine, not a trap. Bring your chaos out, give it a body, defeat it in the open, go home free.
Chronicle Art · The Break · 800 × 450The Break
For age after age the forge did what it was built to do. Player after player entered, faced their Chaos, and won or lost. Then one player refused to fight. They merged with their Chaos instead, and it consumed them, outgrew the forge, and turned against Ja'ak itself. The proving ground shattered into plates drifting through a dimensional void. Ja'ak fragmented into the terrain, where it remains. Reaching.
Chronicle Art · The Court Assembles · 800 × 450Across Worlds and Eras
The Nexum traveled the cosmos, finding the players who needed the forge most. An archive at the bottom of an ocean. A debris field where a dragon civilization used to be. A monument built around a grief. A dead road at the edge of a forgotten province. Each player who opened it and lost rose again on the board, and the wood carved another world into its record.
Chronicle Art · The First Age · 800 × 450The World Before
The world before it burned. Fractured but alive, the terrain still obeying the rules of the forge. Ja'ak's design held even in his breaking. Those who remember it do not speak of it freely. Armex keeps it the way survivors keep the name of what they lost, not to mourn it, but because to forget it would be to lose something they cannot get back.
Chronicle Art · The Last King · 800 × 450Entry · The Last King
He faced the thing built from everything he carried, and refused to let it define him. The game released him. He returned to a world that looked the same as when he left, which was its own kind of disorientation. The pieces remember him. Not fondly.
Chronicle Art · The Burning · 800 × 450Entry · The Burning
Trying to destroy the Nexum with stone, but the stone crumbled. So Jalen tried fire. He held the flame to the wood until the symbols blackened and the Nexum went still in his hands. He believed that was enough. The Nexum survived. What did not survive was the world inside it.
Chronicle Art · The Ashening · 800 × 450Eighty Years
The terrain charred. The sky closed over with ash. The pieces were given no warning and no explanation. One moment the world was what it was. The next it was on fire. They have been surviving in The Ashening ever since, waiting for the Nexum to open again and tell them why. Kravoka found it familiar. That disturbed the others more than the fire had.
Chronicle Art · The Attic · 800 × 450Record · The Resting Place
The Nexum has come to rest in the top room of a house a family just bought. It is only the latest place. It sits in the dust waiting, the way it has waited in every place before this one. Sooner or later, someone in the house will climb the stairs, find the strange carved thing in the corner, and be unable to leave it alone. That is how it has always worked. The room does not change. The Nexum simply waits for the next player to arrive.
Chronicle Art · The New King · 800 × 450Newest Entry · The New King
Her name is Piper. She's thirteen, and her family just bought the house. She climbed into the attic, found the Nexum, and opened it, and it pulled her in. She came through into a world scorched by a fire nobody had warned her about, the armor of the King on her shoulders and eight figures rising from the ash around her. She has not yet met The Chaos. The game is only beginning to understand what she's made of.
What comes next is not yet named. The pieces do not know it is coming. Neither does the King.
The Nexum Is Waiting
The Nexum travels the cosmos finding the players who need the forge most. When it finds you, you will know.
Meet Those Who Came Before