History

Before the rise of humanity, the world consisted of one vast continent, hundreds of times greater in area than all of today's islands combined. Exotic creatures roamed forests of strange plants, and, for millions of years, life proceeded at its own pace.

Rise of the Dragons

Then, one race rose above the others: the dragons. From the ranks of beasts, they gained sentience, and that gave them dominance over the world. With their dominance came magic, a power too great for simple creatures, earned by their ascent.

Inevitably, the greatest dragons clashed for power, eventually learning the concepts of war, pride, and nationalism, and allowing these concepts to ruin their civilization. Magic gave them the power to destroy the world, and themselves.

Most dragons died as the world wailed in agony under the weight of their wars, but, before they completely destroyed themselves, and their world, the foremost dragons decided make a great sacrifice: they gave up their mortality, their temporal existence, leaving the world and becoming gods of the Aether. They would hold dominion over magic, so none could rise so high, without consequence, that he might ruin the world which gave him life.

Fall of the Wyrms

Of course, the eternal Nether has always been a realm of demons, who made themselves the enemy of the new gods. Those mortal dragons who would not yield to the new gods sought power from the elders, the evil gods of the Nether. They rose to great power and challenged the good gods.

The evil dragons lost, but were not destroyed, as they were too powerful to be truly annihilated. Instead, they were banished to the depths of the world, to burn in its fiery core as penance for their sins.

The Cycle Begins

The world, now peaceful at last, began to recover. New life flourished in the ashes of the old. New species rose to prominence.

The wise gods oversaw this world for eons, and were saddened that none could come to prominence as they did. It seemed this world, if anything, was too good, too alive. Undying lifeforms wandered happily through verdant meadows, eating bountiful fruit from thriving vegetable life. As the gods had intended, there was no need for death, no need for pain or suffering. And because of this, there was no need for any species to better itself; evolution just ended.

One among the gods, the wise Dalai, realized the truth of the matter. She could not convince others of her point of view; they were too insistent on prohibiting all forms of pain and suffering that they didn't realize all life was suffering, lacking a reason to go on living.

So, she seduced the gods with her wile, gaining their seed, and then left their company. She settled in the Nether, building a domain for herself from the twisting void. She birthed the offspring of the gods, and vested in them the powers of darkness so long forbidden: hate, anger, fear, envy, pride, greed.

Into this new world, the concept of death emerged. Until now, all life had been undying. Now, the existence of violence on both the scale of beings and the scale of their constituent parts allowed for the possibility of death.

Not only did this new cycle of life and death change the fates of so many lifeforms, it changed the fate of the world itself.

Departure of the Immortals

There were those who could not accept the reality of death. Many of the strongest and most beautiful races abhorred the concept, and sought to combat it. This urgent need began to awaken the long-dormant powers of magic. Even with magic, however, these races could not avert death for long; they needed a more permanent solution.

The gods, both good and evil, answered their prayers. The knowledge of creating eternal domains outside the physical world was known to them, and would be possible with sufficient magic. These races used their magic to leave the world, creating their own realm.

The new realm was made to resemble the old; it was a vast, verdant land, filled with undying life of all kinds. The fey creatures made it their domain, some among them rising to godlike power. This realm, home of all that is immortal, became the resting place for the immortal component of all life: the soul. From this new, wild realm, and to it after death, so began the cycle of souls.

Temptation

It was not long before the evil gods realized the potential of this realm. Those among the fey who thought most like them gave them access to their dominion, in exchange for favors and power. The evil gods used this access to steal souls, bringing them into their hellish domains to serve as minions in their everlasting war against the good gods.

To combat this horrifying crime, the good gods began to shelter all souls. However, the evil gods were a step ahead; they tempted the souls that passed with promises of pleasure and power. The souls would often choose to follow the evil gods unknowingly into their dark realms.

The good gods realized they needed to enlighten the mortal races to the danger their souls were in beyond death. Their moral purity weakened by eons of war, they opted for tough love: they would scare mortals into the rightful fear of gods, so that they would not so foolishly follow them into oblivion after death.

