Prologue

An endless ocean.

A world of eternal seas.

Water as far as the eye could see. So much that you could drown in it.

And it was up there. Separated by a void of incalculable distance.

Pale blue eyes stared up at the distant celestial moon, as Metus’ dry mouth managed to grow drier. Most of his world’s moisture had been torn from it many millennia ago in a traumatic event known as the Shattering. The planet once known as Spherus Magna had exploded into three pieces; a planetoid and two moons. Their names: Bara Magna, Bota Magna, and Aqua Magna. One moon had taken the vegetation and the ice. The other had taken the seas.

Much as the Agori villagers wished they could forget, somehow they knew they never would. Every night, as the shadow of dusk stretched across the vast wasteland, the moons would rise. The glittering green and blue of life taunting them from so far away. Untapped resources — for it was doubtful anything still remained alive up there following the explosion.

No. Bara Magna was the road’s end for anyone that fell into its grip. Mighty civilizations equipped with giant machines had once walked this planet, but they had all but disappeared. On occasion, an Agori may find the relics of the past — a robotic elbow here, a metallic leg there. Some civilizations crowded near these mechanical corpses, clinging to life among the dead. But it was only a matter of time until they too rotted away.

It was a pitiful existence. scraping out a life here, fighting to maintain what dignity they had. Forming something that resembled “civilization.” Metus remembered a time when such savagery had not been necessary. Say what you would about them, but the Great Beings had always brought prosperity and affluence to the tribes during their time. Now it was a dull, monotonous life of nothing but the same. Villages contending for an ever-shrinking pool of resources again and again, raising up new generations of warriors only to see them cut down to the desert or to each other.

In fact, perhaps the most unusual occurrence that had happened in this desert wasteland took place just over a thousand years ago, when what looked like a giant meteor had crashed into the water moon. The moon had been knocked off its rotation and some of the weather patterns shifted — a routine desert storm occurred slightly further east. But beyond that, life quickly returned to its perpetual decay. And the event was lost in the sands of time.

Only Metus remembered, and vaguely at that. He had never been one to forget seemingly needless details. To survive in this wasteland, you had to climb to the top, no matter what it took. It was a harsh way to live, and sometimes he hated that it had come to this.

Only the Glatorian system had kept the villages from devouring one another to survive. As one of the few charged with recruiting and training the Glatorian warriors, Metus was one of the main individuals responsible for preserving that peace. In this manner, he would continue to uphold that fragile order until something better came, something that would prevent the villages from having to fight.

And perhaps something had.