The Chronicle of the Fire Winds

Aethra was forged in the exact nexus where the Sun and the Moon sealed eternity. But perfection crumbled, and ages of decay have devoured the magic of our ancestors.

We are the Strollers. Immortals born of light and shadow, asleep in stone, awaiting a call we never wished to hear.

The seal has been broken. The dragon Ignakor has awakened, and the Winds of Fire now devour the land below. Our only protection is Oria, the city anchored in the clouds by the ancient Runes of Wind. Here, the air is still pure, but the winds cannot hold back the flames forever.

Awaken, Stroller. The Soul Flow demands payment. The journey into the abyss has begun, and the crown of this world will only be forged in the ashes.

High above the clouds, where the air is still clean and the architecture is ancient stone bound together by wind magic, Oria is where every Stroller's journey begins. It is the last place the Winds of Fire have yet to reach in full force, and for now, that makes it the closest thing this world has to safe.

But safety in Aethra is borrowed, not given. Every Stroller who wakes on its shattered fringes knows the descent is inevitable.

Down on solid ground, a vast ancestral forest of colossal trees surrounds Alduris, a fortified camp standing against a corruption that creeps in from the treeline. It is the first real contact with the world below the clouds, and the first place where the line between civilization and wilderness stops being clean.

Parts of the forest are already darkening. The beasts that live there are growing restless, maddened by the soot Ignakor's fires carry on the wind.

Further still, the land gives out entirely. The sky over Tergoth burns red and black with smoke, rivers of hardened lava scar the ground, and ash falls constantly, like snow that never melts.

This is the last outpost before Ignakor's lair: a brutal, opressive place held together by desperate settlers and worn-down soldiers who know exactly how close they are to the source of everything burning around them.

Every Stroller carries Evernity, the life-force that marks them as something more than mortal, and something the ash-corrupted creatures of the lower world have learned to hunger for. What is spent doesn't always return, and the Soul Flow that binds it to a body demands its due.

It is this cost, more than any decree or law, that shapes how Strollers live, fight and choose what they're willing to risk as they push deeper into a world that is actively trying to burn them out of it.

At the medallion's center sits the infinity symbol, and among Strollers it has a name: the Soul Flow, the Cycle of Exchange. "Pay the Moon with your soul" is not a warning so much as a description, because the Evernity relic is not just a currency. It is a receptacle.

The soul enters, and power leaves it. The gold enters, and the eternity remains inside. What the medallion holds is transmutable by nature, and every Stroller who trades in it is, knowingly or not, a party to it. To carry one is to carry a piece of the Stroll itself, the endless walk with no true end, and to be bound, however loosely, to a cosmic contract that outlasts whoever is holding the coin.