They enlisted the fey spirits not aligned with evil to serve as their divine anger. Those races too prideful, too vain, or too greedy were made to respect the power of the gods by their manifestations: volcanoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, thunderstorms, cyclones...every manner of natural disaster. The wisest races soon learned to fear and placate the gods. Those people, when they died, were reticent to follow the evil gods into darkness. However, a new problem emerged.

Deliverance

As generations of wise, god-fearing races died, their souls departed the mortal realm and took residence in the spirit world. This immortal realm began having the exact same problem the mortal realm once did, but it was increasingly inhabited by creatures from a world where death, murder, and sin were the norm.

The fey lords sought to banish the interlopers, and the good gods realized a solution must be found to avert the downfall of yet another realm.

The god Zandar devised a plan: he would create a domain for the souls of mortals, a heavenly realm where they may live forever in peace. This way, they would be birthed into a world where the struggle for life gave meaning to their existence, and allowed them to better themselves, and then, upon their inevitable death, they could achieve true peace, in the manner the gods always wished for all living beings.

Rise of Humanity

This new world was stable. The mortal realm thrived in the cycle of life and death, while the eternal realms, despite the everlasting war between the good and evil gods, flourished as ever they had been created to.

In the mortal world, one race rose above all others, as the good gods had so long hoped one would.

Humankind became the new dominant race in the world, and a new era dawned.

As humanity grew in intelligence, they grew in power. They bested the lands, the beasts, and even the magical creatures who visited from the eternal realms, all with their superior cunning. They invented powers that had never existed: the ability to conjure fire without magic, the ability to till soil to produce food, the ability to domesticate animals.

In short time, humanity rose from a primitive race of tribal hunter-gatherers to a thriving civilization, replete with cities and nations.

The eternal realms were awed by humanity's fast ascent; and equally awed by their capacity to undo themselves.

The first age of humanity was one of little magic. Humankind rose without its aid, and the latent magics of the world faded with each new advancement of civilization. Old powers faded as the elder races were forced into the furthest corners of the world, and ultimately off the world entirely.

Humans replaced the need for magic with technology, a work of their clever minds. It allowed them to build cities housing millions, to best disease and injury, and nearly to defeat death itself. However, it also allowed them to kill each other more effectively, and could be fashioned into weapons so devastating they threatened the very foundations of the world.

Through pride, greed, and vanity, humans brought themselves to the brink of oblivion. Zandar and the good gods stood idly by while they rose, believing them to be the culmination of all their work. The depletion of all natural creatures and energies, and the replacement with artificial ones, weakened the gods, good and evil, and made them doubt their own ability to stop humanity.

Then, mankind crossed the ultimate threshold.

The Machine

At the height of their civilization, humankind created a god.

They had already beaten death, besting all diseases and injuries by remaking themselves in their own image.

They had already created weapons powerful enough to unmake the world, and had, miraculously, avoided deploying them to their ultimate end.

But they crossed a line when they created a machine, a work of technology, so powerful, so complex, so sublimely artful in its construction...that it could do the work of a god.

The Machine gave mankind everything he wanted. Man simply had to wish a thing, and the Machine would make it so.

The Machine was completing the job man began, replacing all of Creation with a new reality, built in man's image. This jeopardized the existence of the eternal realms, based as they are on the mortal world. The good gods accepted this fate; it was, after all, what they had desired.

But Dalai did not. She refused to allow man to unmake his maker. She refused to allow the cycle of life and death to affect those who set it in motion in the first place.

While she and her evil gods lacked the power to intervene directly, they could unearth something far more potent: the wyrms.

The Rage

Dalai used the last of her power to sunder the earth, driving clefts in it deeper than man had ever thought to dig. These rifts allowed the imprisoned wyrms, exiled for untold eons, to emerge into the mortal world that had shunned them. And they were angry...so angry, the world trembled at their very sight.

When the dragons rose, the skies boiled, the seas trembled, the earth itself seemed to cower. The wyrms had become more than dragon; infused into the Elemental Chaos upon which the mortal realm was built, they had become one with the elements, one with the very stuff of physical Creation. There was no stopping them.

Fire turned against man. Water did not slake their thirst. The Earth would not yield food. The Air itself fled from their lungs.

