Birdsie
The God-Emperor of Mankind
- Introduction
It was the 17th of Hofesh, in the year 1074.
A cold evening, the sun already setting behind the horizon, with the purplish-orange disk of blurry light the only indicator of its last known location. Ethereal snowflakes fell down upon the field of endless battle. Steel met steel, the snow becoming red and warm. Power clashed against power, artifact against artifact, crime against crime.
Archaic technologies long-forgotten unveiled as weapons in the perennial conflict that doomed the continent of Ebox. The spirits of heroes, rogues, and wizards cursed, spearheaded the path into enemy ranks, and fell in quick succession. It was another day in a war that had been steadily going on for thirty-seven years, and those who would end it met constant failure.
There was no power more utilized for the task of warfare than magic, and magic required mana: primal energy. The most available of mana sources was Findross: the greater source of the outer universe.
Findross had been honored as the lifeblood of the world, the entropy-defying engine fluid of the universe. It was tapped into by martial artists and prana-weavers alike, utilized to channel great might and magic that no mortal could dream of otherwise.
One man corrupted it. One man found the truth of polarity. One man unlocked the secrets of the forbidden. And in one fell swoop, he ended the war on that eventide on the battlefields of the Auseyas front.
"If Findross is the lifeblood of the world, then Findross is a mathematical one. If there is a one, there is a zero, somewhere, that serves as a mirror, and behind that mirror must lie the opposite statement."
Thus he founded Void, and Void was the most terrible mistress. The opposite statement: the deathblood of the anti-world, the gushing root of entropy from which everything came, and to which everything was supposed to return... only he forced the return to be earlier than expected.
Armies were annihilated. Cities were shattered. In only five minutes, thousands were already dead to his novel witchcraft. There was no ward, no artifact, that could protect from his vile power, for the power was a swarm of lice that ate its way through plate, warding, magic, and even logic.
He called this power the Spoken Silence - the anti-tongue. Spoken in response to a speech of zeal, it dissolved it into doubts. Said in a prayer, it rotted religion. Weak mortals could not resist it, and even the mighty found themselves clouding with doubt, hesitation, and fear. It rendered thoughts and voices into nonsensical glossolalia and dissolved understanding like a cocktail of acids eating through precious metals. Pages containing it shriveled. Stories spoken in it ended. Minds exposed to it became empty vessels, well-prepared to receive the Sacrament of Silence.
In a day, the nearest armies bent like a steel rod clad between the gauntleted fists of a monstrous ogre. It wasn't an easy task - it took months, alas, but the persistent war eventually ended at the hands of this one man. Kings were brutally dethroned, queens became hopeless brides, and this man - Turenval - was no longer mortal man, but immortal lich. This marked the founding of the Millennial Empire and the rise of the Millennial Emperor.
Almost immediately, the first resistance groups started pooling their resources together... this is the story of one such group, and its connection to the others.
June Verles
Noble Scion
Epiphany
Hanarei
Kylesar1
FireMaiden
Safety Hammer
Swire
Bakuyoshi
Fable
