From a brochure published by Alset Technologies:
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The first form of teleportation that mortal mages managed to develop were the class of what we would consider blink spells, short-range movement rituals which didn’t appear to travel through the intervening space. These spells were expensive, usually limited to line of sight, and required expensive components from creatures who demonstrated instantaneous movement capabilities, such as phoenixes, warp hounds, unicorns, crevasse rats, and more. It was also dangerous if done incorrectly and very limited range, leaving it largely impractical outside of very niche circumstances.
Of course, it was no less practical than any other magic of the time, and the inherent mortal fascination with teleportation ensured that interest never truly died out, but it remained a niche way to traverse short distances for most of recorded history.
It wasn’t until Archartificer Bralin Aliar developed the first teleportation beacons that true Teleportation became a reality. This first form of beacon was incredibly limited, being wholly immobile and only capable of teleporting a caster from an elaborate teleportation platform (which the entire beacon was built around) to a second, equally elaborate beacon. It was only able to go in one direction, required two entire Convergences dedicated solely to its operation, and a modified blink-teleportation ritual that required nearly an hour of direct casting.
This platform had no safety enchantments, accidents were common, and they consumed truly fantastic amounts of resources to use, with a brazier burning phoenix ash, unicorn blood filling the ritual circle’s channels, and other incredibly rare and powerful components related to the selfsame creatures that had inspired the very first blink-type spells. Even then, a strong storm, extreme amounts of active magic, or even a single contaminant in the boundary wards could cause the entire ritual to fail, wasting the entire attempt.
It still revolutionized transportation, and no-doubt helped the Ethizarian Empire limp along for an extra century, with the incredible flexibility it provided when deploying Archmages for duty. Even with only four true teleportation stations, they quickly developed and expanded the technology. By the time of the Empire’s collapse, they’d gotten the ritual down to as little as a fifteen-minute cast and (through clever overlaying of the sending and receiving enchantments) a single teleportation station could be used as a destination or sending pad, though still to only a single other paired station.
After the final collapse, knowledge of the teleportation stations was lost for several centuries, until uncovered notes and further advancement in the field of artificery lead Arish El Kaia to develop a drastically simplified ritual. At the heart of this new design was a teleportation crystal that still relied on many of the selfsame innate teleporters that had been so integral to developments thus far. However, thanks to the then-new Eltimari Principle, this crystal was permanent, and even should it fall out of maintenance, it would retain its magical properties and drastically cut down the cost for each individual teleportation.
Furthermore, by consecrating the central crystal as a Roadstone, a spirit of the road was bound to the teleportation system, enabling them to, for the first time, utilize a single teleportation platform to truly enable travel to multiple locations. No longer were complicated chains of teleports required, nor endless pairs of teleportation platforms, so long as a location had a crystal, any other teleportation Nexus could use it as a destination. Naturally, the means of their creation was a closely guarded secret, and to this day the exact methods have not been fully duplicated, and traveling likewise required the agreement of the gate-spirit at both the arrival and destination Nexuses.
It similarly still required a modified blink-type spell to cast, but thanks to advancements in foci, it was possible for an archmage to travel anywhere within the Fractured Alliance in a single afternoon.
No substantial developments were made for a couple of centuries, until the Kas-Vital Anchor Principle was discovered. Originally researched as part of a failed branch of target-seeking combat spells, the ritual circle proved to be very compatible with the teleportation nexi. By extending the same principle utilized to teleport the active spellwork of the traveler’s modified blink, the Nexus teleported its own magical framework to a prepared location, enabling any properly-constructed Teleportation Circle to serve as the destination for a teleportation Nexus. This did roughly double the power strain on the Nexus, but with a new Nexus configuration created by the Bileri Family (the predecessors to the Transportation Guild) it was more than capable of handling the load.
This was, once again, a revolution in teleportation, as the anchor circle was, while not simple to create, was order of magnitude cheaper and easier to install, with maintenance costs slowly becoming feasible for smaller locations to afford. Even as destinations grew more numerous, however, teleportation was still quite a niche form of transportation, with the required ritual still quite complex even for experienced mages. Thus, it remained reserved in practice, and occasionally by law, infrastructure solely for nobility and royalty to use.
By the time Fizzalinit Ieshrilian developed the Anchor Reversal Principle, having a teleportation circle was an outright prerequisite for officially becoming a city. Once the Reversed Anchor teleportation circle was developed, having a robust teleportation hub, with multiple Circles in use, was all but required for any city that desired any level of freemage inhabitance, travel, or trade. The ritual required to utilize the teleportation Nexus was still quite complex, a spell so heavily modified from the original blink as to be almost unrecognizable, but with the Reverse Nexus, it first began to integrate divinatory components as well as the actual travel magic. With the divination, channeled through a compatible Circle, a nearby Nexus was signaled to send the entrance to the requested location, enabling the mage to teleport from a known Circle back to the Nexus, and from the Nexus out to any other Circle it was connected to, or another Nexus.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
With continued refinement of the Nexi and the Circle alike, it was only a few decades before Itzillin Xalistar managed to create a properly portable teleportation circle, enabling a mage to carry around a platform that they could place at any arbitrary location, instead of the formerly location-locked Circles that the nexuses required. Elziar Ttaxian took that concept one step further, distilling the Teleportation Circle into an arbitrary spell formula, only requiring the mage know a ritual to inscribe and charge the circle on any flat surface they may encounter.
