Editor's Note — Chapter VII
The flood receded enough to reveal a world remade. Survivors learned new crafts, forged communities, and discovered latent Talents. Yet the Earth they reclaimed was not the Earth they had lost. I close the prologue with a small scene—one such attempt to resettle what remains, a glimpse at the dawn of a new age.
Chapter VII — The New World's Dawn
Seven years had passed since the great rains finally ceased. The waters had stabilized at a level that drowned the old world forever, leaving only the highest landmasses as permanent islands in a new, endless sea. Valleys were now abyssal plains; hills had become skerries; the bones of ancient forests and cities gathered sediment to form new, uncharted islands. The land had been rewritten forever. And the people, like the land, were remade. The floating sanctuaries and emerging islands now housed not just humanity, but a mosaic of its potential and its failings given flesh: Dwarves delved into stone, Elves communed with wounded forests, Halflings nurtured small, steadfast communities, Goliaths carved roads from cliffsides, and the fierce Ogre clans stood guard over the most vulnerable passes. In the shadowed groves and on the rocky heights, the Beast-folk tribes kept their own counsel, while their human-descended counterparts, the Beast-kin, often served as bridges—or barriers—between the wilds and the burgeoning settlements. The sky was sometimes cut by the vast wing of a Drake or the elegant flight of a Sylph. The very air tasted different—salt where there had been sweet grass, mineral tang where orchards once bloomed. Mortals and Shaped alike clung to remnants of homes that existed now only in memory, to courage worn thin as old cloth, and to the Animas' gifts that seemed both blessing and burden.
Saints moved among them, guiding, teaching, protecting. Their light burned like torches in a gray world, but each flame strained under sorrow's weight and new, complex divisions. They had expected to shepherd souls toward transcendence; instead they found themselves rebuilding the most basic foundations of civilization while also mediating between Dwarven forgemasters and Human salvagers over rights to sunken metal, calming the fears of a village that believed a nearby Elven grove was "stealing" the land's vitality, or trying to calm tensions after a Hunter's Guild, comprised largely of Wolf-kin, encroached on hunting grounds the native Wolf-folk considered their ancestral right. They consecrated burial grounds for the countless dead, blessed tools made from wreckage, and warded against Shadows that prowled in hidden places, whispering small corruptions to hearts still raw from loss.
The work was endless and often thankless. A Saint might spend months teaching a mixed community of Humans, Halflings, and Ogre to purify brackish water, only to find old prejudices resurfacing the moment their back was turned. Another might establish a school for orphaned children, only to watch half her students—Human, Elf-kin, and Mer-kin alike—run away to join bands of scavengers, preferring the harsh freedom of the ruins to the discipline of learning.
Fae, custodians of the elements, watched at the edges of vision with something approaching despair, and now, a newfound curiosity. They found a strange kinship with the Pure-born Treants, Kirin, and Sylphs, speaking in the old languages of root, wind, and storm. But they viewed the Shaped races with wary uncertainty; the Dwarves' deep digging and the Merfolk's ocean-ranging were acts of dominion that made the ancient spirits uneasy. They whispered to wind and stirred the waters, trying to coax the traumatized landscape back toward balance. Their presence was a reminder that creation itself had not abandoned the world, though they rarely intervened openly in mortal affairs. When they did act, it was often with a heavy heart—clearing a landslide here, calling rain to a dying field there, always aware that each small mercy might prevent the new peoples from learning the harder lessons of survival.
The Drowned drifted in marshes and flooded valleys—echoes among reeds, memories given half-form. Some sought quiet relief in the deep places where living feet could not follow. Others lingered near survivor settlements, offering cryptic warnings or eerie solace. The new races perceived them differently: Elves heard their whispers as sad songs on the wind, while Dwarves felt their presence as a cold draft in a sealed hall, a reminder of all that was lost and unstable. The Beast-folk and Beast-kin, with their sharpened instincts, simply gave them a wide and respectful berth. A Drowned fisherman might appear to point toward safe passage through changed waters; a Drowned mother might hum lullabies outside windows where orphaned children wept. Mortals and Shaped learned to fear them and, sometimes, to listen. The boundary between the living and the lost had blurred, and the Drowned served as constant reminders that death was no longer an ending but a different kind of existence.
And the Shadows whispered still. Though Tameel himself was bound in chains of his own making, cast into the deep places of the world, his seven personifications moved freely, weakened but not destroyed. Without their creator's full favor, they could not dominate as they once had, but their influence seeped into corners like water finding cracks: they now sowed discord between Dwarf and Human guilds over resource distribution, inflamed the innate pride of Elves into isolationism, tempted the Amalgam with fresh envy, sought to twist the Ogres' protective loyalty into paranoid aggression, and found fertile ground in the natural tensions between Beast-folk and Beast-kin, whispering to the former that the latter were pathetic imitations, and to the latter that the former were mere beasts blocking progress. A new settlement, striving for unity, could be corrupted by greed; a school fractured by envy between teachers; a market where honest traders were slowly squeezed out by those willing to lie. The canvas for their work was now vaster, and the potential for new, hybrid sins was immense. Mortals and Shaped faltered. Saints grieved. Even the Fae felt the pull of unrest that seemed to rise from the very bones of the wounded world.
