Song of Hope.

In the year 8799 AD, humanity experienced the single greatest socio-political Schism in its history.

They discovered that the universe was collapsing on itself, ending all life and leaving nothing behind. One faction, the Scientists For Higher Existence, said that they should use what they had learned in their time on the planet to ascend their minds to the next plane, whilst the Luddite groups preached that technology would destroy us more devastatingly than the coming Armageddon would.

In a way, they were both right.

After years of civil war, the remaining scientists uploaded their consciousnesses  into the void beyond the universe, and the remaining Luddites sat at home, waiting for the end.

It came.

The Luddites' souls were trapped in the matrix of energy left after the end, tortured forever in the agonies of their deaths. The Infernals were left after the humanity had been scalded away from the Luddites by their pain.

The scientists, overloaded with the knowledge that the new universe gave them, became as gods. The Celestials were their descendants.

Studying the matrix, the Infernals saw that by manipulating its currents, they could create a new world on which to build an army, an army to storm heaven and free the demons that they had become.

So, they created a world -- a terrible place of black rock and liquid fire, the air full of noxious gasses, and crawling on the surface a race of hardy people held beneath the whip of twisted demons.

This gave rise to the Infernal Auspices: Earth, Fire, and Life.

The Celestials, in their compassion, saw the people, and used their powers to cool the planet, bathing it in rains for three days, until the fires turned to rock, and the skins of the slaves no longer baked just to be alive.

The gasses were dispelled, replacing them was the sweet nectar they remembered from their time on a planet; their servant, the Dragon, they sent to purge the new-formed world of the demons.

This gave rise to the Celestial Auspices, Air; water; and the warrior Dragon.

All life on the new world Anno was made of a combination of an Infernal and a Celestial Auspice, creating a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

In the second era of the world of Anno, a great dark army rose up from the amorphous nothing simply called "the Chaos", and enslaved entire continents.
These hideously malformed paragons of depravity and their master, the demon Justicar known as Malefex, were only driven back when the forces of the Crimson Guard of the Easterlands joined troops with the redoubtable Ashen Horde of Westmoor in a historic treaty between these two erstwhile enemies. At the great battle of Erin's Dawn, even this tumultuous alliance was nearly overthrown by the pestilential horde of the Fouls until the Celestials themselves deigned to intervene.

The humans were given a powerful weapon, the LightStone Yanu. Wielding this, the Undying Wanderer (the worlds' greatest magus) was able to best the Justicar in magical combat, sealing him from this world.

However, in the fourth era of Anno, the Ashen Horde and the Crimson guard began to make war once more, and reports from the court of the Emerald Throne said that the Emperor grew more unstable by the day, consorting with dark magicians, and darker creatures, until the seas of the Easterland ran red with the blood of innocent sacrifices.

Finally, in an act of staggering insanity, he succeeded where many Fouls had in the past failed: he sundered Yanu.

In the tower where it had been stored, a party of his so-called Nin-Jeti butchered the garrison of guards, and used their sacrifices to power the dark engine LifeSnuffer and separated the LightStone into a number of shards.
Ensuring hope remained, the lingering strands of the Wanderers' magick scattered the stones across the world, to keep it from the grasp of evil.

Slowly, a great cloud advances across the world, bringing despair to the people beneath it. Under the baleful eye of a red-filtered sun, the noxious fumes of the corrupting cloud unmake both man and beast, remaking them as Fouls.

What, then, of these shards?

Where were they fated to fall, and what was to become of them?

In that terrible instant of madness and fire, all around the world, children were being born. These children, their first breaths coinciding with the fracturing of man's last hope, were marked by destiny to bear the shards, and to protect them from the corrupting, damned touch of the Chaos.

Now, fortune does not favour these would-be heroes, for before their coming of age they would feel no benefit from the crystal, nor would they know of the thing's presence in their hearts.

The emperor, consulting with his enslaved demon and his chained oracles, learnt of this development with a twisted smile on his lips, for he knew that those born within his kingdom would be his inside of a day, their hearts removed from their flensed and gutted bodies and brought before him to be joined and remade into the hideous mass of the DarkStone Janu.

Many children fell that day as the merciless purges swept the newly expanding Easterlands, and the Emperor sat on the Jade Throne, befouled by his very touch, and smiled.

Prologue: Song of Fire

Kikuno ran through the streets, hearing the rough breaths of the  men chasing her as they hurled vile abuse.

"Got a present for you, pretty! You gon' loooove it!"

Kikuno sped up, closing her eyes and putting everything she had into her flight, wanting more than anything to escape.

Unbeknownst to her, however, she had more pursuers than she thought...

A second group of three men stepped out in front of her, and she ran into them without realising.

"You shouldn't have tried to escape, precious... We might have let you live, otherwise...."

The circle closed in around her, leering in the half light and pawing at her dress, their drunken hands eclipsing the moon in her eyes and casting bestial shadows on the alley walls as she threw her head back and finally began to scream in earnest.

The crystal, entwined with the filaments of her soul, felt the terrible knell of her distress and added it's own note to her ululating cry of distress, the pitch rising with the beating of her frenzied heart, singing a song of vengeance in tones of light.

Her throat, glowing with strange energies, soon drew the eyes of the inhuman mob, scalding their retinas with a wave of sheer good. As they clutched at their faces, they began to feel the uneasy creeping of the crystals harmonics through their lust driven minds and began to quiver in fear.