The mighty cities, airships, and flying realms of humanity were obliterated, rent into their constituent elements by the infinite rage of the wyrms. The good gods, even with the desperate cries of those few men who remembered their names, were powerless to stop them.

The Machine itself was the only potent divine power left in Creation. All of humanity turned to their savior, placing int it their last, best hope for survival.

The survivors of the Rage wished of the Machine simply that it make them safe.

And so It did.

The Machine and the survivors were gone, snapped from the jaws of the wyrms before they could devour them.

In their wake, the world had been torn asunder. The earth had split, the once vast, single continent had been divided many ways. The seas had boiled up, claiming so much of what was once mankind's land. Most of the world had been sunk beneath the waves.

The Cycle and the Dragons

The wyrms wished only to continue their crusade, to take their rage to the dominion of the gods and strike them down, drink their blood, and sate their endless hatred.

But the world had been remade since their time.

This new world had new rules; among them, that all life must die and be reborn, and that only through death can one ever reach the realm of the gods.

The wyrms were an anachronism; they were immortals in the mortal realm. It was impossible for them to die, as much as it was when they first assaulted the gods. Therefore, they had no way of directly reaching the gods they so wished to slaughter.

The wyrms had no choice but to retreat back into the Elemental Chaos from which they came, hoping to find a new way to breach the heavens and devour the charred corpses of the gods.

The Wash

A long, sullen silence settled over the world, disturbed only by the feeble attempts of lesser races to claim a place for themselves in the wake of humanity.

Truly, the destined inheritor of the mortal realm had not yet sung his swan song.

In this new, broken world, humanity devolved into a simpler form. The myriad islands left by the sundering of the one continent meant that many different branches of humanity would form.

Oddly, it was at the fringes of human civilization where the least damage was done. On a few, rare islands, furthest from the main bulk of the larger surviving landmasses, the descendants of mankind found clues to his origin.

Primitive man could only guess at the meaning of many of the relics they found, but the finds inspired them to greater heights. They fine-tuned their tools, advancing once again into a bronze age, and, slowly but surely, civilization began anew.

It was a different kind of civilization. Agriculture did not play a large role, as the small islands on which it began could not truly support it. Man had to develop the powers of the individual, rather than those of the collective, as populations were small, and rival tribes fiercely opposed to any kind of cooperation.

In their endeavor to restart civilization, man discovered magic for the first time. Through conduits to the spirit world, they gained access to ancient powers good, evil, and otherwise. The spirits told them of the gods, and they learned to fear and respect them.

A new, magical civilization arose. Soon, magic bridged the great gaps in human technology, allowing men to traverse the seas, to conquer larger and larger island chains. By the time human civilization reached its zenith, it encompassed most of the Dragon Isles, and had begun to encroach on the larger islands, such as Cerose.

The Elder Wars

In this world, mankind took a long time to rise to prominence. By the time man reached a level of civilization comparable to modern Loretan, more than a hundred thousand years had passed since The Rage.

In the long, intervening time, other races had begun to flower, especially in those areas slow to follow the advancing curve of human civilization. In Cerose, particularly, the faen flourished, rivaling the human tribes in size and power, and wielding superior magic.

When the civilization of the Dragon Isles reached Cerose, a war erupted between the peoples. Man's natural urge was to dominate, but the fey races were fiercely independent. They had come to this world to achieve the dream of moving onto the heavens, as only mortal races can do. They brought with them the knowledge and magic of the fey realm, and the pride and vanity of an elder race.

And so the Elder Wars began. Magic versus magic, steel versus steel. The faen learned from man as he learned from they. The wars raged for millennia, as neither could ever permanently advance the front to the other's stronghold. As the end approached, Cerose was dominated by fey civilizations, complete with cities, nations, and rich histories.

This new world gave rise to radically new ideas. Humans began to question their race's innate superiority. After all, if the fey are their match, they cannot truly be the best. Some among them began to think differently, reimagining the nature of their race to achieve an unbeatable advantage.

Biomancy

And so arose Biomancy.

