Long before Eldritch University's torchlit halls echoed with the footsteps of scholars, Helteria was a wound in reality—a fractured world where the Veil between realms frayed like rotting flesh. Shadows here weren't mere absence of light; they were alive, hungry entities born from the Void, whispering madness into the minds of the unwary. They slithered through cracks in the earth, coiling around the hearts of the living, promising power in exchange for sanity.
The horrors beyond the university's rune-etched walls defied comprehension. Demons, spawned from the sulfurous pits of Infernus, wore skins of flayed nightmares—towering brutes with jagged obsidian horns, mouths unhinging to reveal rows of teeth that ground bones to dust. Their roars curdled blood, summoning swarms of lesser fiends: skittering abominations with too many legs, eyes weeping black ichor, and tentacles that burrowed into flesh to puppet the fallen.
Dragons ruled the storm-wracked skies, ancient leviathans whose scales shimmered like shattered obsidian. Not noble beasts of legend, these were Void-tainted wyrms, their breaths a miasma of shadowflame that withered forests to ash and twisted survivors into gibbering thralls. Monsters prowled the wilds in endless variety—colossal behemoths with hides of writhing thorns, spectral hounds whose howls summoned blizzards of razor ice, and colossal krakens rising from abyssal seas to drag airships into lightless depths.
Even within the university's wards, darkness festered. Non-humans bore scars of the wilds: dragonkin with molten veins pulsing beneath scales, elves haunted by ancestral pacts with shadow spirits, tieflings whose demonic heritage manifested in involuntary flares of hellfire. Humans like Jade fared no better, their ambitions drawing the Void's gaze. Hunters, the grim reapers of this nightmare, ventured into the fray clad in armor forged from dragon bone, wielding blades quenched in demon blood. Yet for every beast they felled, two more clawed from the rifts.
In this eternal twilight, where hope was a fool's lantern, Jade Blackwood dared to embrace the shadows—not as enemy, but ally. Until the night she tore the Veil too wide.