Chapter 0: Prelude

[A short walk through the history of the world.]

Kiria was once a land of untold beauty, with vastly magnificent skies, vibrant cerulean oceans, and bountiful green forests. From a lone seed of infinite light, the world was born and began forming and changing. Along with the birth of the world was the birth of the serpent god Grudia. As the world grew, Grudia began adding new things, such as trees, water, and life – a few small creatures here and there at first, then more and bigger ones until Kiria was abuzz with life. Grudia greatly loved three of these species it had created and granted them the knowledge and powers of Essence: the naturally-occurring energy that most beings could sense, exude, and manipulate.

The Hjina, known to some as Humanity, were the first intelligent creatures, and were widely spread and creative in their given environments. They created systems of governing, coinage, and powerful societies that challenged each other.

The Retura, humanoids with the visage of Kiria’s beasts, held charisma and scientific curiosity that helped them understand the planet and planes that made up Kiria – they designed maps and timetables, mathematics and science, languages, and the various names of fauna, flora, fungi, and abiotic materials that Grudia had presented them.

The Mysteians, humanoids possessing growths made of crystallized Essence, were much more mysterious – they hid away from the world to study Essence itself, and became the forerunners of biological, chemical, and Essence sciences, including maztech: technology stemming from and enhanced by magic.

The gods that came about as Grudia made the world took their own ideas and added to Kiria as they saw fit, adding more intelligent species, the elements of Essence, and weather and geography. Even when darkness came about – in the form of the Shadow of the World, Uruhsatt – the creations of the gods fought valiantly to protect Grudia’s design.

Eventually, the intelligent creatures began weaving stories of their own, creating a calendar of ten months with thirty-five days each, named after the ten heroes who fought the scourge: Novos the Warrior; Mexei the Arc-mage; Verund the Sniper; Rhuvu the Engineer; Celest the Maz-mage; Pheri the Warchief; Olos the Guardian; Rem the Maz-mage; Avis the Grand Mage; and Hjui the Huntsman.

The ten heroes sealed away Uruhsatt in the form of a Hjina eye, wrapped in a sacred cloth and jar’d in a dull, thick vase. They borrowed Grudia’s power, who had grown weak by this time, to create several keys made from Grudia’s Essence – the only way to re-seal Uruhsatt if it inevitably came to rise again. They hid away the keys and the sealed vase to limit the number of people with access to the sealed form (with each member passing down the location through their own means). To this day, only a handful of people at any given time know of the seal’s current shape and keys’ locations and form.

That is the story that all intelligent beings of Kiria knew and understood. Following that, the rise of awareness, emotions, and fears gave way to new creations, both good and bad. The Word of Grudia, a well-known and well-kept documentation of the world’s history, was sewn into the mind of anyone who could read (and even those who couldn’t, in the cases of churches and religious schools), and the Shadow of the World’s sealing was spewed as a cautionary tale for those who dared incite violence. But alas, war was inevitable, and the people of Kiria became separated by their values, goals, and desires.

Kiria was now separated into six powerful continents, each with cities, governments, militaries, and citizens, and each holding back from war as if a frayed string was taught – it seemed like the smallest provocation could spell conflict. Nesetta in the north and the Ovurian Isles in the south in particular were constantly prodding each other with territorial disputes and hit-and-run tactics since the first leaders of the lands had ruled. It was only a matter of time before something turned their feud into a larger-scale war.

In the late 11^th century, there was a roaming crusade that preached equality and kindness under the name of Grudia: The Sacred Military, as it was called, expanded from a small township in Miral into a worldwide name. But just as suddenly as they united the world, the entire army disappeared in a flash. Some thought it was due to the increase of dangerous creatures, others believed there was infighting that escalated to the point of self-destruction. Sadly and quietly, as the final breath of peace in Kiria, they disappeared in what felt like an instant.

After the disappearance of the Sacred Military, nations grew weary of peace and complacency and began trying to expand and conquer once again – led anew by Eli Nesetta the Sixth in Nesetta, Arno Carmohart in Miral, and Isaiah Ovura in the Ovurian Isles. Even the normally neutral leaders in the central continent Alhose began splitting their opinions of rule and became separate nations.

But those weren’t the only wars being fought – a self-funded mercenary-militant group, referring to themselves as the Second Sacred Military, were on a crusade across Alhose to wipe clean the land infested with Baael – creatures created of malice and spite, horror and confusion, chaos and death. The SSM’s cause seemed just at first, but as the years went on, their violent gaze turned to any that were not of the Hjina race – the beast-like Retura; the terrifying, skeletal Icredie; and the small but wise Sichie all became targets of the SSM by a time. It became so infamous that Alhose’s leader, who originally pushed for the creation of the group, found himself gathering strong warriors from all over Kiria in an attempt to stop their genocide. As fortune would have it, an insurgence from the SSM’s middle ranks ended up killing the mad crusader, Cestalian Lumes. Obviously, both the insurgents and the loyal militants lost men in the final bout, and after the SSM finally fell, not one of the survivors could say where the goals of the group had been lost.