The beautiful orange orb, the Elder Goddess, the sun, shined magnificently on his crimson helm. Elbryon looked up, his deep saphire-esque eyes glimmering in the suns warm light, closed for a brief moment. With a deep sigh and an uneasy shift of his feet, the memories of old hit him with the same viciousness as would the hammer strike of an enemy.

It seemed so long ago when Elbryon was but a boy, living in his beloved town of Kurdan. Their, the Tiraj Sand Knights reigned. They weren't rulers, no never that, but rather guides for the common folk of Kurdan, Nobelmens to which the people looked to. However, the desert is a harsh place. If it be Wurms (Sand Dragons), Sand Maggots, or the wild shifts in nature itself. However, the biggest threat of all were the chaotic servant denizens of Bardush, Emperor of Blood.

Legend has it, That the knight houses of Toul'nar were once brothers with the practitioners of Blood, however, one man rose in the ranks of those infernal magic-users, Bardush. This man didn't want a treaty, or peace, he served the Dark God Evil and craved to bathe in the blood of his victims. He had a personal goal, the eradication of all the Toul'nar Knight houses. Of course, the Knights paid little heed to the warnings, many of those same houses awoke days after reports of the threat, to the smell of burning wood, cloth and the pungent aroma of cooking flesh.

The houses were in disarray, but, great men arose from the knightly houses, heros of the age, taking the reins of a new cause, a new conquest. Unified they stood, crushing all resistance, sending the practitioners of blood towards the verge of extinction. Just as the practitioners fell, so did their leader, Bardush. They latched Bardushs' head, arms and legs upon rope, tieing the opposite ends onto muscular steeds. The riders began to urge the horses into opposite directions, a horrific cracking of bones polluted the air, but, the final sound from Bardush wasn't the scream of a man in agony, but the laugh of a victorious man, that stopped as soon as it started when he was torn from his limbs.

They divided the arms, legs and head amongst the four Islands, to act as symbol of the new law. The law of body and not of Magics. How wrong we could have been, ever since those years of glory, wherever the taint of Bardush's body went, so did the dark shadow of his revenge, from beyond the grave, and from beyond the Wyvren-earth plain.

I am the last one, the only one not caught in the destruction, whose relentless assaults over the decades left us as we left the practitioners of blood, upon the verge of extinction. I, leading the dead and dying folk of Kurdan, carrying Flameberge, the last relic of the knightly houses, imparted on a journey, away from the golden islands of Toul'nar and into the unknown.

I find Vormav, the Lord of Vampires. He is far worse than Bardush. And though I escaped the evil Bardush unleashed upon my home, I cannot escape this evil. And here I am today, Elbryon of the house Tiraj, son of the Chieftain Norrec Tiraj. Now I am Vormav's servant in his army, a lap dog of evil. How my human self would have cried to know this is where I ended up. He was a fool anyway. After all...evil is just more fun.