Eschain

Thousands of years have passed since the existence of the multiverse stood on the precipice of unmaking. Hastur, an ancient god from beyond reality, had very nearly escaped his prison, a demiplane beneath the 9th layer of the Hells, guarded and secured by the then-new pantheon of gods that found him. A team of brave heroes, their names now lost to the ravages of time, entered this prison, braved the traps and firewalls put in place to contain Hastur, and battled the Old One, defeating him before he could destroy all of reality. In doing so, the heroes ascended to godhood themselves, rallying the remains of the gods of their time, and set to remaking existence in the wake of total annihilation. Eons passed, and the work never quite seemed done. Disparate ideas and opinions regarding the tasks at hand found the heroes-turned-gods at odds with each other at times; at times, directing their newly-formed clergies collectively to give fuel to the dimly-glowing flames of civilization. Empires ascended and crumbled, and new settlements were built on the skeletons of old. A thousand forgotten wars were waged across an unknown number of battlefields for ideals as great as righteousness and justice, and as base as domination and malice. The boundaries of the great empires of the world have shifted and changed too many times for historians to definitively track. The legend of Reality’s Mending is now something of a creation myth among the peoples of the world once referred to as Toril. Now known as Echain, the world again begins to rumble. There’s a tension in the air. Kingdoms begin to field armies as borders are contested, the wilds have begun to push back against the settlements, and on the eastern side of the continent, the peoples of the Bawahi Steppe witness the birth of the rune children for the first time in a dozen generations.