Terra: The Islands No One Was Watching

PreviouslyCorak nearly lost his life in an ambush aboard the CRON station, but managed to save it — and himself — from destruction. The price of that rescue was steep: the time lost to reconstruction gave Sheltem exactly the head start he needed to reach the place he'd been making for all along.

Terra — the world Sheltem was once meant to protect, before everything went wrong — was not an empty ocean waiting to be settled. The Ancients had seeded life here long before his arrival, with a separate seed-ship, building a civilization deep beneath the waves. It was this civilization, invisible from the surface, that Sheltem was meant to watch over as a Guardian.

The islands travelers walk today did not exist back then. They appeared only with the arriving flotilla — nacelles broken apart in flight settled onto the water and shattered into pieces that, over time, grew over, became inhabited, and turned into new land. That same day, the wave of destruction also reached the old, submerged civilization Sheltem had been protecting from the start. Once-great cities — both the submerged ones and those newly risen on the islands — fell into ruin. The underground filled with demons and the undead. Three human kingdoms, descended both from those who survived beneath the water and from the settlers of the new islands, now wage a ruinous war over whatever is still left to seize.

Into this chaos, six strangers whom nothing but circumstance could ever have bound together find one another: Resurecta, a cleric who wants the war to end more than she wants anything else; Kastore, a mage worn down by lawlessness he never wished to witness; Sir Canegm, a paladin for whom the undead roaming the city are a personal insult; Crag Hack, a barbarian looking for an enemy worthy of his strength; Dark Shade, a thief who sees every locked castle as nothing more than a well-secured chest; and Maximus, a knight fighting for the honor of a kingdom that barely remembers what it used to be. Along the way, two hired hands join them, Tolberti and Robert Wise — less gifted than the rest, but every bit as hungry for adventure.

Their journey across the Isles of Terra ends with the discovery of eleven Spheres of Power capable of ending the ongoing war, and a peculiar blue card that opens the way to the planet's deepest underground. There, at the heart of a ship hidden at the bottom of the Great Ocean, Sheltem is waiting.

Corak arrives not long after. When he joins forces with the party at the control center, the confrontation that follows is one Sheltem loses — though not badly enough to be caught. He flees aboard one of three rescue ships docked in the bay. Corak takes the second in pursuit. The party of eight, whether they intended to or not, ends up taking the third. None of them notice the shapes watching their departure from the shore — or that they are no ordinary monsters at all.