The dream of a perfect kingdom
It is said that everything began with a king — a king possessed by a single idea: a perfect kingdom, free of all evil. He could not bear the sight of criminals in his streets, of wild creatures in his fields, of monsters at his borders. Yet he was a ruler of strange scruples. He did not wish to kill his monsters, nor to execute his criminals. He wanted only to be rid of them — to make them vanish, as if they had never existed at all.
He consulted oracles. He consulted other kings. He consulted the wisest scholars he could find. None could give him what he asked for. To banish evil without spilling blood seemed impossible — until the day he heard of a circle of sorcerers.
The sorcerers and the rift
These sorcerers had discovered something no one else knew: a portal. A rift leading to an unknown place, unlike anything ever seen — another land, perhaps another world entirely. The king sought them out, brought them to his court, and laid his desire before them.
The sorcerers refused. They understood that such a thing could shatter a delicate balance: the more people who learned the secret, the more it would be used — and no one had the faintest idea of what waited on the other side. To meddle with the portal was to open a door that might never be closed again.
But the king would not accept refusal. He forced them to teach him the ritual.
The banishment
In the ritual, the sorcerers tear open the passage to Vashrath. And the king began to cast through it everything his world held that was wicked: the criminals, the monsters, the dragons — everything that troubled the well-being of his perfect kingdom was hurled through the portal.
For a time, it worked. The king's world grew cleaner, safer, more beautiful.
The secret that escaped
Over the millennia, however, the rumor spread — and the portal ceased to be an instrument of good. Where once only monsters were sent, now people began to go: political rivals dispatched in silence, entire factions exiled, families banished, rival peoples driven away — and even those who, of their own free will, wished to begin life anew and crossed the portal in search of a new world. More and more people came to learn the secret.
That is how Vashrath ceased to be merely a limbo.
The world that swallowed a universe
With so many souls on the other side, the place began to live. The exiles raised their cities and their kingdoms. The wild creatures returned to doing what they had always done in the world above — hunting, migrating, ruling — only now there were peoples to fear them and to fight them. Crops were planted, walls were built, children were born and elders were buried. Vashrath, meant to be a dumping ground, ended up absorbing an entire universe.
They say this explains so many absences in the world above. There are no werewolves prowling the woods, no vampires in the towers, no dragons in the skies, no monsters in the lakes — not because they never existed, but because the sorcerers banished them here. Everything the old legends fear truly lives on the other side of the portal.
And it is into this world — dark, endless, forgotten — that you cross. With no inherited name and no promised throne: only the steel you manage to forge, and the legacy you manage to carve out among everything the world chose to forget.
The journey of those who cross the portal begins with The Awakening.