In the era before the Cataclysm, Thanator’s grip on Vandyrus was ruthless but unfinished. Their exploitation—industrial, extractive, and unyielding—never reached completion. The real collapse began not with local rebellion, but with withdrawal: Thanator’s masters, facing greater crises at home, issued orders that could not be denied. They left Vandyrus in haste, abandoning mines, leaving behind poisoned land, empty outposts, engines still running, and wounds still raw. Their occupation had never been a negotiation. They ruled from airships no grounded force could challenge, departing with no thought for what would follow.
What followed was the vacuum. Into it surged the pre-cataclysmic races—creatures older and crueler than most care to remember. These are called the Titan Races: the Kirin, horned equine sorcerers; the Sabertooths, colossal feline predators; and the Dire Wolves, whose madness would outlast all rivals. The Kirin, for all their brilliance, never reached the stars—their sorcery ran deep but could not pierce the sky. By the time of the cataclysm, the Kirin civilization was already in terminal decline, shattered into fractious cults driven by degeneracy and ecstatic violence.
The Sabertooth factions, too, were coming apart, undone by their own black arts—mutations and madness unleashed by necromancy and the desperate pursuit of new forms. The Dire Wolves, whose name would haunt Vandyrus for ages, had long since abandoned sanity in their own pursuit of bloodline perfection. Eugenics, ritual, and carnage became their law. All these titans warred on each other and themselves, every front a fresh wound, every border shifting in blood and chaos.
The only reason this violence did not engulf the planet sooner was Thanator’s sheer dominance: airships above, orders obeyed, no diplomacy, no resistance worth the name. The moment Thanator left, the cage opened. No one was thinking long-term—every race, every warlord, every sorcerer and beast jockeyed for the spoils of a world left unguarded.
Then, the cataclysm rocked the world.
