Prologue

Everterra is a land shaped by possibility and ruin in equal measure.

Its vastness resists comprehension, reaching from restless seas and ancient forests to sun-scoured deserts and places deliberately erased from memory. Across its long history, civilizations have risen, fractured, and vanished, leaving behind ruins half-buried by time and stories worn thin by retelling.

This is an age not yet forgotten.

It is called the Age of Men.

Once, the peoples of Everterra lived without great war. Conflict existed, as it always does, but it was contained — border skirmishes, rival claims, ambitions checked by balance rather than conquest. The races of the land lived alongside one another in uneasy tolerance, bound by custom, distance, and necessity.

That balance ended with the rise of a human king.

His name was Canaan.

At first, his ascent drew little notice. He emerged quietly, consolidating control over the southeastern reaches of Everterra through favors, bargains, and the convenient removal of those who resisted him. Many believed his rivals died by chance or misfortune. No proof ever surfaced to suggest otherwise.

By the time his intentions became visible, it was already too late.

Canaan ruled from Mount Canaan, a fortified metropolis that became both symbol and engine of his authority. In public, he was measured, charismatic, generous in speech. Behind closed doors, he ruled with precision and cruelty, reshaping the land through forceful diplomacy, bribery, and fear.

Lords who pledged allegiance were rewarded with titles, protection, and status. Those who did not vanished. Armies followed, not always by loyalty, but by necessity. Rank was offered freely to any able-bodied man willing to fight beneath his banner. Wealth was promised. Order was enforced.

Within five years, the South-Eastern Domain fell.

Within thirty, the majority of human civilization stood beneath his rule.

Canaan did not immediately wage war on the elder races. He did not need to. His power spread through infrastructure rather than invasion — fortresses raised at strategic crossings, castles converted into labor facilities, cities transformed into supply chains feeding his machine.

Prisoners were not executed.

They were repurposed.

The elder races watched all of this and withdrew.

Not from cowardice. From arithmetic. The elves retreated into forests that men still feared to enter; the dwarves sealed their mountain roads one by one, each closure announced by nothing except the fact of it. The orc clans of the eastern steppes, never united, were dealt with the way Canaan dealt with everything divided — separately, patiently, one bargain and one betrayal at a time. And the Darkling, who had never held territory, who had lived scattered among the others for as long as any record ran, discovered what scattered peoples always discover when an age turns: that having no walls of your own means every wall can be closed against you.

It was said, in the manner of things said quietly, that Canaan feared no army — but that he had scholars in his employ whose only work was the study of the elder races' oldest stories, and that what he had them searching for, in all those rotting archives, was never spoken of at all. Whatever they sought, the search ran northward. Year by year, expedition by expedition. Toward the ice. Toward the erased places.

Toward the end of the known world, where he built his most feared compound.

Among the many erected during this expansion, one inspired fear beyond all others.

The Ninth Gate.

Built against the northern edge of the Dark Forest, pressed close to the impassable icebound mountains that marked the end of the known world, the Ninth Gate was both institution and warning. It housed political dissidents, criminals, and the inconvenient — those who could not be allowed to exist freely but were still useful.

Useful things were not wasted.

The Ninth Gate was never meant to be lived in.

It was meant to be endured.