Lemuria: A Land Beyond the Empire

It is held as an unequivocal truth that before the rise of Emperor Banfield Firehand Yolak, the land now known as Lemuria was but a patchwork of blood-soaked tribes and feuding clans. The term ‘kingdom’ is generous, for few bore the mark of sovereignty in any formal sense. Only Armourers Terris, fractured though it was, held the semblance of a crown.
Indeed, even that ancient realm had been cleaved in two centuries prior, when twin princes of the bloodline sought dominion. To avert civil war, the land was split: Western Armourers Terris and Eastern Armourers Terris—brothers parted by steel and pride.

The nature of Man is ever to hunger for more. So it was that generation after generation spilled blood in the hope of uniting the sundered kingdom. Yet it was not until the rise of Banfield that such unity was finally forged.

Some Thunderkin chroniclers have claimed that it was in their mountainous domain that the first true kingdom arose. But if the annals of history are to be believed, and if one is to judge by the notorious savagery of their rites, it is a claim difficult to substantiate.

Yet before the tribes, before the crowns, before even the memory of steel and script... what was there?

When did Time begin?

This is a question only we, in the vaulted halls of the Order of Chroniclers, dare to pose aloud. For though we toil in the tangible: wars, reigns, decrees, and deaths, it is impossible to chart the course of history without brushing the edge of theology.

There would be no Lemuria…without Ashalen.

There exists a widely held belief, particularly amongst the devout and those educated within the walls of ecclesiastical colleges, that the world we now call Lemuria was not the first of its kind, nor its current state a natural evolution. Rather, it is said to be a salvaged remnant. Rebuilt, reformed, reborn.

Ornate Scalian-Godslight, most revered among the Godslights of the Church of Ashalen and a scholar without peer, once postulated that hundreds of thousands of years before the formation of the Empire, before even the naming of Lemuria, the world had torn itself apart. Not through war or natural cataclysm, but through the sheer weight of chaos and the failure of divine stewardship.

It was Ashalen, the Supreme Being, who is believed to have intervened. Not as a wrathful god, nor a distant architect, but as a guardian of last resort. From his very essence—whatever that may be—he is said to have spurned seven beings: the Archangels.

These Archangels, unlike the lesser gods of antiquity who demanded worship and spilled oceans of blood in their names, were born to guard. Each was placed in some remote corner of the world, tasked not with dominion, but with vigilance. Their mission: to prevent the world from tearing asunder again.

Their corporeal existence, of course, remains a matter of intense debate. Amongst Chroniclers, you will find those who dismiss them as metaphors for natural forces, or personifications of virtue. But Scalian-Godslight has claimed—without ever presenting it to public scrutiny—that unequivocal evidence of their existence is kept within the sealed vaults beneath the Grand Cathedral of His Almighty Ashalen in Browensford Capital.

From these Angels, so say the oldest oral traditions, came the first forms of life.

From their ribs, came mankind.From their breath, the birds and winds. From their tears, the oceans. From their sweat, the beasts.

And from the salt of the sea, mingled with the fury of a volcanic eruption on an islet long swallowed by time, came the first of the Giants.

Whether such tales are symbolic, allegorical, or divine truth that is not the role of a Chronicler to decide. What we must acknowledge, however, is this: no historian, no scholar, no mage nor mystic has yet proven the true origin of man, nor giant, nor daemon. If answers exist, they are buried beneath both stone and scripture.

And perhaps, in such absence of certainty, we are wise to consider even the most extraordinary of beliefs.