Frontier Unwound

My mother used to tell me and my sibling's stories in my youth, about faeries and specters. Of other worlds and their mysterious inhabitants. In part to scare us into behaving, but also to appeal to children's sense of wonder. She wanted us to find something in this world that captured our minds.   It's unfortunate that her stories turned out to be more real than they were story.   Centuries ago, our world was without magic. It was a thing of myth and mystery. Something for children to aspire to and for those same children to scoff at when they cross the threshold of adulthood.   All at once, we learned the truth of the matter. We had not been without magic, and our legends were based on more fact than imagination. The magic had simply been waning.   It operates like a tide, ebbing and flowing through the layers of the multiverse over the course of aeons, and out world simply had the fortune to be on the tail end of an ebb when humanity first started to walk upright.   The magical races that filled our dreams had simply left as the magic did, not wanting to be trapped on our side of the fabric of reality. A few stayed, or were trapped. That Dracula fellow comes to mind.   But then it came rushing back.   Realmgates opened up across our world as the Greeks were fighting the persians, the Romans were carving out their empire, and the Chinese broke apart into their warring states. To say the empires of the world were caught off guard would undersell the chaos of monsters and other races pouring through portals en mass truly did.   Dare I say, Human civilization probably would have toppled completely if it wasn't for the shadowed efforts of the Fae courts preparing us as best they could without saying it outright.   Now here we are. A new age in a new age. Now we can turn our ingenuity and industrial might to the conquering of the array of Realms left before us.   Or find something that will kill us all for good.