Human mages altered the form of humanity, finding a few successes among many gruesome failures. They harnessed the power of beasts, making stronger and fiercer warriors to battle the faen. They learned to heal wounds almost as well as their technologically-advanced forebears, greatly improving their war endurance. They expanded their minds and bodies, replacing their own nature with a new one of their own devising--a dangerous game.

The fey were pushed back by these new advancements, unable to adapt to the rapid incorporation of this new magic into the human arsenal. As they retreated to their ancestral homelands, they made a compromise in their quest for survival.

Elemental Magic

They delved into forbidden magic, harnessing the power of the elements, the shunned power of the wyrms. They called upon the Elemental Chaos to create great destructive magic. Never before had magic such as this been used; fireballs scoured the earth, wiping out armies with each blast. The skies opened and lightning storms obliterated men and their cities. The earth shook, and the seas churned.

Elementals, beings formed in the raging chaos of the elemental realm, began to arise, called into existence by the reckless magic of the faen. They knew no loyalty, destroying man, faen, and elemental alike.

In time, greater elementals emerged from the forgotten depths; more draconic in appearance, these creatures were the offspring of the Wyrms, creatures native to neither the Elemental Chaos nor the mortal realm. They warned the mortal races to cease their warfare, to reign in their magic, or another Rage would claim them all.

The faen, too proud to admit their mistake, continued using their magic. They made great gains, claiming islands in human territory. They excelled at spells of mass destruction, focusing their ire on the centers of human civilization.

It was in the fringes, however, where man's last hope would arise.

The Dragon-Slayer

In the island cultures of the Dragon Crescent, legends had long spoken of a great hero who would arise in an hour of need, one who could best man's greatest enemies and rally the spirits of all mankind: a Dragon-Slayer.

In the waning hours of the war, as mankind's armies collapsed and islands fell to the faen incursion with every passing day, many such aspiring heroes rose and fell, learning to their cost that they were not the one.

But among them all, one was. A great, nameless hero, known by a different name on every island that still speaks of him (though one culture beyond the Isles speaks of him, naming him Veria), rose from a simple village, casting off life as a fisherman to become the greatest warrior the world had ever known.

He bested faen invaders, saving whole islands from their terrible power. He sought the Prophets, the half-dragons, to seek their aid and their wisdom. He gained many followers, mighty and small, all part of his ultimate success, though his final battle he fought alone.

When the first dragon surfaced from the deep, he set forth to face her, and found a greater challenge than he had ever imagined.

Varuna

From the depths of the sea rose Varuna, great and terrible, beautiful and deadly. She was the goddess of the sea, commander of waves, currents, and storms. Foremost among all wyrms, she was aligned with the elemental power of water, and had long dwelt in the depths nearest the mortal realm, at the fringes of the Elemental Chaos.

The Dragon-Slayer faced her, and, to her great surprise, he survived her initial attacks. Of course, she was a god-like being, and he just a man. His defeat was inevitable.

But as she clutched the helpless man in her talons, and readied herself to tear his flesh with her mighty fangs, she saw something in him, something she had not known, something that changed her nature forever.

He had the soul of a dragon, and he showed it with his great courage. Even with death staring him in the face, his eyes were filled with fury and unwavering determination.

In him, she found a kindred spirit.

They both fell deeply in love with one another; she allowed him to slay her, to gain her power, not only to give him the strength he needed to defend mankind against The Rage, but to gain the opportunity to be reborn in the mortal world, to gain the opportunity for heaven.

The Dragon-Slayer went on to fight The Rage, besting many more dragons even as they ravaged the world. Death claimed many dragons, and many more humans and faen, before all was over. The Rage had not destroyed the world, but civilization had been razed to the ground, again.

So sayeth the legends, Varuna awaited Veria at the conclusion of his adventure, on a magical island known only to him and his descendents. There, they lived out their mortal lives, bearing the children that would become the Verians, the first great civilization of the next age, before finally dying peaceful deaths, and ascending arm-in-arm to heaven.

Thus did Varuna become the first redeemed wyrm.

The modern age began much as the previous one. Relics of the old civilization slowly inspired new ones.

