The wind whispered through the ancient forest, playful and wistful, weaving between trunks that had stood for millennia. It carried with it the scent of pine and dirt, brushing against sentinel trees that had once been worshipped as spirits. Below, a river roared, untamed and furious, as if raging against the very bones of the world.


    Once, the forest had been a name sung in reverence, whispered by firelight, etched into stone by hands long returned to soil. The people who had lived beneath its canopy had spoken to trees and stars and understood the rhythm of root and wind. They had left offerings at moss-covered shrines, wrapped words in ritual, and bound their lives to something greater than themselves.


    There were those who still remembered the forest’s true name, before the harmony of the Weave was silenced beneath iron and ash. Now, it was just another woodland, mapped and categorized. Ancient, yes. But forgotten. Like most of the old ways.


    Where once the glades teemed with magical beasts and flora sang with the resonance of the Weave, now only silence remained. The Empire’s expansion had driven back the sacred in the name of progress. The progenitor races had watched their memory fade, swallowed by the tide of steel and smog.


    Now the Empire ruled with its books that explained everything and understood nothing. With its schools and its maps and its polished coinage stamped with smiling kings.


    The Weave was bound and bottled, studied in classrooms, and dissected by scholars who could name every part of a flower but had never smelled one in bloom.


    They rose cities taller than ever before. Monolithic walls stretched like mountain ranges. Races once scattered across continents now coexisted beneath the banners of the Union Conclave.


    Dwarves lent their stonecraft to human ambition, boring tunnels through the mountains and connecting cities with subterranean rails that wound through the depths of Stonesharth all the way to Brassford. Halflings cornered markets and brokered power behind polished smiles, while Nyms whispered through the shadows, holding auctions for artifacts older than nations and Beastkin worked the fields, tilling the land their ancestors once ruled.


    The Old Tongue—once spoken in reverence, each word a key to the fabric of the world was lost. Its meaning scattered, its power buried. The ancient songs of the Weave now lay silent, drowned beneath the hum of machines and the march of progress.


    But not all was lost.


    In time, the younger races, humans, dwarves, and others, discovered how to bind with the Weave and finally they had achieved power they had always wanted.


    But with that power came ascent and collapse.


    The union conclave collapsed and the Empire shattered. Kingdoms rose like tidal waves, only to be torn apart by their own ambitions. Wars erupted, braking the brittle peace carefully cultivated by treaty and blood. Alliances fractured. Cities crumbled and were rebuilt again.


    And still, they pressed onward. New lands were charted. Old ones renamed. Curiosity replaced reverence.


    In some corners of the world, memory fought back.


    There were elders who still whispered the names of the Firstborn into their fires. Traveling merchants who passed along stories not found in any book. Hermits who carved forgotten glyphs into stone and bled offerings into the soil, hoping the earth still remembered what the people had forgotten.


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    And in one such school, seated behind stacks of borrowed books and messily written papers, sat a boy no older than twelve.


    He had no titles. No lineage worth noting. But within him burned a hunger not easily quenched. A hunger for the forgotten power that had once shaped the world.


    He read everything he could. Studied maps that no longer matched the land. Dug through legends dismissed as fairy tales. While others studied to pass their exams and bond with powerful beasts, he studied to find truth and real power.


    Others laughed. Called him deluded. But he knew.


    There were truths buried beneath the layers of revision and ridicule. There was power in the past. Real power. Not the measured formulas of imperial magi or the lifeless diagrams of classroom resonance, but the kind that moved through root and river, blood and stone.


    And in time, something answered.


    At the edge of his search, where lore became whispers and fact became forbidden, a man found him.


    An unassuming figure. Who was neither old nor young, handsome nor ugly.


    He leaned in, quiet as shadow, and whispered truths the boy had only dreamed of. Of the Firstborn. Of the Weave in its raw form. Of the old names that still held power.


    He told the boy of the Fyralie, born of deep waters. Their bodies shimmered like light through ice, their hair drifted like kelp in unseen currents. They sang in the undertow and wept with the tide. Wherever rivers bled or oceans sighed, the Fyralie watched.


    Of the Fae, those not made for the waking world. Their limbs too graceful, their smiles too sharp. They walked dreams as easily as roads, and spoke truths only in riddles.


    Of the Giants, stone-blooded and slow-hearted, who slept beneath mountains and remembered when the stars were closer. They moved rarely, but when they did, the world would shift to make room.


    Of the Sandari, who walked the edges of the world. Nomads of the horizon, with voices like wind over salt. They carried their homes in story and song, their skin shifting to match dust and sun.


    And then, he spoke of the Orrani.


    The first to name the forest. The last to remember it.


    He told the boy of their skin that bore the pattern of bark and moss and their ears that curled like maple leaves in spring. He told him of the knowledge they keep and of the ancient powers they keep hidden away.


    They were the Firstborn, all of them. They were not born of flesh and womb, but drawn from the world’s breath. From stone, water, wind, root, and sand.


    But time dulled blood. The others came loud, fast and many. They called themselves kings and builders, thinkers and makers. And still they carried pieces of that first breath, buried deep in their bones.


    Most had forgotten. But not all.


    The man told the boy where to go. Where to find what the others had forgotten. Where power still slept. And how, if he was willing—truly willing—he could take it.


    The boy listened.


    And then, he left.


    The man’s promises echoed in his mind, soft and irresistible, like the pull of an unfinished thought.


    He journeyed toward a forest long forgotten, where the wind whispered through the ancient trees, playful and wistful, weaving between trunks that had stood for millennia. Where it carried with it the scent of pine and dirt, brushing against trees that had once been worshipped as spirits. Where a river roared, untamed and furious, as if raging against the very bones of the world.


    He passed the edges of mapped roads. Past old signs bearing names that no one remembered. Past broken shrines overtaken by ivy and silence. Each step further from the world of classrooms and ledgers, deeper into something older and forgotten.


    He crossed streams that remembered prayers. He stepped around stones carved with glyphs eroded by time but not erased. He passed through wind that smelled of things that hadn’t walked the world in centuries.


    When he reached its edge, he paused.


    The name came to him as though the man whispered it in his ear. A word older than kings, buried beneath maps and smoke.


    Valthara, he whispered.


    Here, answers waited. Power slept. History was carved into the roots of the trees and carried on the breath of the Weave.


    This is where his life would begin.


    And so, he stepped forward, entering the slumbering forest.


    And behind him, the wind whispered secrets to the forest.


    And for the first time in a long time, the forest listened back.