It is the Age of Gelding. The Nether Regions are reeling from the desolations of a ruinous conflict that engulfed much of the known world. Every nation bears the sobering vestiges of war and cataclysms visited—scars now native to the lands that bear them. Yet still do the embers of hatred flicker and dance within smoldering hearts. In a recurring event known as the Crucible, nations compete in ritual combat to secure access to zonal resources within their rivals’ borders or be otherwise forced to acquire them at extortionary rates. Under the ubiquitous gaze of the Consociation of Khalik, an extranational arbitrator wielding supreme military might, the Great Nations send waves of their own citizenry at one another with callous indifference, save for the desire to see their dominance assured and their rivals brought low.

Some among the learned and scholarly speak wistfully of halcyon days, as if tapping into an ancestral memory shared collectively among them yet persistently out of focus. It is said then that bones once held great reverence for all life in its myriad forms, wanting for nothing in the nourishing presence of the empyrean. These idyllic reveries present a stark contrast to that which contemporary history has proven—violence is and always has been endemic to a bone’s existence. Feuds between societies, resource competition, and grinding wars of attrition have carved a festering wound in the psyche of a people that have hardly known respite from its incessant throb for over a millennium.