Prologue: Hunted and Hated (Shade)

When you were born, your mother an Oracle of your people, dedicated your spirit to the Goddess Diana and imbued you with the Spirit of the Hunter. As you grew by her side she told you of the days before the Blood Wars, when Umbrians were at peace and there was no Tyranny forcing each of the holds under its power. The days when the Old Gods such as Diana guided your people and maintained the balance between the faerie and woodland spirits. The days before the Corruption of Blood had come, long before the hated enemies the Ankivari had fallen to the followers of the human god of the East.

For fifty years you lived the life of a ranger, following the doctrines of balance and order of the Old Gods, in harmony with the forests around Dauphne, your ancestral homestead. You heard stories of the war being waged far away and the merciless expansion of the Tyranny. You heard of the sacrifices being made to the New Gods, the Primordial Princes of the Elements and the destruction of the shrines to the Old Gods. You wept to hear of the forests burned and devastated by the fiery abominations.

It was with a sense of inevitability that your people heard the news that the Tyrant's Host marched on Dauphne, one of the last holds to remain independent of his power. The populace prepared for the battle to come and you joined the forward skirmishers that sought to delay the advance of the black legions. You fought valiantly alongside your kin but the Tyrant's forces were too numerous and the tide swept aside the hold's defenses. You evaded death and for sometime capture but only long enough to know your family had perished in the assault. Bound by foul magics and binded with a runed collar of silver, you were press-ganged into the slaver ships that ploughed the Golden Gulf.

The next stage of your life was a torturous hell of sea-borne pillaging and the stench of burnt human offerings to the so-called New Gods. Far from the glades and forests of your ancestral home, your soul retreated deep within you. For years, you awoke with nothing but the wish that you would die on the next voyage.

It was at the nadir of your spirit, that something miraclous occured. You awoke one morning and your binding collar fell. For the first time in over sixty years, you had free will to act and knew hope. Your body exhausted beyond measure collapsed and the galley master presuming you had died threw you overboard.

Were it not for a second miracle you would have died beneath the depths but instead you awoke on an unknown beach. You clung on to life finding food and shelter, nursing yourself back to health on that hidden cove. Your strength restored, you gathered makeshift tools and clothing heading inland. The sea shore led steeply up to broken wastelands and beyond them desert that seemed to go on forever. You wandered along the coast until at last you saw a strange looking settlement. Remaining hidden. you observed the first people of the Caliphate you had seen in their natural environment. Expecting a hostile reception, you covered your appearance and adopted a psuedonym.

You travelled along the deltas with much time to think before you arrived at the City of Pearl, Darvish Kapur. Your hatred for the Tyranny and the Elemental Princes brought you closer to the people of the Caliphate and piqued your curiosity about this "Holy Divine" that they worship. You cannot help but wonder: Where was the Goddess Diana when your people were subjugated? Did this Holy Divine truly bring an end to the Ankivari? Could He do the same to the Tyranny? And what role will you play in all of this? And of course, what power had set you free?

There was a lot to consider but it was evident to you that a single Umbrian stranded in a hostile land could not achieve much by himself. Sitting in a coffee house in the Bazaari quadrant of the city, you wonder whether there will be potential allies to be found amongst these people who will look past your origins and see the Spirit of the Hunter within?

Prologue: Into the Shadows (Raouf al-Kapur)

You were born in the ivory tower of the al-Kapur family estate in the City of Opal, Helespolis. The oldest of just two childern in a prestigous house, you were destined for greatness. From an early age you knew you would be entrusted to run your house on the day your father passed on. Your family wasn't very religious and your father was a harsh and accomplished wizard always hungry for more power. To him, you were merely another asset to be nurtured for his own purposes. It was early on in your life that it became clear you had little magical aptitude, so your father sent you to one of the training schools of the powerful Hassaris. "If you can't wield a wand, you will learn to stick the knife in!" was your father's last words to you before you departed for the City of Pearl, Darvish Kapur, at the young age of seven.

After the excitement and trepidation of the trip to your boarding school, you felt liberated to be away from your father's tough discipline. Your natural charisma and intelligence made making friends easy at your school and your showed natural aptitude in the Hassari arts, rising to be the unrivalled leader of your class. You mastered blade and poison quickly. You were particularly good at improvisation. Subtle and quick, you would have had a promising future in the order if you weren't already destined to be the head of a noble house.

