The sun was falling into the night and the temperature started steeply dropping with it. They began putting up a fire. Before the night grew too dark it steadily blazed beside them. They rested around it, Aldi and Seras staring at the many luminous stars whilst Swift kept at his books. The red moon was now bright in the sky with its rings like Saturn, it had drifted further from the grey-blue goliath of a moon which had just poked over the horizon.

“It still doesn’t feel real,” Seras said.

“Every time I look at that sky... But maybe it’s because even after all this time, it's so terrifying, that we are really stuck here.”

Adil was near her, inspecting the arrows he collected for traces of black gunk, not finding any.

“Tell me about it,” he offhandedly said.

Swift threw some wood into the fire. He had moved onto the book 'magic history' its pages seemed old and delicate, and he took good care when turning the pages. 

Swift felt as though he now knew more into the history of the world he now found himself in than most who lived there, each text highlighting key differences in knowledge between the banned texts he held and common knowledge. It appeared that the 'high elves' were the reason for this as they tried to strip away any reference to the old world.

Originally, there were no other races, it was just man, a time when the world was in a roughly shaped peace where society was most interested in developing magic.

Magic, however, came at a cost . Though each mage trained for years before he practised they all soon developing the sickness as they were poisoned by their own new powers. Sometimes the sick changed in other ways, elements of their humanity taken away as their flesh mutated. Researchers and users of magic tried desperately to fix this problem and find a way people could use magic for longer. In their attempts, they looked at the way people harnessed magic, changing their crystalline manna, commonly known as a person's essence. 

The altering of a person's essence was a rough science, dangerous and caused disaster after disaster. As a person was changed there was a large chance they would lose what made them, themself. They would change in unprecedented ways, most commonly were, cancerous growths that developed sentience and the unsurprising spontaneous combustions. However, many changes were stable, creating creatures with mismatched proportions and strange abilities. More so, all these changed creatures lost any semblance of a rational or empathetic psyche, turning into dangerous monsters. Eventually, the mutated creatures spread far and infested areas of the landscape, creating what today is still called 'the dark zone.' 

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Eventually, top researchers and magic users gathered their research, both to find an answer to the magic problem and to stop the more dangerous experiments. They joined forces and pushed into the alteration of a person's essence to create a new person, a better being able to live longer and use magic with impunity. The results of their research and experimentation created the 'high-elves' and the 'dryad'. This remarkable achievement made a method to turn humans into longer living beings that could use magic without care for its poisoning effects. However, it came at a slight cost. As a person's essence was altered they were restricted in the forms of magic they could take. Each high elf was only able to use magic in its purest form, emitting something close to pure mana, unable to fully shape it into different effects without using items like crystals to redefine the manas properties. Whilst each dryad used magic associated with nature, focusing on enhancing the effects of the environment than forging them into something new, whilst human magic only increased in its variety.

“Hay Swift tell me something interesting,” Adil said, resting on the ground and looking over at Swift, he was still reading his books.

Without taking his eyes off the book Swift repeated.

"Birds can't fart," he said.

"What, do they just like explode if you give them beans?"

"Something like that,"

"That's cool. But in your book is there anything interesting?"

"The book I just finished said the high elves had a war with humanity."

"Really?" Seras asked.

“Yep, all the people in one place turned into high elves and dryad, but the high elves wanted to stay pure so they made their own kingdom, and it seems they don’t and didn’t want anyone in. But the Dryads wanted to stay with nature and the people. And they were like, I know what to do, let's have a war. you know.”

"Seems like you might be blowing over something important,"

"Is it ever really a good reason though?" Swift said

"point taken."

“Anyway, then the high elves didn’t want to spend any more of their own people because it was slow and hard for them and they didn't have many kids. So, they started messing with biology again and created a warrior race called the Orc. The race was all-male, was meant to be an honourable strong race to be ‘chosen’ by and they grew to adult by the age of seven or so.”

“If they are all male, then how do they breed?” Adil asked.

“An elf or even man would be chosen by an esteemed Orc to raise the next generation of soldiers. It’s not clear on how. I think it’s a society thing. And their ‘genes’ or essence, seemed to overpower parent species.”

“So, to carry on. They crushed the humans and Dryads. And then, it’s not clear what happened, but I think all dryads and orcs are now dead.”

Seras was staring into the fire intently listening to the conversation.

“Funny how the goblins are like that... All male I mean...” She said. Swift closed his book and saw the trouble in her eyes. There was a serious hatred for the creatures.

"Sure..." swift added.

The three of them ended it on that then took turns to try and sleep, only a few final words left drifting in the air as Adil said.

“Pretty miserable thing to end the night on,” Adil said.

"You asked for it," Swift added.