Her scream raised in pitch as the crystal drew in more and more of her spirit to weave into it's symphony. The clustered gang clawed at their ears as the sound permeated to the very cores of their beings, and with a sickening "Spleech", barely audible above the wailing, her troubles abruptly ended. Her assailants, leaking scarlet tears from their eyes and ears, crumpled to the ground as Kuniko, her energies fed into the crystal, crumpled to the ground as if every sinew had been cut at once.

When she came to, some hours later, she was wrapped up in a warm blanket, on a comfortable mattress in what appeared to be a well-appointed home.

"Finally woken up, have you?"

A man's voice, from just out of view.

"No, don't try and get up. You've had quite a nasty strain."

He finally walked into view, holding a strange glowing rod which he waved over her chest a few times and watched the colours frantically swirl and change.

"Yep, shard of Janu... No doubt about it."

He clenched his fist, and then unfurled it into some form of hideous appendage, covered in barbs and fearsome prongs.

Almost absentmindedly, he plunged into her heart.

As her eyes filled with blood, Kikuno heard him mutter

"The emperor will be most pleased with me... Give me first picks in the harem, won't he?"

And that, as they say, was that.

                                      Chapter One: Beginnings.

“You can never go home again” – Anon.

Easterland raids were a fact of life out on the Westmoor borders; the Crimson Guard would swoop in like hungry ghosts, appearing from the shadowy borders of the great Chaos and erasing small settlements and homesteads, killing all those inside, if they were lucky.

The boy’s mother was not.

When her family’s mine was raided by the Guard, she and all the other females of age were taken to the great camps inside the Easterland borders to “Service” the passing troops until she died or became pregnant.

Which she promptly did.

She was thrown out into the wilderness to die, but she had the tenacity to drag herself through the blasted wastes back into the Westmoor borders, where she birthed her children and died.

The children, brother and sister, were reviled by the people of the city where they wound up, their eastern blood clearly visible ensuring that no one would take them in.

So it came to be that, at the age of five, they were thrown out onto the streets to take their own chances.

The boy, Mika, gave his all to protect his sister, getting into fight after fight after fight to keep her from harm.

She was shy and retiring, relying almost entirely on her brother to provide for them.

A Don, with a taste for young girls and a profitable business supplying those with similar tastes sent some of his men to collect this reclusive beauty he’d heard so much about…

Only one returned.

Mika was only ten at the time, and already his hands had blood on them.

Another Crime lord, named Marlin, was impressed with this performance, impressed enough to adopt Mika and his sister into his street team, a group of children and teens who would lie, cheat, steal and occasionally kill if they could find a profit in it. For the next seven years, Mika rose steadily to become the most feared and respected agent in the underworld community, yet also remained unflinchingly loyal to his sister and his adoptive father, Marlin.

Marlin’s hideout was located underneath the pub he ran as a front, a “Respectable” establishment that deflected attention away from his thieving legions. He was gathering his most skilled operatives in the caverns below for a mission briefing- a mission that could make them all very, very rich indeed.

Naturally, Mika was in the front row.

“Children, a certain wealthy patron of my fine public house has aired a most… interesting… proposition.

If we can become the biggest criminal scourge this city has ever seen, he will set each and every one of us up for life, with all the money we could desire. So, I want you to go out tonight, and each and every one of you should be a crime wave in your own right.

I want you to be brutal, I want you to be ruthless, and I want you to bring this city to it’s knees!

Make me proud, lads.”

Mika instantly knew what he needed to do: one of the city judges had been cracking down on Marlin, constantly swooping down on the pub in order to “Catch him at it”.

Mika was going to stop his nosing, for good.

He found himself at the judge’s palatial mansion in short order, and scaled the great wall around it with ease.

Keeping to the shadows to avoid the guards, he sprinted to the house itself and climbed to the balcony, slipping inside the judge’s bedroom like a cold winter’s breeze.

Reaching to the small of his back, he unsheathed one of his daggers; his mark emblazoned on the hilt, and prepared for the downwards thrust. With a single smooth motion he impaled the fat official.

A cursory glance around the room revealed two bulging money pouches which he rapidly pocketed and fled the room just ahead of the maid coming in with the warming pan.

Leaving the mansion and it’s estate, he heard the howling scream coming from the bedroom, and knew that the body had been found quicker than he had counted on.

In minutes, the streets swarmed with guards and he was stranded in the upper district, hiding out until the pursuit died away.

When the coast was finally clear, Mika made his way through the murky streets to his lodgings under Marlin’s Tavern.

“Sister Dear…”

No reply.

“Sister? Where are you?”

Nothing.

Mika unsheathed another dagger, and pivoted about to a sound behind him.

It was Marlin, and a retinue of his top agents.

“Do you know who was financing our little endeavour, Mika?”

Suddenly, everything became horribly clear.

“What have you done with her?”

Marlin twisted his lips into what might have been a smile, but was more likely a sneer.

“There is… I should say, was… a certain city official? He needed an excuse to meet with me to arrange things, so he pretended to be cracking down on me.

A transparent ruse, really.

If he were still alive, we would all be very, very rich right now.

But, it seems he came down with a fatal case of STABBING during the night.”

Marlin lifted up a familiar dagger.

“Lost something, did we?

Luckily for you, we were able to get similar funds from another source…

Some Easterland men came through here whilst you were away.

They seemed most anxious to have your sister, they did, so we took them for everything they had. Most generous, they were.”

With an inarticulate scream of rage, Mika hurled the blade in his hand in a blur of motion, leaving it vibrating deep in Marlin’s eye socket.

His followers were shocked, but already Mika had another knife out, and then he was amongst them and it was too late.