Mana...
This is the basic energy that seeped through every living creature.
An easily perceivable force whose texture, intensity, and colour varied with each life that created it.
It is vibrant, elegant... a gift from nature... a blessing...
But humanity, as it always does, learned to take that beauty and turn it into weapons... into what is now known as Magic.
In this magical world, all of mankind clings to a single vast continent—the Great Land—divided between four great kingdoms and the lesser nations caught between them.
For a long time, those four kingdoms bled the world dry, warring for dominance and control, using brutal military tactics, weaponry, and, of course, magic wielded by humans capable of fully harnessing their mana.
These people became known as Mages.
This war persisted for five hundred years...
Cities were destroyed as collateral; clans were wiped out, and countless lives were lost from this worthless, selfish bloodshed...
Until peace finally came...
Not by understanding or wisdom, but by power.
The South-Land's Monarchs rose without equal—mages so far beyond the rest that resistance became meaningless. At their head stood the Mage Emperor, a figure who did not end the war so much as silence it.
And so, the world was forced into peace.
A fragile thing. Celebrated. Enforced.
Built on ash, along with the carried whispers of old grudges and the ever-present shadow of what had been fought for and lost.