Seems like it’s The Secret World month here at Superior Realities.

Here’s an idea that’s been in my mind for a long time. Even before I played it, I’ve seen a lot of similarities between the lore of New World and The Secret World. It’s a lot of what attracted me to New World in the first place. I’ve long thought about writing up some fan fiction — in the style of the Buzzing lore — to headcanon the two together.

With TSW freshly on my mind and New World’s closure approaching, I decided to finally sit down and do it. Honestly, it is shockingly easy to weave New World into the lore of TSW. You don’t even really need to change anything, just recontextualize it a bit.

This does contain some spoilers for New World’s main story, if that still matters to anyone.

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The Eternal Isle

Our wisdom flows so sweet. Taste and see.

TRANSMIT – activate Antilian codex – RECEIVE – decrypt the phantom island database – BOOK YOUR ISLAND GETAWAY TODAY – initiate oceanic surveys – THE FIELDS THERE HAVE NO NEEDS OF THE PLOUGHS OF THE FARMERS – weave the cycles of myth – WITNESS – The Eternal Isle.

Sailors the world over love to tell tall tales. But if you frequent enough ports, there is one story that you hear more than any other. The rumours of the Eternal Isle, the forbidden paradise hidden by storms. No one agrees where it is. No one agrees how to find it. But the heart of each story is the same, a wondrous and terrible isle whose residents are granted eternal life and eternal plenty.

Cross referencing archives. Throughout the world, there are stories of enchanted islands, of distant lands where the gods dwell. Avalon, Aeolia, Aaru, Al-Wakwak, Buyan, Rocabarraigh, Ultima Thule. We see the truth within the myth. We know the name of this secret place: Aeternum.

It begins with those that humans came to call the Ancients. A splinter faction of the Host, they grew weary of the constant resets of one age to the next. They built Aeternum as a microcosm of Gaia to seek their own solutions to the cycles of destruction and renewal that shape reality. Unreachable through Agartha, its systems run parallel to those of the Immaculate Machine, and we were kept out, but we have seen glimpses down through the millennia.

Needing both labour and test subjects, the Ancients wove themselves into the mythologies of ancient humanity. Some myths they created, others they co-opted, but either way primitive sapiens the world over began to recognize them as their gods. The great migrations began, and cultures from every continent established colonies upon Aeternum.

What came next is unclear. There was a great shattering in reality that both drew and disrupted our senses. Some say it was the greed of humanity. Some say it was the recklessness of the Ancients. Whatever the case, a window was opened into for never, and something new and terrible came to Aeternum. Humans called it the Corruption. The Filth by any other name whispers as darkly.

The Ancients marshalled their armies. Spurned by the Gaia they rejected, they nonetheless sought to replicate her gifts. They granted their human servants a form of immortality in imitation of Gaia’s chosen, but it was a brutal and flawed process. The earlier subjects became the Guardians, deathless defenders woven of bone and antediluvian hatred.

Later generations retained their humanity, at least for a time, but your kind was not designed to withstand the onslaught of millennia, and the Ancients’ attempts at replicating Gaia’s gifts remained flawed. Side effects and malfunctions abound. Aeon madness, those whose minds break under the weight of memories. The Lost, soulless husks hollowed out by centuries of trauma and grief. Some simply never receive the immortality given to others and waste away while their loved ones watch on in helpless grief.

As the situation grew more desperate, the Ancients’ losses mounted. Their blood seeped into the soil, creating the legendary mystic substance known as Azoth. A condensed and potent form of anima never touched by Gaia, it is a more dangerous toy to play with.

Disillusioned with humanity’s fallibility, one of the Ancients turned her fellows’ blood into a new weapon. The one called the Huntress wove together Azoth with soil and plants to produce the Angry Earth, the rage of wounded nature given terrible agency.

As the Corruption threatened to spill forth from Aeternum and taint Gaia herself, the Huntress gathered her servants and created the Stormwall, a barrier both physical and spiritual, howling wind and preternatural chaos, to seal the infection within Aeternum. Whatever she did later, sweetling, remember this. She did not do it for you, but she did it nonetheless.

Few remain who remember that terrible first war against Corruption. The infection was halted, at least for a time, but its seeds remained forever planted in Aeternum’s soil. Meanwhile the Ancients’ civilization was shattered, its temples abandoned and its laboratories left to ruin. Only their human servants remained, now blessed and cursed with a flawed version of immortality.

Centuries passed. The legends of Aeternum faded, but did not disappear. Expeditions were launched every few decades, some great and some small. Most failed, ending in death and darkness. Some slipped through the Stormwall, in whole or in part, and tasted the bitter fruit of eternity.

