Mul kept her silence as they walked the ruins of Alexandria. The ground was cratered and cracked from the fighting, such was the violence of the powers that had been unleashed. There was the scorched ring, some six hundred feet in diameter, where the Blood of the Dragon had died during the Seminal War. The close-clumped, overlapping hundred-foot craters where a mage had called down an Iron Storm. The arcs of fire where stone had melted and run in the spell-fueled firefight. The razor clean cuts through entire buildings where dimensional rifts had been weaponized. The fields of ashen bones where merely mortal soldiers had been wiped away in the blink of an eye.

Never before had so much magic, both Arcane and Divine, been unleashed in battle. Eight million soldiers had fought and died in the space of a single afternoon. The fires had taken weeks to burn out, years for the last of the other-heat to fade from the stones. Even now, there were places still tainted, where staying too long or drinking of the wrong spring would bring a slow, lingering death.

This was the graveyard of empires: silithid, elven, dwarven, and human alike. No power structure had survived in the vacuum when all others had been ripped away. Iron Fists and Gilded Collars alike had cracked and shattered. The old noble lines had been burnt out or swept away, and new ones had grown in their places. And with them had died magic and knowledge alike. Not forgotten, not entirely, but much more carefully taught and regulated. No-one wanted to see another Seminal War. And so Kingdoms had stagnated, trapped in a fearful stasis of their own making.

Mul's mouth twitched in wry amusement. Neither the elves nor the dwarves had dared to look beyond what had kept them safe. Her own orcs had grown bold, aggressively expanding, pushing outwards with the same bared fangs as their ancestors. But it had been the humans who had begun to kick things loose.

Mul had seen it first in Westmarch, when a group of serfs had tossed aside their fetters, looked beyond racial hatreds, and cut their own Republic into being. In the doing, they had sparked the reform of Clan Glacierheart and the Jeweled Cities. Sparks of that mundane event were still spreading and catching. The Guild had already taken to using magical tools, and were becoming increasingly innovative with what they already knew. And now, with what the Keeper of Lore was putting into motion in Trebor, mixing that heady brew of eager inventiveness, willingness to challenge established doctrine, mechanical know-how and magical assistance... It would be a true Renaissance.

Dragons counted their lifetimes in millenia, elves and dwarves in centuries. But a human, fortunate to count his life in decades, was about to re-shape the workings of the world before his time was even close to spent.