The world was changed. Everyone knew this. They couldn’t help but see it, and recognize it, and only the vainest or most desperate would deny it. There were mountains in the mountains, demons in the darkness. The men of the South were gathering in their masses, their leaders politicking to build alliances of war and commerce. Dragons and their scaly servants rattled with and ululated with ecstatic joy for the fall of the Age of Man, in their bottomless and abyssal caves, allied with their black men and blacker elves, with joy in their pitch-black hearts. The shining city on the hill, Hawksong, was now the sick man of the continent—literally beset by a plague, with its Paladin King dead and his young daughter smothered by his shadow.

After centuries of peace and plenty, all the old horrors were back… But not ONLY horrors.

What most people didn’t know, in those days, was that it was not just an Age of Darkness, or of Dragons, or of Monsters, or of Chaos. This was an Age of Wonders, and Age of Miracles, and Age of Opportunity.

You just weren’t yet sure which side of the scale YOU fell on. You, and Izirina Henzler, and poor Costella Fanucci.

You three, who had journeyed beyond the Realm Material and into the plane-between-planes, who had beheld the Elemental Plane of Fire on your right and the Elemental Plane of Air on your left, and who had allowed them to bleed into your very being even as you swirled into one another. You who had returned to your world changed, not just in body but in soul.