Yet slowly, with the patience of seasons, pockets of genuine hope formed. Survivors discovered latent Talents that had been sleeping in their blood for generations, gifts that emerged only under the pressure of necessity. Some found they could coax fire from damp wood, others could sense fresh water beneath layers of silt and debris. A few learned to speak with the spirits of tools and buildings, understanding the history held in salvaged materials and using that knowledge to rebuild more wisely.
Communities were no longer just human. They were alliances, often fragile, between species with complementary Talents. A Dwarven and Gnomish enclave might provide forged metal and cunning gem-light for a Human and Halfling settlement, trading for the Elves' knowledge of cultivating the transformed soil and the Merfolk's access to sunken treasures. These pacts were written not on parchment, but in shared effort, and were the first, trembling foundations of a new world order. Some mortals and Shaped became masters of Elementals, learning to bend fire and wind not through domination but through partnership, understanding that the forces of nature were allies to be courted rather than resources to be exploited. Others devoted themselves wholly to the service of Saints, forming orders of continuity and mutual aid that would outlast the lives of their founders.
The Overseer watched and recorded with the patience of stone and the attention of a scholar—every deed honored and every vow broken, every act of courage born from despair and every moment of cowardice that chose comfort over growth. It now tracked the lineages of Drakes, the founding of the first mixed citadels, and the arduous path of the Redeemed with the same impartial eye. Balance remained broken, perhaps forever, but life endured with the stubborn persistence of weeds growing through cracked pavement.
On a small island of sodden earth that had once been a hilltop, a woman named Sera knelt with a packet of seeds between her fingers. The packet was water-stained and torn, rescued from the ruins of a village that now lay twenty fathoms below the surface of what had become a permanent lake. She had hauled soil from a collapsed terrace, dirt that remembered roots and growth but had spent seven years underwater, learning the taste of salt and the weight of loss.
The earth felt wrong in her hands—too heavy, too cold, tainted with memories of drowning. She pressed the seeds into the foreign ground with trembling fingers, wondering if anything could truly grow in land that had been so broken. The act felt both sacred and foolish, hope and desperation intertwined like lovers' fingers.
A young Dwarf passed and mocked her effort, his voice carrying the bitter wisdom of someone who had seen too much too young. "This soil remembers drowning," he said, spitting into the turned earth with casual cruelty. "Nothing good will come of it. Metal and stone are all you can trust now."
Sera, whose senses had grown keen from years of listening to the wounded land, looked up at him with eyes that had learned to see past surfaces, past the anger that protected his wounded heart. She smiled without humor but also without bitterness, the expression of someone who had chosen hope not because it was easy but because the alternative was unbearable. "Then it will remember life too," she replied, covering the seeds with hands that shook only slightly. "Memory works both ways."
She planted with the devotion of prayer, one seed at a time. Months later, when the Dwarf had forgotten his mockery, a stubborn green sprouted through the transformed soil. It was not much—thin shoots that bent before the slightest breeze—but it was enough. Sera tended it, and neighbors came to watch: first a Halfling with a shovel to help expand the plot, then an Elven woman carrying precious freshwater from a distant spring where the Fae had blessed a source to run clean. From the edge of the tree line, a Fox-folk watched with unreadable amber eyes. Later, a young woman from the settlement with reddish hair and strikingly similar eyes—a Fox-kin—would leave a freshly caught rabbit at the edge of the garden, a silent offering of kinship and respect to both the land and its original children.
They replanted, failed, replanted again, learning from each small disaster. The harvest, when it finally came, was bitter in places where salt lingered, sweet in others where the earth had truly healed. But it was their own—wrested from ruin by persistent hands and patient hearts.
That dogged act—planting in changed earth, tending growth in transformed soil—became the work of a thousand small hands across the flooded world. It was a truth understood by Human, Dwarf, Elf, and Halfling alike: Saints taught the principles of cultivation in alien conditions; Fae guided the healing of poisoned ground; the Overseer noted each success and failure in the great record of recovery. The world would never be as it was before—the old maps were worse than useless now, the old certainties drowned beneath fathoms of consequence—but by such patient insistence, it began to grow again.
In workshops built from salvaged timber, Dwarven craftsmen learned to work with metals that had spent years beneath the waves, discovering that salt water had changed their fundamental properties. Some grew brittle; others became strangely flexible. New techniques emerged from necessity, and tools that had been perfected over centuries gave way to innovations born from scarcity and imagination.
Children who had never seen the old world—human, pointy-eared, stout, and small—played games among the ruins, inventing new songs and stories that took the flood and their new forms as a given rather than a tragedy. They climbed the tops of buried towers that now served as islands, dove for treasures in the flooded streets of sunken cities, and learned to read weather patterns that followed rules their grandparents had never known.
The balance remained broken, perhaps forever—too much had been lost, too much had changed. But life endured and adapted, as it always had, as it always would. And in that endurance, in that stubborn refusal to surrender to despair, and in the fragile, budding cooperation between all the Children of Emuna, lay the seeds of whatever world would come next.
Final Editor's Note — End of the Prologue
This is all I have discovered, recovered, and pieced together. The scrolls were frayed, the ink faded, and some passages are missing entirely. I do not know where history truly begins or where it might end. What I have given is imperfect, incomplete, and fragmentary—but it is all that remains of a world both terrible and wondrous.
Read, and judge for yourself.
— End of the Prologue