(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
- Rudyard Kipling
We still don't know why my world is the way it is. Was it always this way or did something happen to make it so? It would be a drab history if things hadn't happened to make things the way they are. So what were they like before?
In ages past Foran was a typical medieval feudal society, all human, but with a little sci-fi thrown in. The evil fairyfolk were kept well away from threatening towns and farmers by an elite order of Energy Knights, paladins to the lords of Foran. The Energy Knights led the Exoknights, men in mechanical exo-skeletal suits, 8 feet tall that made them soldiers to be reckoned with. Not all lords could see eye to eye and so there was the occasional war between kingdoms, but most of the time there was peace.
There came a time when a sage, who was adviser to one of the lords, the names of both have been long forgotten, began dabbling in alchemy and mystic theory, things that natural science could neither explain or disprove. This sage was the first to make contact with the Void, a space permeating and surrounding all of reality, everywhere yet nowhere and separated from the real with no avenue of interaction, until now.
The Void possessed a consciousness with which the sage learned to communicate. Fascinated and enspelled by this new promise of knowledge and power to dominate all of Foran, the sage allowed himself to be drawn in to the Void's influence. He began to study it's arts and took a group of followers that he taught to contact the void as well under his tutelage. These men learned to charm the minds of mortals, call lightning from the sky, move things without lifting a finger, and spew fire from their empty hands. They became wizards. Prolonged contact with the void and possibly the extensive use of magic slowly drained all color from them. Their hair and skin, even the pupils of their eyes went pale and they adopted clothing to match. They became known as the White Ones.
Some of the lords began to suspect that the White Ones were becoming a danger. The common people feared them for their appearance and strange ways. As they became more twisted physically and mentally by the Void, that fear of them only grew. By the time the lords decided to act against them it was too late, the White Ones had amassed too much power to be subdued so easily.
The White Ones employed as servants a creature they called Troll, which they claimed to have created from nothing. In fact, wizards who ventured too close to the Void too quickly became trolls, it was the final form of their degradation. Careful White Ones learned to harness this process and began creating Troll slaves for themselves, while peasants vanished mysteriously. Trolls were pitiful lost things with no memory of their former selves, with no anchor in the world apart from their masters. Being creatures of the Void, so infused with its essence, Trolls often grew to be more powerful than their masters, though great pains were taken to keep this knowledge from them.
When the lords of Foran united against the White Ones, the ensuing war racked the kingdoms. Entire towns were swallowed by the earth, castles were turned to rubble, towers the White Ones had built were toppled. In the end, the last White One fell, but not before the lords were dead and the kingdoms were crippled beyond recognition.
The Trolls seized the opportunity and abandoned their masters in their moment of weakness, in what became known as the Troll Exodus. They fled the holdings of the White Ones in droves, unerringly aimed for each other. In the central kingdom they pooled into a mass of thousands. They tasted freedom and wanted nothing but escape, and in their flight destroyed anything and anyone that crossed their giant path. They swarmed to the mountains and disappeared into their cracks and tunnels, leaving devastation in their wake. It was the trolls that laid the blanket of darkness over the world which would block the sun for all times to come.
Civilization as the people of Foran knew it was gone. In this new dark world, remote villages and the few survivors of the destruction of others found themselves abandoned. Their lords were dead, families shattered, homes razed and broken, and the world had been engulfed in constant night. Independently of each other, they began to rebuild, afraid to venture out and seek other survivors before securing a safe home.
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