The dawn has risen upon a new world - a world unlike that you may know. Shattered by a catastrophic impact not long after the extinction of the great thunder-lizards, Earth is not as it should be. This impact, a star falling to earth, changed not only the shape of all the lands, but also their contents. This star bore strange lights and queer crystals, changing and warping the planet on which mankind slowly arose. Continents were broken, minds shattered, even animals and plants twisted and changed. It is a strange world now - one in many ways hostile to humanity - but in the end, it is your world still.
You stand forward as one of the leaders of a growing empire of men. No longer mere tribes, nor polises, far greater than humble city-states; the mechanisms of nations in truth, of crowns and kingships and bureaucracy and the force of arms - all these things have been manifested upon the world. In fire and blood and bronze have the states of the world been forged, some using peace and the strength of their industries to grow and expand, others conquering at the point of the sword. No longer do men live in kindreds and humble hovels. Great cities of stone, populated by thousands, teem at strategic rivermouths, sprawling across fecund plains and in the passages of glowering mountain ranges. It is a time of instability, but also a strange promise. Man has come into his own, and his threat is no longer the dark things of the world, nor the brutes of the field, but his fellow humans of flesha and bone and arcane might. Will you lead your people to greatness in this new age of war, conflict, and competition, or falter and be forgotten by the histories? Come, and tell the tale of the Strength of Empires.
Third Turning of Fire's Hand, Cycle 240 of the Scion's Brow - Year 488, Common Era
Heights of the Mother Mountains
Down through the jagged peaks, from the Pass of the Moon, the black column wound like a living thing. In midnight-cool leather and armor the soldiers and wains moved, hobnail boots beating on packed earth alongside the creaking of harnesses and the rumbling of wheels. At the head of the column the Herald rode, his stature tall, faint red light leaking from beneath his eyelids as he silently contemplated the sprawling vistas ahead of the army marching westward. Behind him in serried ranks passed soldier after soldier, faces as black as midnight, but in their lines too stood men of swarthy visage, or pale and fair, or dark ebony not yet turned to inky gloom.
It had been a generation since the Tithe-Reaves of the Lord of the Earth and the Obsidian Throne had passed west from the Midnight Vale. Time enough for vassals to forget their responsibilities, for boys to become men, for armies to stand down for their alert wariness and rulers to forget the danger to their rule if they did not hold to their oaths. The known world bowed to the First Man, he who had cast down the Gods and taken their power for his own. But they would, perhaps, need to be reminded of that fact.
Some men had grown lazy in the Vale too. Some did not visit the sacred fires as often as tradition dictated or piety demanded. An army that did not kill slowly became a beast old with age and lethargy, warriors spending more time feasting and storytelling than training and waging red war on those the Lord demanded. The Herald was perhaps a part of that problem, not the solution. His own muscles were marbled with fat, and his hair streaked with gray instead of a pure jet-black - not that any man could forgive him these human failings, not at his age.
But the Tithe-Reaves did not forget. And the accounting was due. Westward this host marched, and eastward another. The Midnight Empire was patient, but it did not forget.
