The world was changing. Many denied it, as well they might. How COULD they not? Simpleton and scholar alike had enjoyed an era of peace prosperity, and nobody wanted that stability to end.

Well, maybe SOME did. SOME had never had peace, or prosperity, or stability to begin with. And some, neither simple nor merely scholastic, pursued a deeper truth: the lies that underpinned and propped up the illusion of peace, the façade of stability. Some saw the writing on the wall, and chose not to close their eyes and turn away, but to DECIPHER that dread script.

Before the Death of the Paladin King, the bloody rise of the Empire of Evil, the Rebirth of Dragons… There was just a strange little girl name Izirina Henzler, sitting in the eye of a hurricane that had not yet begin to whorl with its full fury…

And you. Her half-elven rival-turned-friend.

Well, you liked to THINK you were still friends. You’d been estranged this past year, ever since a drug-fueled vision had clued you into a terrible secret, and your unauthorized researches into decades-old records had revealed still darker depths of conspiracy.

Izirina Henzler was no normal girl, but… Something else. Not just a foundling raised to be a magical prodigy, but some sort of… Experiment, or weapon, or WORSE.

Her ‘mother’, the Archmage of Hawksong’s prestigious Mages’ Tower, was party to a sinister plot involving serpentine subversives and advanced biological magics, to uncertain ends and with seemingly malevolent means.

And the only ones who might have had the answers you sought, to learn the TRUTH about what happened twenty years ago and what the Archmage has done and WOULD do, were some outcast goblins dwelling amongst a ramshackle band of ruthless raiders.