Of Monsters, Spirits, and the Wilderness Wars...

Now when the Spirits first set foot upon the corporal plane, eager to set about their task they were confronted with a dilemma of sorts...that is, the lack of any proper organization, and not enough man power, so to speak, to get the job done willy nilly.

Truth be told there wasn't much to be done in those days, check up on the primitive human dwellings, tour the forests, and cull the occasional undesirable.

Still it was a big job, and long hard fought wars had taken it's toll on the Spirits, so few of them were left.

So the five most powerful of their number gathered together...and made ready their plans to protect their younger siblings...

They would each gain a cardinal direction, one to the north, one to the south, one to the east, one to the west, and the most powerful to hold the center. The five would have free reign to protect and maintain their regions as they saw fit, essentially making general organization a non-issue

Taking their respective followers with them they spread to the four corners of the globe, and for a time things were good, under their care watch humanity first began it's tentative steps towards civilization...combating the effects of death even as it corrupting touch began seeping up from beneath the earth.

It changed with the coming of the Progenitor, the First monster...coming into being somewhere buried deep beneath the Spine...

It was never learned what the father of the monsters originally was...some manner of bat...or cave dwelling insect, at any rate it proved rather irrelevant as the terrible mammoth form it took could not be connected to any form of life the Spirits had ever seen before that day.

True it was not the first corruption of life they had ever seen...but it was the first of it's kind none the less, in a limited albeit terrible fashion...it possessed sentience...previously a gift blessed only upon humans. It was smart as well, easily evading notice for years on end...for a long time the Spirit only had the vaguest sense of what it truly was, and what exactly it was doing

And perhaps most terrible of all, it knew magic...a primal archaic loathsome form of magic, but deadly potent still...

For the longest time it haunted the caves in the dark places of the world...wrecking havoc on the fragile ecosystem, taking legions of cave life and twisting them into it's own terrible spawn...

To this day entire swathe of the spine are completely vacant of life...and to enter certain caves is an act reminiscent of entering a tomb...

Thus was an entire species...connected solely in it's purpose and it's ancestry perhaps...born beneath the Spirits' radar...never again would they leave the places beneath the world so unwatched.

War was declared by the spawn of opposing gods, on the side of Life stood the Spirits, watch dogs and maintainers of the mortal plane. On the other stood the monsters, bitter resentful things created by the half conscious imaginations of the Death God's unknowingly forcing their dark will upon an otherwise innocent, and powerless creature...

Undeniably the Spirits were more powerful then their half created brethren...but they were truly few...and the monsters were not so weak as it seemed. Once more...their were traitors in the ranks of life.

The south lands, consumed by bitter civil war, fell to the monsters...the Spirit Lord of the south, slain by Orgshanku, the Bull King, something that might have once been a Bovine creature, now stood, higher then some mountains, as the unopposed god of the lands south of The Spine. None but the most tenacious of Spirits dare dwell there to this day...even those few can only just keep the damage from spreading beyond a taught frayed line...that gets just a bit thinner everyday.

The north was lost...it's Spirit Lord long since dormant after a free Death God bested it in combat, sparing it's life merely to prove a point.

When Nomen's crusade inevitably fell upon the scattered leaderless spirits, they were ground one by one beneath the sheer numbers of his legion. The only consolation is there were never many monsters that far north anyway...and the few that were are easily contained to this day by humans, trained by spirits.

The Spirit Lord of the east led his forces beneath the waves, to purify the ocean floor of the Progenitor spawn before their terrible intent spread above sea level. He has not been see or heard of sense...

The Spirit Lord of the West...well...it's best not to speak of it...

Yet even in the darkest of days, the center still held. Propped up, solely perhaps, by the sheer force of will of the Spirit King Dragoth.

The Spirits fight their battles as they always have, at the edges of the central conflict, dying and killing beyond the knowledge and notice of most. The only thing keeping them together being their unified purpose, the one thing they never truly had, is now the only thing they truly have left...their powers are great, but their numbers are few...fewer then the monsters at any rate...

The edges of any map...are dangerous places to be...beyond the center...here there be monsters...