The next obvious step was held back for a few decades by a simple power limitation imparted in large portion by the sheer numbers that teleport nexi were transporting at any given time, making their locales bustling metropolises no matter how traditionally inhospitable the Convergences they were built on would normally be. It was eventually solved by further refinements lead by the Transportation Guild, and enabled free teleportation between any two teleportation circles, provided one knew the appropriate directions to pass along to the Nexus for their direction, and assuming that the target circle was still in existence (that is, not a temporary departure circle, which was the one of the predominant modes of teleportation at that point).
A couple of decades later, Tross Kas lead a research team enabling individual nexi to cooperate to pass along a single teleport, creating a true teleportation network, as a teleport was no longer limited to within the range of a single Nexus or between nexi only.
After Illzian Kazador, working with the Transportation Guild, managed to refine the spellform teleportation to the point where a Teleportation Circle was only trivially required as an anchor for the actual spatial working, a new wave of artificers trying to push Teleportation to be fully portable, with need for nothing but a standard-sized focus to tap into the full network.
It was Treil Kazador and Albert Spears who eventually succeeded, with an orb a foot in diameter capable of sending a powerful enough divinatory flare to the nexus, and serve as an adequate framework for the teleportation spellwork. Within five years, it had been reduced to three inches in diameter, and over the following decades became a staple in every mage’s toolkit. It was, after all, around this time that the Arcanic Revolution was taking place, and the ability to freely teleport from anywhere at any time to nearly every city, town, and ritual site was a truly staggering development.
Less than twenty years later, a research team lead by Alia Kazador developed place beacon, which enabled trivial teleportation to functionally any place a mage had been previously. That same research team, this time led by Itzzillin Errasil, later developed what was then referred to as signal location, once again allowing an unparalleled amount of free travel.
It was around this time that Teleportation Networks installed the precursors to the modern safety systems, as freely-directed teleportation opened up the possibility of unsafe teleportation targets, and began to intentionally fail easier than they did previously. A malformed longstep could still result in the caster appearing within a solid object, but with the new safety regulations, a properly cast one was almost perfectly safe, with many ‘mortal tolerances’ programmed into the network and preventing appearing miles above the ground, deep underwater, or in the middle of a sandstorm.
During this golden age of development, Umbra Asena’s General Teleportation served a truly incredible role, combining no less than four spells: Signal beacon, to notify the Nexus of the caster’s existence and desire to travel, two separate spells indicating first the manner of identification they were using and the identification for their actual destination, and only then were they able to begin to cast the actual longstep (barely recognizable from the blink variant it once was) that would teleport them, though the network, to their destination.
Of course, this development was only made possible by Liarraza Kialamoor’s recent addition to the Nexus, enabling them to accept a new kind of identification, based on common identifiers. No more, was a city’s teleportation hub a string of magical impulses that a mage needed to perfectly convey to the Nexus, a simple will-based identification of the desired location was sufficient. Of course, this only worked with places that both the Nexus and the caster was familiar with, but it allowed Asena’s General Teleportation to default to this usually-superior mode of identification, cutting out half of the normally required steps. A much easier target for simplification.
Another new location protocol was introduced within a decade, meant to work with General Teleportation by, instead of providing an impression of the desired location to the Nexus, instead provide mathematical coordinates to the network, directing the mage through the network and to any point within the Nexus’ range, with startling precision. In time, this was even integrated with the Kialamoor Location System to allow for mathematical precision based on a freeform location, and integrations with more advanced scrying systems enabled a mage to safely identify if their target location was safe before teleporting, once again drastically lowering the number of accidents that happened during travel.
Finally, we reach the great Ixolai Alset himself, whose advanced translocation spell, utilizing modern spellframe techniques now enable true, proper teleportation utilizing nothing but an artifact. This brought teleportation to the relative masses, as no longer did a traveler need to know an actual spatial magic spell, but simply the divination half of General Teleport. This incorrectly-named (as it is not spatial magic in the slightest) Greater Teleport is capable of instantaneously moving anyone to anywhere within its network, by sheer virtue of putting all the actual transportation magic as a duty of the teleportation Nexus.
With the newly-developed Beacon Amulet, even that is no longer a requirement! All that is now needed for travel to anywhere within a teleportation network is simply the ability to activate an enchantment, a clear destination, and off you go, the Nexus taking care of everything else.