Under the crushing weight of necessity, with hundreds of thousands of lives hanging in the balance, Ciaranol Kalvorsson pressed forward at the command of the Midland Alliance's leadership. He had not yet solved the problem of linking two Worldgate locations, but the knowledge that humans had once passed through them in the distant past suggested that a solution existed—somewhere. Yet, nowhere in the preserved histories of humanity's arrival could he find mention of how they had emerged. It was as if their passage had simply happened, without record or explanation.
The only clue he found was a name, buried in the oldest fragments of preserved lore: Naomi Viskarn. A human wizard, or perhaps a cleric—no sources agreed—but the one sliver of evidence he had suggested that whoever she had been, she had not accompanied her people through the Worldgates. Instead, she had remained behind.
If true, this meant something grim: one could not both open the Worldgates and pass through them. If a spellcaster had to maintain the gate from one side, then whoever had guided humanity through had sacrificed themselves in the process. And if that was the case, Ciaranol's efforts were already doomed—no mage in Encara was powerful enough to sustain a spell of such magnitude alone.
Against the warnings of his allies, Ciaranol left his research unit and set off in search of anything else that could explain what had been done. He scoured archives, monasteries, and forgotten ruins, convinced that if there was even a sliver of knowledge that could turn the tide of war, he had to find it.
Months passed. And in those months, the war was lost.
Yldan fell to the Imperium's relentless advance, losing nearly half its territory. The Imperium's armies reached the borders of Yost, a kingdom unprepared for war on this scale. Refugees flooded the north, pouring into Ainor, Elendris, and Luthstreig. Karhol and Luthstreig, two minor northern kingdoms, pledged their meager military forces to the Midland Alliance in a last-ditch effort to slow the Imperial war machine, but the Imperium's forces numbered over a million, bolstered further by constructs and war machines fueled by brutal orcish artifice.
The Midlands had weeks—at best—before collapse.
In those final desperate days, the gnomes of Valdeschtauk unveiled a prototype war engine: the first flying machines in Encara's history. Brass-winged birds, capable of carrying a single pilot and a payload of deadly gnomish explosives, took to the skies. They were unreliable, experimental, and often deadly for the pilot. But they were something. And as gnomish engineers refined their volatile spell-infused munitions, the Midlands lashed out with every weapon at their disposal.
Meanwhile, Ciaranol finally found what he was looking for.
Deep beneath a monastery in the frozen wastes of Luthstreig, buried in a vault untouched for millennia, he unearthed a journal. The personal writings of Naomi Viskarn, written in a language no translation spell could decipher. With the aid of the monks, he spent weeks painstakingly decoding what little he could.
What he learned crushed him.
The Worldgates were never designed to transport people across a single world. They were interplanar constructs, ancient beyond reckoning, designed solely to move material between worlds.
All his research—all his work—had been a waste.
By the time he returned to the front, the Midlands were nearly gone.
Yldan's armies had been broken. What little remained of the alliance was preparing for a mass evacuation of their civilian populations, already accepting that they could not win this war.
Ciaranol brought his findings to the alliance leadership, hoping to finally put an end to the folly of the Worldgate project.
But one voice in the chamber disagreed.
Algrim Vanbrauscht, a Rauchstav gnome and an expert in summoning magic, had been conducting research of his own—though not through books and scrolls. He had turned instead to the knowledge of his people's infernal contacts.
The problem, he argued, was not that the Worldgates couldn't move armies across Encara. The problem was that the Midlands had been using them incorrectly.
These gates were linked to places beyond Encara—places filled with things. And if they could not send their warriors through the gates, perhaps they could instead call something forth.
Ciaranol was horrified. They had no idea what lay beyond the Worldgates. No knowledge of what they might unleash. Algrim dismissed his concerns. Binding creatures from other planes was his expertise, and the infernal scholars of the Rauchstav had long perfected the art of binding and controlling otherworldly entities.
The Midland Alliance, desperate beyond reason, agreed to the plan.
Ciaranol, unwilling to see the Worldgates turned into tools of madness, opposed the project at every step. But the war had already taken the decision out of his hands. If he did not help, others would.
And so, working under duress, Ciaranol and Algrim began the Summoning Project.
Under Algrim's guidance, infernal warlocks and sorcerers worked alongside Ciaranol's wizards, devising a means of inverting the Worldgate's function. The spells Ciaranol had developed had been focused on pushing things into the gates. Now, they were altered to pull something through.
When the spell was complete, they tested it.
The first summoned creature was a predatory reptilian beast, the size of a wolf, with wickedly curved talons and eyes that burned with unnatural hunger. It was completely under Algrim's control.
The second test was even more promising: a creature summoned at a distant Worldgate, remotely bound and directed by sorcerers and diviners.
And so, at last, the Midlands struck back.
