Ethergenesis

Era beginning/end

The defining event of modern history, the event that changed both the material plane and the inner planes around it forever. The creation of the Ethereal and Shadow planes by the mage Imbrir left a permanent scar on the face of Physica and lead to the devastation of the continent.

Ethergenesis started with a problem- It was difficult for people on the material plane to access the Outer Planes. The Outer Planes themselves were steeped in magic and powerful beings that were willing to bargain with mortals, but getting to them was incredibly dangerous or at least expensive. This was because of the Inner Planes- the elemental planes and the energy planes. There exists no way to access the Outer Planes without going through at least one of the Inner Planes, usually quite a long way through as well. All the planes had their drawbacks- the energy planes were intrinsically deadly to mortals; the plane of fire required expensive magic to cross without being burned to a cinder; the plane of earth was labyrinthine and prone to trapping people in caves; the plane of water required breathing apparatus for most people and the inhabitants were prone to piracy; and the only "safe" plane was that of air, but the Djinni rulers charged ruinous trade tariffs to cross their territory and any trip usually had to go through several. The mage Imbrir was commissioned by some surviving (and now admittedly incredibly wealthy) traders to find a safer way to access the Outer Planes. His solution was planar engineering on the most impossible scale- in a world with real gods his plan would not have worked, but creation was mutable on Physica and so he set to work. Imbrir created his "Mirror of Reality", a device that would swap sections of the positive and negative energy planes in order to create an area of effectively null energy that would be safe to cross. At the heart of his device was the Myst Condenser which drew in the Myst from miles around and compressed it into a solid block by squeezing it between two permanent walls of force. Even so it took more than a century to fully stock with enough power