I, by my name Virilus Legifil, ask the new gods and the old to guide my pen as I record these histories. We stand now in the time between ages and my appeal speaks to any who would hear it. Let wind whisper truths in my ear while the fire claims any falsehood. Let the light in my eyes show reality, let the extraneous wash from my skin. Most of all, let my accomplishments shine through the darkness of my failures, all presented here as they are.

  The last of the old gods has died. Brodyn's corpse consecrates the peak of Mount Bromid, his last breath drawn peacefully as his hands wove the passing of the era.

  The place of the First Congress is set. Preachers across the Etherlands tell their congregations of a new contest to be held around Brodyn's body, a way to choose a new Septemvirate for a new age. The rules of the contest are unknown; in the five thousand years that have passed since the last contest, all that is remembered are the ruins the gods rebuilt this world from.

  This time, the preachers are ready. The scholars are ready. The historians, the tavernkeepers, the criers and the gossipers are ready. They know the leading candidates, the Demigods and the Heroes and the Nemeses. They watch these men and women, they watch Mount Bromid, they watch their families and villages and cities and nations, and they seek to record every scrap they can. The fog of prehistory will be allowed no longer.

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  The calendar is closed on the year 5192 of the Fifth Septemvirate. We stand now in the time between ages, with no calendar to guide us, where the world drifts along in the absence of its greatest forms of life.

  The nobles of the world issue their decrees, the politicians put forth legislation, the bureaucrats enforce their policies and procedures, but in the end the common people know that everything is about to change. What else has provided them the boons that the gods have? What else has shown them suffering like the gods have? What else but the gods have given and taken from them every reward in their lives?

  I am Virilus Legifil, a magic historian from the two hundred and thirty-second class of Docet Barrington. While my colleagues seek to compete for the greatest biography of the greatest Demigods, I seek a different path. Near the town of Lurim I found a Nameless, maybe the last Nameless, and it is his record I wish to lay down here.

  This is not due to a lack of ego, or a lack of a competitive streak, or due to any behavioural reason my colleagues think of when one does not attach themselves to the most famous names. Rather, I intend to take the surest route to carving my name in history: I swear on my name that the man who I call Drifter will join the Sixth Septemvirate, and I will have written the most complete, and possibly only, biography of him.