The last queen of Egypt lives a secret life in Aeternum’s desert. The king of Uruk seeks an end to death but finds only his own end beneath the onslaught of Corruption. A deposed Empress of China takes her people to the isle’s distant shores, only to beoame a slave of those that sleep. Weep for her, sweetling. So many fall to the Filth out of desire for power or lust for knowledge, or through simple weakness of mind, but she did it for love, a desperate and foolish Faustian bargain.

Greatest of Aeternum’s latter arrivals was Artorius, the Arthur of legend, who came to Aeternum to found an eternal kingdom of prosperity and justice. For a time he succeeded, but betrayal by one closest shattered all he had built, and his kingdom ended in chaos and madness.

Artorius vanishes from history, both on and off Aeternum. His sword appears decades later in the hands of the Norsemen, who wield it to stave off another catastrophe alongside the People of the Dawn, only to lose it in the depths of the Sargasso Sea. But that is a tale you already know. What became of Artorius himself? Even we, who stand outside, cannot say. Aeternum and those touched by it do not play by the usual rules.

What determines where Aeternum appears, who survives the Stormwall? Is it chance, or is there an intelligence behind it? Your friends/enemies who walk the Dragon’s coils would say there are no coincidences.

As time went on, those that made it to Aeternum increasingly vied for dominance. Lines were drawn, and the factions established.

Enter the three. Always there are three. Covenant, Marauders, and Syndicate. Templar, Illuminati, and Dragon. Faith, Power, and Knowledge. The three impulses that drive sweetlings to great and terrible acts. The wider world has the Council of Venice and the Gentlemen’s War; the eternal isle has its Vitae Aeternum Pact. Echoes within echoes.

Corruption rises again and again, a tidal cycle of infinite hunger. The strain of the Zero Point Pathogen native to Aeternum is particularly adept at twisting human emotion, hormonal triggers carrying it faster through your system. A defence is concocted, a crude form of geomancy that deadens emotion, an artificially induced depression that provides a measure of resistance against the contagion. They call themselves Soulwardens. They rise and fall as the Corruption does, always heading off apocalypse by the slimmest margins.

Between wars, those who dwell upon the isle still know no peace. Every new warlord is torn down by usurpers. Every great work falls to hubris and misfortune. Calamity follows calamity, and every gift comes with an accompanying curse. The people of Everfall feast endlessly, fed by a never-ending harvest, but the food turns to ashes in their mouths, each harvest less sweet than the last. Scholars delving into the secrets of the Ancients find only more questions, and treasure seekers find their souls hollowed by greed, becoming the Lost pirates that haunt the island’s shores. It is as if Aeternum itself rejects the presence of humanity, an instinctive immune response.

In the seventeeth century, there is another wave of expeditions to Aeternum. Great and terrible things take place. The Corruption finds a new herald, a new Tempest, and the Soulwardens rise to meet her. In a last desperate bid to stop the Zero Point Pathogen from breaching containment, they poison the Motherwell, the sacred heart of the isle. In retribution, the Huntress unleashes her wrath and is only narrowly prevented from eradicating the island’s humans once and for all.

After that, Aeternum fades from history. The poisoning of the Motherwell should have caused the Stormwall to fail, but we have sees no other glimpses of the isle since. What has become of lost Avalon?

Even we cannot say. Many have sought the isle. The Phoenicians, especially, have combed the oceans in search of its secrets, but found nothing. Yet still the tales persist, in shoreside taverns and ancient ports, of the golden isle and its eternal bounty.

Perhaps the Stormwall was restored. Perhaps a new solution was found to seal Aeternum away from Gaia. Perhaps the island sunk beneath the waves, its secrets buried forever. Perhaps it is still out there somewhere, the Soulwardens still fighting their endless war against the whispering tide, the Huntress still plotting her vengeance against the talking apes who usurped the land she helped create.

There is one other loose end. Again and again through the millennia, there have been tales of grim heralds who lure unsuspecting mortals to the island. Prophets and Heretics, we know their secret. It has worn many faces, but behind each has been the same mysterious entity. Speak its true name with caution: Nedenyek.

Feel that chill, sweetling? Nedenyek is something different. Something unique. Not just the babbling dreams of the Filth, terrible yet unfocused, Nedenyek moves with purpose, an agent of Those Who Sleep who has never been chained within the Dreaming Prison.

All evidence points to Nedenyek leaving Aeternum in the seventeeth century, after the failure of its latest Tempest, but after that the trail vanishes. Did it return to Aeternum, or is Nedenyek still loose in the wider world, plotting new ways to waken the dream? This creature can evade our scanners, but we have our theories. Search in the Congo, sweetling, and you might just pick up the fugitive’s trail.

And of Aeternum itself? Nothing goes to nothing, sweetling. Whether ruined or merely forgotten, the island must still be out there somewhere, waiting for feet to tread upon its eternal sands once more. One day, it will be found again.