Out of sight meant out of the mind of your father. Your mother, aloof and concerned only with her own luxurious lifestyle, was no better. Only your younger sister, Leila, would write to you but after many years at the Hassari school without returning home even once, you found it difficult to keep in touch. Only on your sixteenth birthday, when you were officiated into the order, did your father send you a gift: A rare and magical implement, the Ghost Strike Ki, that made you even more deadly with the dagger. Yet in your heart you were left bitter that none of your family were there in person to celebrate the moment of your ascension.

It was in a state of anger and melancholy that you lashed out at a fellow pupil during the final initiations before you would become licensed by your order to take approved contracts. What should have been a non-lethal proving contest turned bloody and the inner demons inside you were unleashed in a violent display that saw your fellow Hassari butchered like an animal. This was an unspeakable breaking of the oaths that bound the Hassari as brothers and you were flogged, stripped and thrown into the street with nothing but shame. Your father upon hearing of this, cursed your name, disowning you and disbarring you from your inheritance in preference to your younger sister.

A life with the promise of power as the inheritor of the house al-Kapur or brotherhood in the Hassari order vanished before your eyes. In the days that followed, you scavanged like an animal in the backstreets until you had gathered the means to survive without becoming prey to the criminals of the seedier parts of the city. Months past until you had mustered the energy to break into your old school, stealing your precious Ki and other supplies before vanishing into the night.

It has been over a year since the events that saw you an outcast and you have made a subsistence level living as an assassin for low-class criminals, a waste of your professional training but a necessary means to stay alive.

Today, started like most others with you heading to the coffee house frequented by the Bazaari, waiting for the fateful scroll that would give you some poor mark to meet their fate at your hands. Yet this time the scroll that was put before you did not name a victim but reported the news that your father had perished, the victim of a magical disaster. The hand written note by the Vazier Hamish al-Torfan suggested your father had practiced unlawful necromancy and his work had resulted in a terrible infestation of shadow creatures upon your family's estate. You did not shed a tear for the old bastard that had disowned you but only felt some sadness at the news that your mother and sister had perished with him. Hours and many cups of coffee have passed since you read the scroll and realised that the life you knew was truly over. You wonder: Where would fate take you now?

Prologue: Man of the People (Rafiq al-Rashid)

You were born into comfort and privalege if not great power as your high-born house, al-Rashid, had faced centuries of decline from the time of their founding in the early Caliphate. Your childhood was one of idyllic peace growing up on the family estate, Hamzi-e-Rashid in the Gilded Quarter of the City of Pearl, Darvish Kapur. Your parents were both loving and took great care to give you and your brother and sister, the best education they could afford. The family's tutor Farid Mehdari was a good man and like an uncle to you. He ensured you were grounded in the necessasities of a high born's life: philosophy, art, drama, etiquette, the arcane and history. As the youngest child you were indulged in ways your older sister, A'isha, and brother, Nasir, perhaps never were. There was the usual brotherly rivalry between you and Nasir and A'isha took her role as eldest far too seriously in your books. Her harsh discipline was much hated when it occured but over the years you began to appreciate both her love for you and the burden of being the eldest child.

In your teenage years you were respectful but delinquent, finding games with the city children a far preferable endeavour than long laborious studies cooped up in your estate. Despite your interaction with the children of the mardoum, you still found yourself socially awkward and exasparated when dealing with fellow high-born children. You preferred to lurk in the shadows at annual eid feasts and other parties, sneaking out to play games on the streets when you could. Whilst you had no real friends due to the limitations of being out of your social class much of the time, you earned admiration for your quick wit, humour and sense of social justice. On more than one occassion you outsmarted bullies and roughians who picked on the weak and defenseless.

By the time you became an adult, it was naturally assumed your way with the people would lead to some civic role, perhaps even a place on the Majlis. The Majlis of Darvish Kapur was more in tune with the needs of the people than most other cities and more than a few of the high-born would try to represent the mardoum in its sessions. However, politics was still an ugly business and your family's low standing and your own inability to get along too well with the other high-born held you back from seeking office.

