The Span

The Span

The Span was the region of the Riftmoor Arm's Middle Zone settled by the Wardens during the latter Second Age. It comprised approximately 150 star systems, each containing at least one world successfully terraformed by the Wardens. Most remained comparatively minor colonies, sanctuaries, resource worlds, or isolated settlements, while roughly thirty systems developed into major population centers, foremost among them Riftmoor and its home system, the Reach.

The Span represented the maximum extent of Warden civilization before the Vanishing. Its worlds were scattered rather than continuously occupied, with enormous stretches of unsettled space lying between its inhabited systems.

Knowledge of the Span survived into the Third Age, particularly among the earliest generations who still remembered Warden rule and interstellar travel. As the worlds remained isolated for millennia, however, knowledge became fragmented into histories, legends, religious traditions, and disputed accounts.

The Fourth Age began with mortal interstellar spaceflight and the physical reconnection of the Span. Its old worlds became reachable again, while explorers simultaneously began traveling beyond its ancient boundaries into regions of the galaxy the Wardens themselves had never settled.

That gives the ages a particularly clean spatial progression:

Second Age: the Wardens created the Span.
Third Age: the Span became 150 isolated worlds.
Fourth Age: mortals reconnected the Span and went beyond it.

And I like the distinction between the Reach and Riftmoor here. Riftmoor was the homeworld and greatest historical/political center; the Reach was one of the thirty major systems, containing Riftmoor and its neighboring terraformed worlds. That will matter enormously once Fourth Age people start thinking on the scale of systems rather than individual planets.