The creative force that was Leur brought into being many marvelous things, but to their Mind the foremost was the one they called the Creation. It was designed to sustain the highest expressions of all their gifts — color and music / Time and life — and they loved it such that they decided to inhabit it and enjoy the beauty and surprises of their work.
Leur infused the Creation with landscapes, elements, and systems to sustain living things, and the ability to self-create, which led to many timelines and eventually to intelligent life. This delighted them. Some Leur chose to fashion for themselves physical forms to live among these intelligent new creations and experience life in those forms.
The lifeform of humans in one timeline created the Aryati to be stronger and of greater intelligence. The Aryati, however, thought other humans inferior and killed or enslaved much of the rest of humanity before an uneasy peace could be reached. Leur found the Aryati disturbing but were enamored of the advances their Creation was making: the Aryati had harnessed great energies and achieved advanced technology (a type of creation Leur found uncomfortable but fascinating). Before long, the Aryati detected the presence of the dimensionally anomalous Leur habitat and made contact with its inhabitants.
In a period of cooperation between Leur and the Aryati, Leur gifted the Creation with Five eternal Cities — one for Leur and four for the Aryati. They showed the Aryati the secrets of meta-Time (the existence of the Creation’s temporal planes and manifold pasts) and how to visit these. To sustain the Aryati civilization they shaped living energy cores powered by star matter into the arrays of a Creation-spanning device called the Rill.
Aryati expansion eventually led to the Creation being discovered by a malignant god: Vllyr. Though Vllyr was slain and dismantled, the Aryati concealed and smuggled a jewel from the god's oculus back to their capital, the eternal City of Mulsor, to become part of the Diadem of the Devaryati, their ruler.
Influenced by the Diadem, which contained a piece of the slain (but immortal and therefore not dead) god, the Aryati wagged war on each other and in a cataclysmic series of attacks ruptured the energy cores of Mulsor and other cities. The unleashed energy from the eternal City triggered a blast so massive it vaporized most living things and shattered the shell of the Creation, leading to its imminent destruction.
Rather than lose the Creation completely, Leur sacrificed most of its vast omnificence. As one Mind, they separated the Creation in Time: the Creation’s Past (including all its meta-pasts) was archived; the moment of destruction was isolated into its own Time/Present; and the damaged Creation was healed enough to continue.
The damaged corpus — known as the Second Creation — was salvaged but not completely intact. Though healed enough to sustain life, its land masses are altered and the single continent is walled to the east by a spine of mountains and glaciers; what is on the other side is unknown. The Second Creation’s western seas are bounded and cannot be circumnavigated; none know if there are seas, or anything, beyond the barrier. Though Life thrives on the portion of the Second Creation that is visible, wounds from the Devastation remain. Signs of this incomplete healing are the Rifts that occur at known locations. Occasionally animals, objects, or people cross between the First Creation (and its manifold pasts) and the Second Creation.
Two well-known examples of Rift crossings are the Kheld Invasion, when a large horde of refugees from one Archived Past entered Tahlwent through the Bogs. More recently, the Malyrdeon princess Ariande fled by ship and was caught in the Stauberg Rift, which delivered her to a completely different Archived Past in which she conceived and gave birth to Marc Frederick… who was later brought to the Second Creation by the Wall.
The moment of Devastation itself, isolated in the Stasis called Gsch, is barricaded by temporal lattices known as Daln Barriers and cannot be reached.
One consequence of the Devastation is that while Time was separated for THE CREATION, that sundering did not occur in the Aryati colonies… they simply could never find their home world again. It was forever removed from their Time. The First Creation and its pasts were temporally severed and, though they occupied the same space as ever, became inaccessible; the Second Creation continued to exist in that space… but is temporally removed from the original timelines forever by the few seconds of missing Devastation—
— which is where the Aryati are. For them the Creation is gone, destroyed… but the worlds they themselves founded remain.
[Author note: This is where I get to state definitively that the Aryati are in no way connected to OUR timeline. They are not future us. Neither are the Khelds a tribe from our past; they -- like the Aryati -- are from a totally separate First Creation timeline (and not the same one). The only timeline in the series that IS our timeline... Marc Frederick's. Yep. He is one of us. Sort of. Half, anyway... on his father's side.]