Welcome.

Broken Horizon is an ongoing, expansive worldbuilding and writing project based on and expanding upon the world of Istaria: Chronicles of the Gifted, formerly known as Horizons: Empire of Istaria. This site serves as an official wiki/resource.

Istaria is a fantasy MMORPG from the early 2000s, originally developed by Artifact Entertainment and published by Atari. The game is currently owned and managed by Virtrium LLC.

Broken Horizon is a work of fanfiction and is not affiliated with the game itself. Knowledge of the source material is not required.

To learn more about the game visit the official links:
→ Istaria
→ Istaria Community
→ Istaria Discord

Broken Horizon and this site are created and maintained by me — MMarlowe, or Artayel/Haynes, or just Michael. I've been coming back to Istaria on the regular for over a decade at this point, and I've always loved delving into lore and overthinking things. BH was inevitable.

Around 2025 I've decided to actually put pen to paper and start developing my own take on the world and its characters. I'm treating this as a creative experiment in sticking to the canonical timeline as much as I can and working with it instead of bruteforcing changes for convenience's sake. Of course, things will change. Such is the nature of an AU.

Feedback, questions and critiques are welcome.

BH is written in a heavily customised Obsidian MD vault as my own, locally stored notes, then selectively exported to HTML via Webpage HTML Export by Nathan George.

The .css snippets I use are overwhelmingly frankensteined from a wide variety of posts and further modified. Coding is not one of my hobbies, but bashing my head against things until they work certainly is.