Before the InvasionChapter I
The Averted Invasion
CanonLong before the stranger came, a wizard named Aurelius lived in a Meliora ruled by orcs, and reached back through time to stop the conquest before it began.
Chapter narration
A Realm Under Orcish Rule
In the history Aurelius knew, Meliora did not hold. Orcs took the realm, and for decades the land lived under their rule. Aurelius, a spellcaster of rare talent, tried to fight that evil force on his own, with little to show for it.
The Master of Time
Decades after the conquest, Aurelius mastered the art of travelling through time. Rather than fight the occupiers in his own age, he reached back to the invasion's earliest days and stopped it before it could take hold. With that single act he unmade the Meliora he knew and brought another into being: the realm this chronicle describes.
A Collision in the Stream
The victory was not clean, and Aurelius would later admit that he had got several things wrong. Travelling carelessly, he collided in the stream of time with another traveller, the very stranger who would one day become his apprentice. When two people from different times arrive at the same moment, one of them must be removed, and that, more or less, is what befell him.
A Spirit Without a Body
Aurelius came out of the collision a timeless spirit, a voice without hands, unable to touch the world he had saved. By his own reckoning he spent more than a hundred years staring at the same four walls. Then a visitor from another world crossed the threshold into Meliora.
"I would bow if I could." — Aurelius