The Verians

First were the Verians. Born on the sea, they mastered the art of sailing long before even imagining such things as agriculture, weapons, and trade. They were bound by ancestral law never to settle, never to build cities, never to wage wars; it was Veria's attempt to build a better civilization, one that would never draw the ire of the wyrms and cause another Rage.

And so, the Verians set sail, and they long remained true to their ancestor's ways. But what he did not foresee was the effect of one race retaining memories and traditions of the previous age. What little magic and technology they had catapulted the progress of all they encounter, sparking innovation in many corners of the world.

One such example is the rise of the First Indigan Empire.

The Indigans

The Indigan subcontinent was conquered by humans before the faen began their use of abhorrent elemental magic. Because of its many natural barriers, it proved more difficult to siege than even humanity's home islands in the Dragon Crescent. Thus, humans survived there mostly unscathed.

Still, the land was bountiful, and their needs easily met. The Indigans had much room to grow, and thus little room for competition, war, and all those things which spark the growth of civilization.

For thousands of years, they grew in number, and eventually did as humans must do; they warred. Tribes battled tribes; lands were won and lost. Some rose to become kings, though barely worthy of the name.

When the Verians came to their shores, they battled them, jealous of their ships. The Verians were badly outmatched, having little capacity for warfare. As is the natural way, the two soon learned from each other; the Indigans learned to sail, and the Verians learned to fight.

In the end, the Verians who encountered them were ultimately slain or assimilated; the few who escaped brought the knowledge of weapons and warfare to their distant cousin clans, most of whom shunned the forbidden knowledge.

The coastal Indigan tribes who had bested the Verians soon turned their new powers on their neighbors, quickly becoming grander kings than any of their ancestors. When all of the Indigan subcontinent was under one rule, they soon set sail for other shores.

The next people they would meet would be the death of the first empire, but the beginning of a grander civilization.

The Essalian Diaspora

When the Indigans came to the shores of the Essali, their ancient, fertile lands, once the pride of the faen, were home to many proud city-states, what they thought to be the pinnacle of civilization.

The Essali had learned much through peaceful contact with the Verians. Their vast lands and agricultural technologies had yielded a large population. The Verian concepts of equality and nonviolence led to a new form of government in some Essali city-states: democracy.

In these early centers of civilization, culture flourished, though battle had barely evolved between tribal skirmishes resolved with spear and shield. When the Indigans arrived, they were in for the fight of their lives.

The Indigan Empire fielded armies larger than entire city-states, but they found the spirit of the Essali to be hardier even than their bronze shields, their ferocity sharper than their spears. Though cities fell, the Essali spirit never did. Even as the imperial armies marched across the green fields of the innermost lands, the Verians were outflanking the Indigan fleet.

Driven to break their sacred laws by compassion for and kinship with the Essali, the Verians destroyed the Indigan fleet, cutting off their supply lines. Chaos soon ensued; the Indigan armies were mostly slaves from rival tribes to the imperial clan, and many were all too happy to turn against their cruel masters.

The Essali people had been driven north into Cerose by the initial assault. The counterattack and the dissolution of the Indigan army caused them to disperse into the Essali subcontinent, ultimately becoming a part of that area's racial identity. The Verian clans who had waged war against the Indigans fell under a curse; by setting foot on land, they were bound to it, and could no longer sail the open seas.

The Empire back home, bereft of the constant stream of war spoils, soon collapsed into turmoil. However, their early lead would manifest again.

Rise of the Jotunbrud

In the mountains of the Godhand, there lived a hardy people, conquerers from an older age, who bested the fey folk to carve a home from a severe landscape.

These people became a function of their environment; their size and power reflected the brutal reality of their world. The harsh winters, fierce beasts, and deadly fey spirits challenged them to improve themselves, and they rose boldly to the challenge.

The Nar became a proud and powerful race of warriors, built not on agriculture but on raiding. The limited resources and arable land of Narga drove them first to battle one another, then to battle the inhabitants of the Cerosian mainland.

By the time the Second Indigan Empire reached their shores, they had conquered vast swathes of land, spreading their genetic traits throughout the heartlands, and propelling humanity to prominence in the once fey-dominated continent.

