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There are a few among the elves and their blood-relations who can remember the world the way it used to be. The world the way it was before an age of relentless and devastating war.
Those few will tell you of the Red Empire, ruled over by Emperor Rein the Dragina. They will tell you that it was not a good empire, no, that it ruled through fear and force. But, at the very least, it kept things together. It managed to force the world into well over two centuries of strict peace. And though those who ruled it longed for power, they were men of reason.
Then the Red Empire, after long years of global hegemony, began to sink into isolationism, complacent in its domination of the world. And in the absence of its authority, there was a terrible surge of insanity and violence.
It was the Seekers and, more specifically, Supreme Seeker Asmodean Nyruvial who heralded the dawn of the Age of Mortal Wars. A destructive madman bent on the elimination of all lesser (non-human) races, he and his followers set an entire continent ablaze. Deisach, once a bastion of stability and strength, was reduced to smoking ruins and piles of corpses. In a conflict called the Blood Wars, Asmodean threw a stable and balanced world into chaos before he himself was put into an unmarked grave.
The worst part about all this was that, as terrible as the Supreme Seeker was, he was merely the first in a long line of war-mongering madmen that was to plague the world. Fou Lu had become a world that had forgotten its Gods, and what had once been considered blasphemous was now commonplace. Kings and rulers replaced statues of the divine with statues of themselves, breeding a world of power-hungry dictators kept in check only by the Red Empire's presence.
Shortly after the Seeker Wars, the Red Empire, whose forces were stretched to the breaking point, shattered. And every ruler of every kingdom in the world was suddenly free to entertain their visions of power and glory.
In the wars that followed, the face of Fou Lu changed forever. Ancient and great cities that had stood the test of time for millenia were burnt to ash. The advent of gunpowder and muskets only added to the slaughter. For centuries the wars raged on, entire generations lost in the flames of war. It is from these bloody battlefields that the powers of today's world have risen. Whether their intent was to end the bloodshed and give mercy to those suffering, or whether they were the product of one of the power-hungry butchers, these are the Empires that now hold sway over Fou Lu, five hundred years after the collapse of the Red Empire.
This is the modern Fou Lu, the world that the Gods have returned to in order to make a desperate attempt to keep the mortal races from reducing each other to ash and dust. This is the world that has seen more war in the past five centuries than most do during the entire course of civilization. War still rages on, but the six empires that dominate Fou Lu's political structure have managed to be somewhat successful in avoiding war with each other. It should be hoped that this will continue, because technology and recent advancements in magic have ensured that the next major war will be devastating enough to make the past five hundred years look like a joke.
The people of Fou Lu, standing among the rubble and ruin of former ages, crumbled monuments of a happier time, ache for peace and a hero.
Join us, won't you?
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