“Three thousand years ago, the natives of this world were perishing under the scourge of a terrible plague. Flesh-withering sickness raged across the lands, afflicting each and every race. Efforts to cure the plague – or even to control it by quarantining entire cities – proved utterly futile. People believed that Armageddon was finally upon them...

“Our Human ancestors came to this world on huge, mystical sky-chariots, fleeing a distant land of their own which had been ravaged by war. At first the tormented natives of Emeran regarded these outsiders as a threat. However, the Humans freely offered their own medicines and healing knowledge, and in a matter of mere weeks, they had devised a cure for Emeran’s lethal blight. Within a year, the death-tolls were diminishing. Within two, the world was safe from the ravages of plague... The Humans were embraced as friends by the peoples of Emeran and given a new homeland to build and thrive upon.

“But kinship and peace can change like the weather...

“After five hundred years, a world war had begun to rage: every race across the continent against the other. Petty differences had grown into hatreds; arguments had birthed conflicts, which birthed battles; people had turned from constructing towns and cities of beauty to building weapons of hideous destruction. Again, Emeran seemed to be on the brink of total disaster...

“This time, the Unseen Gods themselves intervened. Weary of the sight of blood and the clamour of war, they destroyed the weapons, separated the races of the world and threw up great walls of shimmering light. Gigantic prisons, hundreds of miles across, were thus created for all the peoples of Emeran. The Humans were given plains grassland. The Graex, an area of desert and mountain. The Callis, open forest. The Veres, swamplands. These and every other race were sealed in a terrain suited for their needs and comforts, whilst keeping them from attacking their neighbours.

“The Imprisonment was a period of penance and prayer. The endless horizons of fiery light that encompassed each people acted as a brilliant symbol of their wrong-doing and of the anger they had evoked from the Unseen Gods.

“More centuries passed and the races learned peace in their solitude. Eventually, the Unseen Gods let down their magical barriers. After generations of separation, the peoples of Emeran were united – all but one... Around the North Pole, the hub of the known world, a great circular wall remained and imprisoned the last race. No-one could remember who these people had been. Yet clearly they had refused the ways of peace and were damned to live in solitude forever.

“Now, half a millennia after the Time of Reunion, the Northern Wall of Light still shines like an eternal beacon. Knowledge of what the wall represents has been lost to many and replaced by rumour and superstition. The Human mystics called the Believers of Light have based a religion upon the barrier: thinking it is the passageway from life to the Otherworld. More naive Humans call the hidden zone Hel, named after a fiery realm of suffering in their old land. The Graex travel north with their dead – passing the bodies into the wall to incinerate them. Other peoples have sacrificed victims by hurling them into that fiery barrier.

“It is a desperate age, much akin to the time before our Imprisonment. Humans and Callis have risen to become to two greatest powers on the continent and they are on the verge of a devastating final war. Border-conflicts rage like fires out of control. Entire villages and towns are sacked. Trade caravans are slaughtered. Farms are destroyed, their crops and livestock stolen or burnt... Villagers pray for the intervention of the Unseen Gods, only to find their pleadings unanswered. When they cry, ‘Have the Gods deserted us?’, priests reply that the Unseen Gods are determined to allow the peoples of Emeran to resolve their own petty differences... Mystics threaten that we are on the verge of an apocalyptic Era of Darkness..."