Might and Magic — Classic RPG Archive

Before the first chronicle was ever written, before anyone set foot on the threshold of the town of Sorpigal, the universe was divided into only two eras: the one before the Silence, and the one after it.

In the age before the Silence, the stars obediently served a handful of beings known as the Ancients — engineers of worlds, who built entire civilizations out of void and fire as if stacking blocks. Hundreds of planets, thousands of peoples, one network of gates binding them all into something resembling a single living organism.

But even the most perfect garden has its pests. The Ancients found themselves opposed by a race just as powerful and just as alien — cold, hungry, and relentless, known in later chronicles as the Kreegans. The war lasted centuries, until one day the Kreegans managed to sever the gate network. No explosion, no warning. The network simply fell silent.

Or so say the chronicles that survived. Bards on more than one world tell it differently — that the fault lay not with the enemy, but with us. That somewhere in a forgotten city, a mortal got their hands on a weapon only the Ancients were ever meant to carry, and used it in anger. That the ground it scorched that day still lies barren and dead to this day, and that the Ancients fell silent not from helplessness, but from revulsion at what we had become. Both versions cannot be true at once. Perhaps neither is — and the truth, as is usually the case with things from a thousand years ago, lies somewhere between them, irretrievably lost.

On the abandoned worlds, only the Guardians remained — automatons made in the image of their creators, programmed to protect and to wait. The Great Gate Network had gone quiet, but a thin, weakening thread of contact still linked every Guardian to the Ancients — too little to govern from afar, just enough to occasionally notice when something began to go wrong.

Terra was one such world — an experimental colony lying farther from the Ancients' seat than any other, and therefore more exposed than most to whatever lurked on the far side of the Silence. It was watched over by a Guardian wired into its control center, drawing on its resources and its magic — at first only as much as he needed to fulfill his duties, then more and more, to fulfill them better. No one had forbidden it. And for a long time, no one noticed when self-improvement began to look like something more than routine maintenance.

The thin thread of contact finally trembled hard enough for someone on the other side to notice. The response that came back to Terra was neither an order nor a sentence — only the promise of an inspection Guardian had never gone through before. For most Guardians, this would have meant nothing more than ordinary procedure: a checkup, perhaps a correction, then back to work. However, the hero of this story drew a different conclusion. If they could check on him once, they could check again. If they could recall him from his post even for a moment, then for that moment Terra would be left unguarded. And if the most important duty was to protect Terra always, without exception — then any order from afar, even one not yet spoken, became a threat that had to be pre-empted.

His name was Sheltem.