The energy inside every Arcanus is not unique to Arcanus. The same core runs through every living thing in Ethora — animal, plant, and person alike, drawn from a single balance the world keeps on its own. It has always been this way, and it was never meant to be touched directly. Left alone, it regulates itself. Disturbed, it does not forgive the disturbance.

In the years before Empurios, that balance was disturbed. A number of forbidden practitioners began experimenting directly on the life-force itself — not merely studying it, but reshaping it, forcing it into forms it was never meant to take. The result was not power. It was ruin: creatures whose energy no longer answered to them, twisted and violent — the first mutants.

King Hidan led the royal army against the practitioners for a hundred years. He said it was for the crown, and left it there — he wasn’t a man who explained himself further, and no one who served under him ever heard him say otherwise. But the war never went further than where the ruin reached for his family and his people, and he was in the field himself far more often than a king needed to be. Whatever it was for, he fought like it was personal.

The sun is setting. However, something is off. Unlike the usual orange and pink clouds, the sky turns bright purple and yellow. You get an uneasy feeling, a ringing in your ears, and you decide to hide in your house as you start to experience an uneasy feeling. You get inside and eventually doze off in your favorite chair. Suddenly you are awakened by the violent shaking of the ground, your instincts immediately kick in and you try to hide, rubble is falling everywhere so in a split second you decide to run to the door. When you finally make it outside you realize something is not right with this earthquake. Instead of the usual 10–30 seconds, the ground proceeds to shake even after several minutes, you lose your footing and you fall to the ground. Slowly you feel your consciousness slipping away, and everything turns black.

You slowly awaken, opening your eyes. You’re blinded by the bright rising sun, weak with hunger, and overwhelmed by the feeling of thirst. You start to slowly take in your surroundings, images of the disaster coming back to you in flashes as your head stings. You stand up and find the rubble that used to be your house, hoping to find anything of value. But... plants have grown over it? The scene around you looks like no one has been there for years. You’re sure the disaster happened last evening... right?

The disaster was named Empurios: the balance correcting itself, all at once, for what had been done to it. It did not ask who was responsible. Everyone alive carried the same missing time, the same absence of memory, because the world does not scale its answer to the size of the crime. It answers everyone who lives inside it.

Every injury from the earthquake was gone. What remained was the missing time — the same gap, for everyone.

Something else came with the correction. Voices, in every mind — the Judgment Gods, present from that day on. No one has ever agreed on whether they arrived because of Empurios, or arrived as it.

Islands appeared in the ocean, off the top-left of the continent, bound by a barrier no one has ever broken through. The forbidden practitioners responsible were sealed inside it. There are no Judgment Gods on the other side of that barrier. Some say that’s not a coincidence — that it holds an older, un-corrected version of the world, from before the balance forced itself right.

Ethora had three kings, not one — three siblings, each with an equal claim on the crown. Sys was the diplomat. Hidan led the army. The third was barely seen even before Empurios, and vanished sometime during the hundred-year war against the forbidden practitioners. Ethora had stopped counting him among its rulers before Empurios ever happened. No one today can tell you his name.

That left two — and once the war was over and the practitioners sealed away, only one of them still had a kingdom that needed what he did. Hidan had spent a hundred years leading an army; with the war won and nothing left for a soldier-king to lead, that role simply stopped being necessary. Sys didn’t take Hidan’s throne. There wasn’t one left to take. He just kept doing what he’d always done — govern — and became the only king Ethora still needed.

Hidan did not take this well. He had given a hundred years to a war he understood, and the world that came after had no place left for the man he’d been. People called him a reminder of a time they wanted to forget. He did not disagree with them, not out loud, but he stopped attending the things a king was supposed to attend, and eventually he stopped being anywhere anyone could find him.

Velkss stayed. He had adapted to the peace faster than his father — spying and infiltration made a strange kind of use for a former royal ranger even in peacetime, and Sys leaned on him for it more than either of them said aloud. But watching his father get quietly pushed out of his own kingdom wore on him. When Hidan finally disappeared, Velkss asked his uncle for leave to go looking for him. Sys gave it. Velkss never really stopped traveling after that.

Hidan did not want the old world back exactly as it had been. He wanted the Judgment Gods gone — he’d come to believe they offered nothing but fear dressed up as peace, watching everyone’s smallest choices and calling it justice. He never organized anything to make that happen. He didn’t have to. Enough people had their own reasons to want the gods gone, or wanted an excuse for what they’d already done, that a following gathered around his name without his say-so.

In Year 150, that following carried out a massacre in the west — hundreds of villagers, killed in Hidan’s name, by people claiming to act for him. He had not ordered it. He had not known about it until it was finished.

Killing on that scale does something to the gods living in every mind that does it, and something similar happens to the man they claim to act for. Hidan’s own Love and Life went into slumber under the weight of a crime he didn’t commit but couldn’t undo either. What was left was Hatred, uncontested — and the twisting of his own Divine gift into something else entirely. Corrupt did not exist before that year. It does now, and it is his.

He has not spoken to anyone who remembers the man before Year 150. Not because he can’t. Because there’s nothing left to say that would change what happened.

The barrier has never been perfectly stable, but corruption — the same corruption that hollows out a single Arcanus — wears at it further with every generation, now multiplied across a whole population. By the current year, 300 AE, weak points open at random, long enough for someone to slip through. On the other side, there are no gods watching. That makes the island a place for trade no one else will touch, experiments no one else will permit, and for those who believe the Judgment Gods should never have arrived at all.