Bedtime story.
"A thousand years ago, the world of earth was a very different place, small one. There were many races, Elves and Dwarves and Dragons, and many others. The races acted much as they do now... there were wars, and times of peace, great discoveries and great betrayals. The land was bordered by vast oceans and a ball of fire bigger than the largest shard lit the sky. So bright that a being could be blinded by looking at it."
"There was, once, before the Elves made the great mistake. The Orcs and Kobolds were considered vermin by many of the Elvish people, and they wanted to be rid or these races. So it was that they began to craft a spell that would whisk up these unwanted creatures and send them... someplace else. This spell was to be the masterpiece of the elvan race, a force greater than the sum of its parts, a spell that would endure forever. The Elves became obsessed with it's creation. It was the Banestorm.
"But the users of magic began to sense a deep foreboding, a quiet dread that shadowed everything. A premonition of disaster. The greatest mages, sorcerers and spellcasters of the earth, and from other places as well, began to gather together at an unnamed place of power. It was as if the earth itself was calling them. This gathering of wizards became known as the nine hundred, and the power they possessed was vast...
"Zarktoff was one of the nine hundred, wasn't he, Grandpapa? He put a spell on our Shard so we could live here, didn't he?"
"Yes he did, but that was later."
"When the Banestorm was released, it grew more powerful than even the most imaginative of the Elves could have predicted, and it destroyed the world. The earth was shattered into a thousand pieces. The Oceans boiled away, and all the races and creatures suffered.
"The nine hundred were very powerful, but even they could not restore the world, nor could they destroy the Banestorm. They did manage to save the planet by using the Storm itself to shift the remaining shards of the planet into another dimension, where the laws of nature were somewhat different. There was air and light and mist everywhere, and the pieces of the shattered world floated in it, like dust in the air"
"That's where we are now, isn't it? In the Aether."
"Yes it is...Do you want to hear the rest of the story?"
"Then stop interrupting me.
"Then began a process of reconstruction that lasted many years. The Nine Hundred created many great shields of magic that protected the individual shards, and spells that restored the seasons, and night and day. They moved the larger shards into permanent positions, and sent smaller shards in orbits around them."
"Er, like a top, only bigger."
"They managed to limit the power of the Banestorm by shifting much of it into many other dimensions, but this was not a perfect solution. The Banestorm still travels through the remains of the shattered world, taking things elsewhere in time and space, but now it also drops things off. All of this was a thousand years ago.
"The Nine Hundred collapsed shortly after the fate of the world was more or less resolved, as if the force that brought them together was no longer interested in them. Some of the Nine Hundred continued to restore the world, some became tyrannical overlords of individual shards, but most vanished, picking up their lives where they left off."
"Where did they go Grandpapa?"
"No one knows, child, no one knows.
"The shards for the most part remained totally isolated from the other pieces for some six or seven hundred years, developing very different cultures and histories. The Banestorm helped matters along by dropping large deposits of people once in a while onto a shard, and vanishing, These people no worse for their experience.
"Our Shard of Megalos is one of these. several hundred years ago, a dozen small towns and villages of Earth were scattered across Megalos overnight. Humans came to the Shattered world. And Lizard men, and Giants, and Monsters, so many others"
"That's us isn't it? Humans?"
"What did I say about interrupting?"
"The Humans thrived upon the shard and quickly grew to dominate all of Megalos. Particularly the Glorious Crusaders of the Church, who conquered most of the eastern and northern lands. the strange Asian people were all but pushed off the shard, and have retreated to the other side of great, impassible mountains to the northwest. The Moslem people have dug in to the south and have built their own empire there, strong enough to defend their borders from our great crusades over the centuries. To the West is the Golden Plains, and farther, the Orclands, and on the other side of the great desert lies the unexplored Land of Djinns. Little is known about them.
"We travel between the shards, a little, To Tejas, and the rim Isles that orbit us, but the Illithids were here before our planet burst into the Ether and they hate us for destroying their civilization. It is dangerous to leave the shard of Megalos, and only the foolish do so."
"And that is all I will tell you tonight, child, go to sleep."
"Awwwwwww....Goodnight, Grandpapa."
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