SOTC Full Lore & Story

Calendar of the World ('Eras of the World')

It is a substitute for the Common Era dating system used across most of the world. This is, or was, Mr. Ueda's way of denoting years in the Wanda universe, and it appears to be mostly equivalent to real life years, as far as I can tell. 'BWE' means 'Before World Era' and 'WE' means 'World Era'. It's the same as BC/AC.

'2500 BWE' -- The Great Catastrophe

A great catastrophe took place around this period, sweeping away most of the known world. It is not known what happened exactly, but it is written that this was a natural disaster. It wiped out most of mankind and reshaped the local topography, significantly altering the people's perception of their land. This population bottleneck reduced the spread of man upon the region from several million to nothing more than a few scattered pockets of nomadic survivors, which gradually banded together for the sake of survival.

Over the course of the years, the survivors, now consisting of dozens of thousands of people, began to scatter abroad. They split in half, with one half heading towards the northwest and the other towards the southeast, and so it was.

2400 BWE -- The Plain at the End

And it is written that it came to pass as the remaining half of the nomadic civilization journeyed southeastward, they came upon a plain in the land of Sinnar at the ends of the earth, and they colonized it and decided to stay there, making it their home.

There were giants in the earth in those days, and powerful men and women of renown among the nomads, and it happened that they encountered these beings in their explorations of Sinnar and were awestruck by the giants and their kind, who came to be known as the Colossi.

Being biologically immortal and varying in appearance to reflect their environment, it was said that these majestic beings were deities that embodied nature, and it came to pass that the mighty men and women of renown were outraged by the Colossi, for they considered them to be responsible for the great catastrophe that wiped out the known world. They rebelled and waged war against their kind, and called themselves the Dormin, meaning 'insurgent', for they were mighty hunters in the face of the gods.

Gathering their people and taking up weapons, they formed an army and slayed one of the colossi. Its blood spilled, marking the land, and its corpse became a hillock of young sprouts of grass, and they found that every new colossus whose blood they spilled gravitated towards the first, and so on, and the hill grew.

It is written in the storyboard that "They said; 'come and let us build a great monument from the corpses of the gods at the center of the land and make a name for ourselves, reaching the heavens, and we shall never again be led astray by the gods' catastrophes...", and it came to pass that very few giants were left in the land of Sinnar. The tower had become strong at their hands, and so they called it the Sky Tower, and built miniature versions of it across the land as a way of mocking the places where they'd felled the giants.

The Dormin were almost finished with their campaign against the Colossi, and it had passed that their bodies had deteriorated and become stripped of humanity from each of their kills, and it happened one day that it was not one of the gods whose fallen corpses gravitated towards the Sky Tower, but rather the Dormin insurgents themselves, who coalesced and merged into one another, forming a collective entity whose likeness was that of the Colossi they slaughtered, and so they came to believe that they had ascended into godhood by overthrowing the gods and taking their place, and thought that they could rule the land fairly, ensuring that the people were never again scattered by any catastrophes they judged to have come from the old gods.

Now, the people who had abstained from the slaughter had become plentiful and their number ranked in the millions. They were awestruck by this turn of events, and thus a great divide took place, with several clans who believed that the Dormin had ascended into godhood through their deeds, and others who deemed the entity and their likeness as cursed and possessed by the dead spirits of the innocent creatures they had slaughtered, and these were the clans of the ancients.

Each clan considered the other to be lethally at odds with their view of the subject matter, and it came to happen in the days of a brave elder, that the clans of the ancients divided from the ones who were in agreement with the Dormin and they all went out from the presence of the Sky Tower, building kingdoms and cities across the land, each after their own view.

2000 BWE -- The Dormin Wars

And it came to pass four hundred years later that the descendants of the clans serving the Dormin infringed upon the peaceful agreements of their ancestors and declared war with those who had been descended from the clans of the ancients, and their conflict was bloody, with thousands perishing all throughout.

Finally, the elders from the clans of the ancients, overcoming their enemies in the end, made the decision of using the runes and magics their ancestors had drawn from the Colossi in order to cast away the Dormin themselves, who had up until this point remained neutral and watched the conflict from afar, refusing to intervene in the matters of those who they now considered to be mere mortals.

Infuriated by their actions, the Dormin manifested and attempted to stop them, but the ancients gathered and used the ways of the giants to draw the Dormin's essence away from its vessel, rendering it powerless in the process, and it so came to happen that the power of the slain Colossi was split between twenty-four great idols, being attracted to both the statues erected by the peoples across the land and to the remaining Colossi, who had hid from the Dormin's wrath before its birth all those centuries ago, and corrupting them with the Dormin's matter.

With the power of the giants who ruled the land sealed away into these incarnated vessels and statues, it came to pass that the peoples deemed the land cursed by its bloody history of conflict and disrespect of the natural order, and so they sealed it away forever, building a great bridge to evacuate the people from the lands forever, and so it was.


This storyboard is dated July 6th, 2004. At the time, there were still 24 colossi.
This is the only storyboard which has been kept, and since the number of Colossi was reduced, there is a chance Mr. Ueda decided to rewrite the story, too. But I don't think it changed much.