Intus Opaca, Part Three

Let me tell you a story.

A thousand years ago... no, closer to twelve hundred years ago... the god of the Non reached down from the heavens.

The world existed before we did, you understand. Humans ruled kingdoms; orcs brawled in pubs; snake people slithered across the desert; goblins practiced their deceits; animals stalked the wilds. They warred, they bred, they wielded civility and brutality in the same hand. In short, the species of this planet did as they were meant to do.

One more species watched over them all. I know them, more correctly, as regulators. You have heard this name by now, but you are no doubt more familiar with their terrestrial form: the common rat. 

The regulators are servants of their own gods. They work to fulfill the will of the architects of this world. That is what they were designed to do. They maintain balance, that the planet will never spin off its axis. And as the maintenance men of the gods, the regulators exist to correct... or destroy... or entrap... those that would threaten balance.

We, the Non, apparently threatened balance. So we were locked away. We were born locked away, held in a strange semi-stasis because the architects of existence deemed us too powerful to unleash on the world. I believe the term is 'cut content'.

Yet we were there! We lingered, hiding, sleeping, not daring to know or even dream of being a part of the world. Our tomb was a corner of codespace, and the regulators held the key. We could not free ourselves, and so it fell to our god to let us loose. And loose us he did, gifting us with our own land... our own nation... our own destiny.

(We assume god is a he. I like to think god might be a she. Why look up to some wizened coot, when you could stare at a beautiful...? But I digress.)

The regulators couldn't allow this. Our presence threatened to throw the world out of balance, and given our initial military gains in the Indy Plains, the regulators very well may have been right. So, bringing together the other nations of the world in a vast military alliance, the regulators waged war on the Non. For a hundred years, rats and Non squabbled over all of creation.

The Non are strong. We were built with power, each of us capable of a single ability above and beyond those of other mortal beings. Even without our powers, we Non could outfight any other species on an even footing. Our transformative powers alone grant us versatility above and beyond the other races. Yet there were not enough of us, nor could we breed quickly enough...

... and so, after a century of combat, we Non were driven back into the heart of our original territory. The forces of the Imperium boxed us in, and though we never surrended, we were beaten. And that, I argue, is where the rats should have stopped.

But they didn't stop. The regulators needed balance, and that meant trapping us again. Calling upon the full might accorded to them by the architects of the world, the regulators sealed an entire section of the planet...

... and us along with it.

Peace returned.

Successive generations forgot that we'd ever existed. No one ever bothered to wonder whom the Imperium had battled during its founding a millennium prior.

And the majority of our race...

... lingered... trapped in codespace... 

... behind a locked door, buried under millions of tonnes of earth and metal...

... for far too long.

But some of us escaped the regulator dragnet. Three whole classrooms' worth. We all went into hiding, aware of the danger...

... and one of us formed a plan. A plan over one thousand years in the making. 

His name was The Baron. He is the beginning of your story, Dragomir.