When your parents died, two years ago, your sister was elected to the Majlis and your brother was left to run the family estate, turning the family's stakes in various city businesses and caravans into regular profit. Your brother's exceled in finance and business, giving him the moniker of "the High Born Bazaari," as an insult by the other high born. Your sister has proven a ruthless and determined politician, punching way above the weight her family name or magical prowess would otherwise afford.

Meanwhile, you have been written off as nothing more than a waster who spends far too much time with the people, solving their petty problems and showing a lack of ambition. You brush off this criticism and devote yourself to doing good and keeping the city you love a peaceful place. But in your heart, you feel somewhat lost and rootless. You have begun to question whether this is all that life has to offer you. Is this all you are capable off?

It is thoughts like these that swarm your mind as you sit drinking coffee in the coffee house north of the Bazaar. Perhaps, you think to yourself, it is time to broaden your horizons and seize an opportunity to be more than the youngest son of a minor house. The city you love is peaceful and the people content. It is not an unjust place and it has not faced true peril in your lifetime. Whilst your empathy and intelligence serve the people here, do they really need you? All these thoughts weigh heavy on your mind as the morning turns into afternoon.

Prologue: Out of the Wilderness (Maissa al-Bahari)

You were a remarkable child and a blesssing to your geriatric parents, coming in the winter of their lives with six strong older brothers many years your senior. Your father, a tribal chief amongst the nomadic Bahari, had already seen his sons follow the Holy Divine's path as Dervishes, the spinning acrobatic warriors that defended the people against the dangers of the desert. It nearly broke your mother's heart when at the tender age of six, a Jandicary visited your tribe and told them that you had the gift from the Holy Divine and must be trained for the perils of your fate. Reluctantly, they allowed you to be educated by the tribe's shaiq, a Bahari priest, and over the course of your education wandering Jandicary would arrive to improve your discipline with the sword and teach you the tactics of battle. Dozens of different men and a couple of women were your tutors as you wandered the Bahar desert with your tribe.
It was on your sixteenth birthday that you finally received the blessing of your parents on your journey as a Jandicary neophyte and the gift of the family treasured heirloom of Dragon Silk clothing to protect you. Set an almost impossible task you travelled alone to the Arkash Mesa where the spirits of the long-banished Shaitun tested your endurance and resolve. For nearly two years, you lived a life of peril and subsistence; your body and mind taken to the edge of what they could endure; your will to live tested and your faith in the Holy Divine's great plan for you shaken time and time again. The final baptism of fire saw you defeat the plot of an Efreet, an evil elemental of the plane of fire, with barely a breath left in your body.
Having endured the trials that saw you become truly a rod for the One True Faith, you returned home to your father's tribe only to learn that your parents and your brothers had all been slain in a devastating attack by the monstrous desert creatures called Ugkrya. The brutish ogres had come in force and your brothers had bravely faced them despite their numbers to allow the rest of the tribe to make their escape. It seemed your ties to this world were severed and you felt a great emptiness in your soul. It took all your discipline not to seek to devote your life to bloody vengeance for that went against all the teachings of your order. In your heart you knew the Holy Divine had other plans for you.
Desolate and unsure of your path, you meditated for weeks in the hill lands seeking divine guidance. It was in the depths of your fasting that a vision came to you of a perilous danger to all the people of the Caliphate. A nightmare vision of an elemental horde unleashed upon the lands and the burning of a city you had never seen in your own life. Once out of your trance, you tried desperately to recall the details of the prophecy, sketching what you could remember using charcoal and granite.
Seeking answers you returned to the remnants of the tribe where you sought the counsel of your old tutor, the shaiq Mustafa ibn-Quom, who recognised your etchings as none other than the City of Pearl, Darvish Kapur. It was clear to you then that your destiny lay there and the Holy Divine's role for you would become clear once you arrived. So you travelled across the desert with the few meagre possessions you had and arrived at the almost alien city, with its bustling people and thick walls that felt like a cage for your soul.
Three weeks you have stayed in the city, moving every three nights as the bonds of hospitality allow those friendly to your order and people to give you shelter. You have wandered every street and alley of the city and learned many of the names of those you met but still there has been no sign or divine guidance as to what danger awaits this tranquil city.
Still your trust in the Holy Divine has never faltered and on this spring day you find yourself in the coffee house north of the Bazaar listening for anything that the One True Divine puts before you as a guide.