Author Unknown
372nd year of the Era of Peace
There are stories that must be told that one hates to remember. Where one committed shameful acts or, still worse, moved aside and did nothing. These are the stories that are swept out of the halls of memory, trampled upon, and willfully forgotten.
We bear one such story, but we refuse to bear it quietly. Not now when we recognize the coming of its brethren, the repetition of our past errors. Not now when the horizon is scarred by all that we told ourselves we would never allow to happen again, the very things they tell us never happened at all.
We must raise our voices now else it will be as though we have never spoken. Please, allow us to make you a witness to our history. Let me outline how it began, however briefly. Let me tell you the origins our world.
Once there was the light, a brightness that pulsed with the beat of existence. The light tensed and, in a moment of great rupture, became life. This is our creation story.
The land was parceled between all things large and small, and there was Great Peace for many centuries. Inside the forests, elves fostered their empire atop the trees, spires forcing their way through the leaves. Nearby, humans cultivated the plains and farmed the land while building cities motivated by steam. The winged avians and stout dwarves shared the mountainous land to the south, the former taking to the sky while the latter bored successively deeper into the earth. Things were well.
Yet as all things do, the Peace eventually came to an end. In their insatiable desire for more, humans overtaxed the land. The game fled elsewhere as the exhausted fields were sapped of their nutrients. Summer draught devastated even the most stubborn crops, leaving man to venture into the woods to hunt for his food. Blinded by their hunger, a small party failed to recognize one of the sacred steer before the creature fell dying at their feet. The elves, enraged in their mourning, struck out under the cover of nightfall to burn the hunting village to the ground.
And so it began. The elves called upon their airborne cousins for aid while the dwarves abandoned their mines in favor of armor and their human allies. It took over a century for the war to dissolve into a tentative peace, but that was more than long enough. When the dead had been counted and buried, the survivors were left to explore their crippled land. The rivers dried to their beds as all around them died and became barren. Fearful of an attack and desiring to protect the little they had left, the elves launched another offensive, taking mankind by complete surprise.
When it was over, the humans and their allies were subjugated, forced to live under the careful watch of their more mystical brethren. Intermarriage, always frowned upon, was strictly prohibited, and any illicit “half breeds” were forced into the same unfortunate fate as their mortal ancestry: to live in the lowest levels of society, perpetually in need of a little more than they could hope to achieve.
So it would continue until now. A collective murmur has begun to rise up from the ranks of such “half breeds.” There is quiet talk of a revolution. For many this amounts to little more than disgruntled muttering, but for a scant few it is beginning to resemble something very different, something dangerous.
Ambition.
