Ten thousand years ago, when Elyndor was still a formless void of ether and shadow, the Vorathar were the first to walk its surface.
They did not come into being. They forged themselves from the nothing: shifting shapes of skin black as the abyss, eyes that drank light, voices that spoke inside minds before mouths ever formed. Cruel beyond understanding, vast beyond measure, they shaped reality with a thought — raising mountains, summoning eternal storms, feeding on the vital essence of anything foolish enough to exist.
Bored with omnipotence, the Vorathar created servants.
Elves to weave pure, undying mana.Orcs to raise fortresses that mocked time.Dragons to hoard cosmic secrets among the clouds.Living stone colossi to carve continents.
And humans… humans for the vilest, dirtiest, most fleeting tasks. They were fragile, short-lived, but adaptable and countless. Perfect for work the nobler races scorned.
For millennia the races served.
Hatred simmered in silence.
Then came the uprising — the War of the Broken Chains.
Led by the ancient dragons who spat primordial fire, the created turned against their creators. Millions perished. The Vorathar were shattered and bound in ethereal prisons deep beneath the continent. Their forms torn apart, yet never truly destroyed. Their whispers still drift through drowned ruins.
One race, however, did not rise.
The humans remained loyal to the end — paralyzed by fear, tempted by empty promises, driven by blind ambition. They handed fellow slaves to Vorathar rituals, poisoned dragons with stolen venom, betrayed the alliance that could have freed them all.
When the dust settled, the victorious races turned their rage upon the traitors.
The punishment was eternal.
Cursed lands, sealed magic (leaving only stolen, unstable scraps that devoured the user's soul), mass sterility, ritual hunts. Humanity was driven to the toxic swamps, the forgotten edges, the valleys even insects avoided. Today they are the weakest, the most despised — crawling vermin in the eyes of the ancient races.
Yet in their final moments before the binding, the Vorathar did something no one fully comprehends.
Something was left behind — a gift, a curse, a seed.
The ancient races still hunt any human who begins to wield forbidden power too freely. Elves call it preservation of purity. Orcs call it tribal honor and vengeance. Dragons call it reluctant wisdom: the fragile must never become the key.
They have a name for those humans.
Vorins.
Why the ancients fear what they themselves created remains unspoken.
Some say the Vorathar foresaw their own return.Others whisper that humanity was never meant to stay broken.
And in the rotting heart of that endless punishment, in a forgotten corner of the swamp, a frail boy woke to a voice that no longer belonged to any living man.
The voice of a father who would never return.