Worlds Without End

Foreword

There has always been magic. And magic has a life of its own. It comes and goes without our control. It flows through the world as it will.

This is how the world was Awakened.

Magical energy ran through the veins of the world like blood through humans. It changed her. And it changed her people.

And it came to pass that events shaped by magic began to alter history.

Earthquakes tore the earth apart. The Four Horse- men of the Apocalypse seemed to be riding across the world. Conquest, War, Famine, and Death raged unabated. The VITAS plague alone took almost a quarter of the world's population in the year 2010.

Then came 2011: the Year of Chaos.

Governments fell. Famine gripped the poor and stalked the wealthy. Nuclear power failed, causing massive radiation fallout. War peppered the world, toppling heads of state, creating new countries.

And then there were the children.

At first, they were called deformities. Then muta- tions. The superstitious called them changelings, and saw the Hand of God at play. Finally, science of- fered a label: UGE. Unexplained Genetic Expres- sion. Everywhere you looked the media ran stories about these babies, calling them elves and dwarfs. The age-old specter of prejudice had found new vic- tims.

At the end of 2011, the most dramatic event of the newly Awakened world occurred. The great worm, Ryumyo, rose from his long sleep inside Mt. Fuji. Thousands watched as the first dragon the techno- logical world had seen took to the sky. In dragon fashion he ignored humans. Humanity got its first close-up look at a dragon when Dunkelzahn con- sented to a series of trideo interviews. The ratings were fantastic and launched Dunkelzahn as an inter- national celebrity.

In 2014, The Native American Nations claimed responsibility for the eruption of Redondo Peak, This cataclysmic event buried nearby Los Alamos in volcanic ash. In a desperate measure to assert con- trol, the United States government sent federal agents in. to stop the NAN uprising. They were swept into oblivion by tornadoes resulting from the powerful shamanistic magic of the Great Ghost Dance.

After this, the changes in the world began to happen at a faster and faster pace. There was the so- called goblinization of 2021. Overnight, people be- gan to change into fantastic creatures once thought to exist only in fairy tales. The stuff of legend.

And buried deep within the Awakening was a mystery from the past.

A time so far away from present events that only a handful of people knew the truth.

About how the world once was. And how it might become again.

When magic was as much a part of life as breath- ing, or eating, or seeing, or feeling. And how the world was made full of heroes and troubadours, and mages, and wild things the modern world could not fathom. And how the very magic that flowed through this world also drew the greatest evil to it.

And when that evil came for the people, one great race understood the futility of fighting this new plague upon the land. The Theran Empire promised a way to survive the hundreds of years this Scourge would last. They sent the people of the world into deep underground kaers where they would live magically sealed against the invaders until the time when they could come back to the surface again.

But such generosity of vision always has its price.

However, that is another story.

And now we have come back again to the magic. And to those who would guard the world from the horrors of the past.

Those who have lived through it all before.