Hawksong. For a five hundred years—nay, even a hundred before then, during the War of Dragons and Elves!—it was known around the world. It was known for its might, its prosperity, its glory and its goodness. Under the reign of its Paladin Kings, an unbroken line of divinely-aligned warriors and diplomats, it established the great peace which all but defined the modern world for the peoples of the northern and western lands. Humans and elves, dwarves and halflings and gnomes, immigrants from the arid Southlands and distant Orient came to its ports. Races as distinct and distant as orcs, goblinoids, and beastmen pled fealty, for what else was anyone to do? Hawksong WAS the fabled ‘shining city on the hill’, a beacon to all the gods’ children…

Except those spawned by the Gods of Darkness.

For aeons, the children of the Old gods, the Dark Gods Beyond and Below, have eyed that so-called shining city avariciously and will ill-intent. Afeared of eagle-headed, lion-clawed war-chimeras and the holy warriors sat astride them, unable to muster to military force to topple an army which can be mustered to the tens of thousands, the scaly and slit-pupiled descendants of the Reptilian Master Race could do little but spitefully sabotage trade, stage the odd assassination, and generally make a nuisance of themselves. It was only recently, with an unexpected act of ambition from a lowly half-human Degenerate, that the scales began to tip. Seizing first the attention of the Dark Gods, and then the blood of a dragon-descendant, she weakened the shining city and birthed the perfect weapon to finally topple it entirely from its vainglorious and lofty place atop that hill-of-ages:

You.