In the first true battle of the Summoning War, a regiment of Kaldjari soldiers found themselves hunted by nightmarish horrors—unseen before on Encara. Beasts, monstrosities, horrors ripped from forgotten realms. Within hours, the regiment was slaughtered to the last.
The Midland leadership delivered an ultimatum to the Imperium: withdraw or be devoured.
For the first time, the Imperium hesitated.
A tenuous peace was struck. The Imperium agreed to withdraw from the Midlands in exchange for new trade agreements—concessions the Midlands had once refused outright. Slowly, Imperial forces began to pull back.
As the Imperium withdrew its forces under the terms of the fragile peace, their war effort did not cease—it merely shifted. While the Midlands turned their attention to rebuilding and stabilizing their war-torn lands, the Kaldjari Imperium worked tirelessly in secret. One by one, every Worldgate within their territory was locked away behind massive fortifications of stone, steel, and magic. These immense barriers, patrolled by war constructs, shamans, and mages, were a clear signal: the Imperium had no intention of allowing the Midlands exclusive access to this newfound power.
For a time, the uneasy truce held, but Ciaranol was not content to let the Worldgate project be abandoned. He believed that its true purpose had never been war, and though the Summoning Project had become a grotesque perversion of what could have been a historic breakthrough, he still held onto the dream that the gates could serve a greater purpose. Interplanar travel. Trade. Expansion beyond the limits of Encara. He envisioned a future where scarcity no longer dictated war, where new sources of materials, magic, and knowledge could be found across the vast unknown. If they could not share Encara with the Imperium, perhaps they could simply leave it behind.
For months, he immersed himself in the study of the gates, refining his understanding of their function. He worked under the belief that the gates were not merely pathways, but reflections of a singular construct, existing simultaneously across multiple locations and—if his calculations were correct—across multiple planes. If it was true that the Worldgates were interplanar in nature, then they were not just relics of Encara's past but tools designed to bridge entire realities. The question was no longer whether they could move armies across the land—it was whether they could move an entire people to a new world.
In time, Ciaranol's experiments bore fruit. He was able to channel raw magical energy through a Worldgate and, for the first time, send something through. It was nothing more than a simple metal rod, marked with enchanted runes, but when it vanished into the swirling void of the Worldgate, it did not simply disappear. It returned moments later, etched with strange symbols and imbued with residual magic from somewhere else.
That was when he realized: the Worldgates were not merely doors. They were messages. Beacons. And someone—or something—had answered.
Yet before Ciaranol could further investigate, the world around him came apart.
It began with a single Worldgate, one that should have remained dormant. Six months after the truce was signed, the towering spire nearest Yldheim, the Yldanian capital, activated without warning.
What came through was no envoy, no answer from another world. Instead, horrors poured forth—a tide of chitin and hunger, insectoid aberrations that descended upon the capital like a plague. The creatures spread with terrifying speed, swarming through the streets, burrowing beneath the ground, nesting in the ruins of palaces and temples. Within hours, Yldheim was lost.
The chaos did not end there. Days later, another Worldgate flared to life in the depths of the Ainoran forests, disgorging packs of ravenous predators that roamed unchecked, slaughtering everything in their path. Then another gate, then another. The pattern became clear: this was no accident.
The Imperium had not abandoned the Worldgates. They had learned the secret of summoning—and they no longer cared to control what came through.
Panic gripped the Midlands as the realization set in. The very weapon that had given them victory had now become a gateway to annihilation. The war was not over. It had only just begun.
With the Midlands in chaos, the Imperium struck.
Ciaranol and Algrim were urgently recalled, their expertise desperately needed to counteract the disaster unfolding across the continent. But they never made it to the front. The Imperium had planned for this moment, and as the two magic users prepared to board a Yldanian skyskiff, assassins struck.
Ciaranol was gravely wounded, a blade driven deep into his side. Algrim suffered far worse—his right arm severed at the shoulder, his spine shattered. Though their attackers were driven off before the final blow could be struck, the damage was done. Algrim would never walk again, and Ciaranol, even with magic, would never fully recover.
The time they had left was lost. The Imperium moved with brutal efficiency, striking at the heart of Yldan, laying siege to Falskan Keep, the last stronghold of the Yldanian monarchy. The queen and her two youngest sons were captured, held as hostages to force the Midlands into submission. The remaining forces of the alliance scrambled to hold what little ground they still possessed, but with the Imperium's war engines advancing unchecked, hope began to dwindle.
There was one final chance.
The crown prince, barely thirty years old, was left with an impossible choice. With his homeland burning and his family in chains, he turned once again to the power that had delivered the Midlands from destruction once before.
Ciaranol refused. He had seen too much, understood too well the terrible price of this path. If they escalated the war further, there would be nothing left to save.
But Algrim?
Algrim, broken but unbowed, promised the prince that he could end the war. That he would call forth something so terrible, so unstoppable, that the Imperium would never rise again.
He swore that this time, there would be no escape.
No matter the cost.