Out of Character:
Welcome to Tomorrow.
Welcome to the world N'Thayn'sal, perhaps better known to you by its current name: Althanas.
Welcome to the world that awaits you, twenty years hence. It's a place where Raiaera fell, and a bloody-eyed banner was hoisted from Eluriand's blackened towers. Where the people of Alerar saw the dangers for what they were and struck -- hard and fast, as best as they could. Where Salvar fell to internal strife of so many colors and kinds. Where Scara Brae is little more than a bowl full of dirty seawater and dead bodies, and Corone is nothing but a fond memory. Mile high towers dot the lands of Dheath -- the lands of Wyrm -- and the ocean boils with the ravenous howls of monsters better left unnamed.
N'Thayn'sal, where gods have died and the stars are going out and the only moon left is riddled with mile deep crevices and burning craters where you can still see the bodies of Things, some good and some evil and a lot that were neither one or the other or anything we can pin names to. It's a world that is, for all intents and purposes, dying.
The High Elves have fallen here, they're just a wandering band of refugees, beggars and hardened survivors now. Man has been broken to his knees screaming and enduring, but no better than others. The Dwarves would've gone to ground as well, had the Hordes of Haidia not sundered them from the veins of the world. Only the Drow remain strong, or at least recognizable, and even the lands of Alerar have shrunken with the fall of the Dwarves and the foothold empire of their murderers.
The goblins and their ilk hold power now, if only barely. They came in screaming from lands known and unknown, lead along by the mighty ogres. The wyrmkin have risen to dominance in Dheath. What was once Raiaera is now Durkland, and what used to be Corone is little more than a hundred feifdoms, ten falling by the year as the Reaper Queen carves her empire out of the flesh of the living, broken masses within.
What once was Salvar no longer is. It's not that the whole country has fallen from a dozen civil wars and twice as many self-proclaimed governments -- and it has. It's not that the Wyrmian Warlocks have infiltrated society and burnt the grimoires and tomes, hats and robes of the old Wizarding orders -- and they have. It's not even that the realm that used to be Sulgoran's Axe has somehow, perhaps by the good graces of whatever Sway still live, remained somewhat intact.
Nominally speaking, Salvar retains a government of its own, though most of its northern reaches don't even know the name of it. It's on monarchy number three in as many years, the previous two quietly installed and removed by a band of Wyrm Warlocks and its armies commanded by the infamous Gale Knights of Icetongue. The people here live between all the rocks and all the hard places; Orcs, Goblins and Ogres to one border, Xem'zund and the Haidian demons to another, and ever the looming threat of another raid by desperate Alerar or the Reaper Queen, or genocide by the Wyrm when the Warlocks tire of their games, or even of the death of their last few patron gods and the slaughter that would doubtlessly follow.
This is a grim, darkened place. This is where the last bits of humanity still look to the increasingly starless skies and delude themselves into thinking they can at least die free...
...and maybe, just maybe if you look hard enough, you'll find something unexpected here. You might not believe it at first. You might think it's ridiculous, you might think it's senseless, you might even consider it absolutely insane, but it remains even after the rest of the world is over.
It's hope.
Hope lives in Salvar, and hope lives in the dying world of N'Thayn'sal...
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