In a world scarred and changed by impure intentions, new forms of life sprouted in its lands, including sentient ones, and these races started molding the world with their passage.

Elfs erected great trees in the forest and sturdy fortresses in the plains, using their mighty wild magic.

Dwarves constructed many complex cave sistems from one end of a great mountain range to the other and became known as master craftsman for their meld magic, allowing them to bend and forge previously unforgeable minerals.

The giants made their homes in the frigid tundra, were they built their massive halls of ice and stone. Famed for their strength and resilience, and feared for their runic magic.

Orcs keep themselves to their homes hidden deep in the swamps, were none may enter except for those proved worthy. their traps and hidden ambushes prevent the unaware from entering their great swamps, and their blood magic causes much polemic between the other races.

These races and unspoken others inhabit these lands since time imemorial, and all of them have survived by a balance of power between them, as such balance is attained by the intrinsic need that they have for one another. Of course most of the races here mentioned want nothing to do with something as feeble as balance.What they want is the much more ambitious ultimate prize: Supremacy over the land and its citizens. However such a prize is difficult to attain, and with so many different creatures vying for it, the balance remains unchanged.

Now, at this point you might be asking yourself "And were are the humans in all of this?" they are, after all, in the mildly sad title of this prologue.Well, they are slaves of course! With so many monstrous races and beings roaming the world, what can one expect of humanity but to decay. Even though there was no lack of power, but of unity.

Yes, the worst situation has come to pass, almost all of humanity has been enslaved, forced to work until their deaths by almost all the other races. they have been like that for so long that no one remembers what they were before, not even the most long lived races do.

It reached such a point and such a long amount of time that it became common sense that all humans are meant to serve, and so the culture of these races also took shape around them.

Humans began to be bred for specific traits, just like horses and dogs, even human pets began to be coveted by nobility and royalty, becoming a fashion among them. Some were bred for strength, to tile fields and carry heavy loads, some were bred for agility, to carry messages, scout dangerous areas,hunting and games of speed, and some even were bred for beauty, in order to satisfy the lust of their masters. Tournaments and games were made around them, and with time, they were no longer slaves, they were only... tamed animals.

After being slaves for such a long time, something very peculiar happened. After thousand upon thousand of years of being bred, the slaves became stronger, faster and more beautiful than their masters, however, they still could not face the might of the other races. And so more time passed, until there was no longer a single slave human being that thought of rebellion, it simply became something unthinkable. they ended up believing what the whole world told them... and with their will shattered and thoughts suppressed, they heeded their masters.

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However not all of humanity was enslaved, a small part of them still lived in freedom, if you can call it that. They are nomadic, never staying too long in one place to avoid being caught by the Manhunters. There are very few reasons to justify their pseudo-freedom, one of them is because they live in the desert. It might seem like a simple and petty reason,but the might of the desert must not be underestimated, especially if one does not know of its inner workings.

There exists no race in the known world that knows how to live in the desert besides the humans. For many years the races tried to brave its treacherous dunes, only to have the ones sent never to return again. They even tried making crusades across the sandy hell in order to enslave humanity once and for all, however the human mastery of the terrain was too great, and the desert too dangerous. Only a handful of soldiers returned, reporting attacks of massive sneaks that got them by surprise and swallowed their entire water supply.

The races did not attempt to cross the desert again when they didn't see much incentive in the project,as per all their knowledge, the desert had only sand to offer. However there were people that thought differently, they saw a lucrative business that thrived in the exotic wildlife provided by the desert, including the humans. These pioneers were of various races, each helping in a different way in the goal of their enterprise. Their group was extremely successful, attracting the attention of many more people for the business and research of the desert. After endless decades of work they were finally able to capture some "exotic wild humans" as per their own words and the business exploded. everyone wanted to look at the unexpected novelty that were savage humans.

The business base became a giant independent city were various races lived harmoniously,well, as much as possible at least. In this time the free humans were forced to up their tactics, as the Manhunters were starting to get ground on them. This continued for centuries upon centuries, every time humanity was losing inch by inch of their desert... their home.

This is the current state of humanity. If you have good ears, you can almost hear its death throes.

However, there is still hope, and this hope is in the form of a woman of unequaled beauty, who is desperately running through an elven forest with all the speed she can muster ...