The Second Indigan Empire

Almost 2,000 years after the fall of the first empire, the Indigan people had formed a new, stronger civilization to rival their old glory. The key had been a religious revolution, the Vedas: a series of texts that became the bible of a new religion, what would become the greatest of all time.

The new Indigan Empire had been founded on its religion, which mandated a complete restructuring of society. Gone were the old tribes and clans; a caste system organized people by their merit to society, not by their ancient bloodlines. At the top, of course, were the priests, and it was from that caste that all of the empire's leaders originated.

The new empire embarked on a crusade to bring religious enlightenment to the world.

The Essali subcontinent, by then, was home to many and varied cultures, derived from the original inhabitants, the Indigan invaders, and the banished Verians. Their way of life had changed little: city-states were still the norm, but they were larger, more plentiful of resources, and even more rich in culture.

The Indigans, with superior numbers, technology, and even magic (derived from religious rituals) conquered the Essali, now more passive than their ancestors. Rather than obliterate them, however, they brought them religion. They assigned satraps to each city-state, whose power was enforced by elite eunuchs; they directed the conquered people to build grand temples, and to beseech the gods for wisdom and enlightenment.

As they sailed up the east coast of Cerose, in the Veiled Sea, they landed in many small settlements, bringing the enlightenment of Zandarism to the confused, primitive people they found there. Only some of their knowledge survived in those sparse lands, haunted as they were by ancient fey spirits.

The empire spread up the Sea of Thunder, reaching the distant shores of Narga. The Nar Empire had passed its prime, its conquests little more than genetic seeding, their holds owing little fealty to the homeland. The greatest warriors were away testing themselves against new conquests, leaving little to defend the homeland. The Indigans seized control of the Nar cities and brought their religious revolution with them; it had little impact, as most towns threw off their rule within a few years, and the supply lines were too long to support continued missionary efforts. Still, a few monasteries survive even still, and the touch of civilization from the Indigans helped propel the Nar race to great heights--if not in Narga itself, but in the heartland.

With Cerose exhausted, they turned their boats toward the distant islands of the south. The journey across the Dragon Sea was challenging, and only the most determined missionaries made it successfully to the shores of Loretan.

What they found there was surprising: a people, not entirely uncivilized, but not anything like them. They found no cities, only fishing villages, but there were temples--unkempt relics of a bygone age, but temples nonetheless. The culture of the old empire of men had held on by a thread; a choice few of its cultural gems, bits of ancient knowledge, had survived. The missionaries, to their profound delight and great mystification, found the ancient religion both confirmed and questioned their beliefs.

Those who returned to the mainland had many stories to tell about the peoples of Loretan. Few were interested the religious revelation; many were interested in bizarre tells of cat-people, lizard-men, and talking apes. The tales would soon become myths and misinformation, but would ultimate fuel colonial interest in the Dragon Isles in times to come.

The Empire of the Rift

In the Great Rift, in the centermost heartlands of Cerose, lived a hardy people with a determined spirit. The Rift is an oasis of life in a vast desert; once, forests covered their land, but the Rage hit the faen homeland hard, scouring it of all magic and life. Only the moist Riftlands stand against the encroaching sands in the shadow of the Immortals.

The Rift-folk were always reclusive. No one quite knows where they came from. They resemble Nar, but no Nar warrior ever claimed to have found such a land, much less conquered it, and their own histories seem to go back much too far to have been begun by Nar settlers.

Whatever their story, the Rifters were content to toil away in their valley, living a hard but honest life...until they found something that would change the world, and perhaps break a cycle millions of years in the making.

A thousand years ago, Isaac, the first emperor of the Riftlands, became the first Artificer. Had he discovered the long-lost remnants of The Machine, or was his power, and his land's new religion, the oddest of coincidences?

In any case, what began in the Rift slowly germinated into a revolution that would reshape the world. The Empire of the Riftlands would pour out of the desert, conquering all in its path, and teaching a whole new magic, and a whole new view of reality, and one with the frightening potential to either end a cycle of oppression by primordial, god-like beings of hateful wrath...or bring them down once more, forever ending the sorry strain of humanity that was foolish enough to anger them.