A thousand years was never enough

Before there was a world there was Ymir, a primeval being born of elemental poison. He grew, and his sons — Odin, Vili and Ve — grew with him. When they turned on him, his blood flooded everything in its path and killed all it touched. Only Hvergelmir escaped the flood, and swore revenge.

From fragments of Ymir's heart, Odin shaped Midgard — the world people live in. Those fragments, the Heart of Ymir, are not decoration: they hold the world together and feed its growth. Take one, and a piece of the world weakens.

That single fact is the engine behind every legend an adventurer will hear.

The gods, the humans and the demons fought a war long enough to erase itself from ordinary memory. Surt, a fire giant from Muspelheim, led a legion against Midgard and was defeated. Four hundred years later he tried again, raising a tower that linked Midgard to his own world so his demons could walk through. He was stopped, and sealed.

Baldr and Fenrir died in that war. Jormungandr, the world serpent, attacked the continent and was driven back by seven warriors. When the fighting ended, gods, humans and demons agreed to a truce — and the seven founded a kingdom.

Nobody signed anything. The peace simply held, for a thousand years.

Peace made people forget. With no war to remember, the scars faded into stories, and the stories into superstition. Trade grew, cities grew, and so did selfishness, corruption and arrogance.

Then the symptoms started: howls at the borders between the three worlds, creatures that had never attacked before, earthquakes and hail out of season. And a rumour — that the fragments of Ymir were scattered and findable, and that whoever held them would hold the world.

Adventurers went looking. Most of them were not looking for the world's sake.

Two more places sit outside the four: Jotunheim, the giants' world, called the Ash Vacuum by Midgardians, reached through a tear in the world; and the eastern reaches — Amatsu, Kunlun, Luoyang, Ayothaya, Dewata, Brasilis, Malaya — found during the Golden Age of Exploration.

Ages ago a great evil was bound beneath the desert town of Morroc. A cult tried to free it. The Assassins Guild and the Dandelion Organization stopped them and captured the cult's leader, Raiyan Moore.

They were not quick enough.

The seals had already thinned. Satan Morroc — Surt, wearing a desert's name — woke, and in hours the town was gone. The castle was torn open, the streets flattened, the citizens fled north-west to the old ruins. Heroes from every nation came and, at terrible cost, forced him east into the desert. The Continental Guard quarantined the ground he had touched. The shockwave loosened other seals: Baphomet, beneath the monastery of St. Capitolina, began to stir.

Then the world tore. Where Morroc's castle had stood, a dimensional gorge opened onto Jotunheim — a land of eternal winter, alien ore, and things that had been waiting a long time. Midgard called it the Ash Vacuum, and sent an alliance through it.

The truce is over. Nobody has announced it. The seals are failing one at a time, the nations are arming, and every guild in the world is recruiting.

You are not the chosen one. You are one of thousands who heard the same rumour and walked out the gate anyway. What you do with that is the game.

(A.W. — After the War. Dates are the ones the official episodes use; this site does not invent new ones.)