The World of Artolan

Over tens of millenia, Humankind prospered on the vast continent of Pangaia, bordered to east and west by vast oceans.  Kingdoms rose and fell, civilisations attained their apogee and then vanished.  History was as the tide of the seas that surrounded Pangaia, ebbing and flowing under the pull of three bright moons.  The only barrier to the insatiable curiousity and ambition of humankind, were those endless and inhospitable salt-water plains.

Until one day, there came to be built a ship sturdy enough, and born an explorer hardy enough, to cross the sea to the East.  He and his crew were lost from view for nine long years, until they came back to tell of new lands, a new continent, where lay unimaginable wealth and opportunities.

The greatest kingdoms of Pangaia sent expeditions into the rising sun, and humankind soon realised it was not alone.  The continent of Avalonia was itself home to inhabitants who collectively called themselves "Critters".

The shock of the encounter was somewhat brutal, for the Critters were nothing else but highly evolved and intelligent forms of those animals well known to humankind.  Imagine that first encounter between a human ship's captain, and a five foot tall talking rabbit.  Consider the rabbit's surprise and horror at the view of the ship's cat, tiny, walking on all fours, petted by humans and incapable of speech.  The only non-intelligent creatures the Critters knew of were insects.

Already facing difficulties with the diversity of their own species, humankind rapidly proclaimed the Critters to be unnatural.  Their very existence was also contrary to human religious beliefs which, although varied, all asserted the superiority of humans over all other forms of life, and of one god or another over all creation.  Religious leaders called for the extermination and enslavement of these devilish abominations.

War was not long in coming, but the Critter Kingdoms were grounded in millenia-old civilisations, well-organised, studded with great cities, and as technologically advanced as their human enemies.  The two mightiest kingdoms of the West, Alladore and Lorenthia, had been at peace for fifty years already.  By contrast, the human kingdoms founded on Avalonia, collectively known as the "Tollonian Principalities", were always at each other's throat.

In the aftermath of the Encounter, the history of Avalonia, knocked off course for sure, nonetheless began to settle into its new trajectory.  Border skirmishes were near-permanent, and sometimes enough Tollonians banded together to set off war, but Alladore and Lorenthia always fought side by side and held their own.  Many Critters, and many Humans, met unfortunate fates, but they also began to seek their mutual benefit.  The Great Trade Road slowly took shape, bringing to both peoples strange and arcane things from legendary places, far away.  Amongst the Humans, some began to rethink their world perspective, and find a place in it for these new peoples.

Rumours had been coming out of the East, passed on and distorted by merchants and fortune-seekers, of some terrible power that had risen, bringing death to entire kingdoms with the stuff of fairy tales.  Twenty years after the Encounter, it was obvious that something was afoot, as the flow of refugees, which had begun as a mere trickle, became a torrent.  The kings of Alladore and Lorenthia sent their best spies eastwards, and they returned with a name : the Shadow Deep.  A rolling sea of black cloud, that filtered like mist into a land, corrupting hearts and minds, before surging forward and covering everything.

It did not take much for the priests of humankind to proclaim this black mist the "divine punishment" for the supposed sin of the Critters' very existence.  The Tollonian Principalities sent emissaries to the Shadow Deep, and began to raise companies of soldiers in its name.  Strangely enough, the horrors which lurked within the dark clouds, undead creatures or twisted monsters, barely raised eyebrows.  The balance of power began slowly to shift, the Critters losing battle after battle against this new enemy and its human allies.

A few days ago, two of Alladore's rangers climbed to the top of a watchtower on the Lorenthian frontier.  With the kingdoms at peace for ninety years, the tower had been long abandoned.  At its summit, a tainted wind assailed them, particularly foul for the dog's keen sense of smell.  Both clutched at the parapet with despair, the hawk so hard that her razor-sharp claws penetrated deep into the wood.  Less than a league away, the grassy plains disappeared.  A fresh and jagged scar of earth, and a wall of black fog, now marked the end of one realm, and the beginning of another.

Lorenthia was gone.  The Shadow Deep had swallowed it whole.

Alladore was now the last Critter kingdom standing.