In the age before ages, when the earth was still warm from its forging and the stars had not yet learned their names, there was no demon, no elf, no human, no dwarf. There was only the Firstborn — a single race of beings who walked the land in harmony, their blood pure, their hearts untainted.

They built cities of glass and bone. They sang songs that made mountains weep. They understood the language of rivers and the whispers of the dead. For ten thousand years they flourished, and in their arrogance they believed themselves eternal.

But eternity is a lie told by the living to quiet the fear of death.

Deep beneath the crust of the world, in veins of molten stone where no light had ever touched, the Firstborn discovered something — a black ichor that pulsed with a rhythm like a heartbeat. They called it Kegare. The Impurity. It hummed with power, promised transcendence, whispered secrets that unspooled the mind. The Firstborn drank from it, bathed in it, forged weapons from its crystallized form. They believed they had found the final truth.

What they found was the first lie.

The Kegare did not destroy them. It divided them. It reached into their blood and pulled apart everything they were, splitting the single thread of their existence into four frayed strands:

Those consumed by fire became the Demon — rage given flesh, bound to the inferno that burns eternal in their chests. Prisoners of flame. Slaves to passion. They remember the heat of the Firstborn's ambition and are punished by it forever.

Those who tried to outlast the corruption became the Elf — stretched thin across centuries, graceful and fading. They do not die. They merely diminish. Each century erases a little more of who they were until nothing remains but a beautiful hollow shell. Eternity, it turns out, is the cruelest curse of all.

Those who rejected the Kegare outright became Human — brief, burning bright. Their lives are candles in a hurricane. They break fastest, love hardest, grieve deepest. They carry the memory of what was lost more clearly than any other race, and that memory drives them to madness and greatness in equal measure.

And those who tried to bury it — to compress the impurity into something small and hard and ignorable — became the Dwarf. Stone-strong. Unyielding. They carved their kingdoms into mountains, believing that enough rock could silence the echo of the Kegare in their blood. But even the unbreakable break. When a Dwarf shatters, the mountain itself trembles.

Ten thousand years have passed since the Division. The four bloodlines have warred, allied, betrayed, and warred again. Each believes their curse is the heaviest. Each believes the others are irredeemably tainted.

They are all correct.

But the prophecy speaks of a time when the divided shall walk together once more — not as the pure Firstborn they once were, but as something new. Something scarred. Something that has learned to carry its impurity without being consumed by it.

They will be called Kegari — the impure ones who refused to stay broken.

The age of the Kegari begins now.