Istoria. My home. It is the kind of place that might've once been a paradise, or at least one that had great potential to be. The land is lush and splendid, brimming with plentiful resources, as if all of life's beauty was placed on hopeful display. This place was meant almost as an argument by the cosmos, I think, an argument that we needn't fight and steal and hurt. Every lovely aspect whispers to us - the clear water, the scent of wildflowers on the breeze, the warm bloom of sunset - all of it trying to tell us that this is enough, that we can find peace if we simply stand still.

Of course, we don't listen closely enough to these arguments, if at all; there is in fact no evidence that we ever have. Our written history begins immediately in the realm of greed and bloodshed. Of course, as an author and historian myself, I could argue that a truly peaceful person would have no need for written history at all. I could argue that we only write and record if we are inherently incomplete, if we are searching for fulfillment among the words and pages, if we seek to learn in others what we haven't found ourselves. But I digress.

The Kyverns arrived, according to most sources, around six-thousand years ago. Were they colonists from a faraway society, messengers from our previously distant creators, forces of nature personified? We did not know; we still do not know. They gifted, to a select and seemingly random few, an ability that was dubbed exousia, an ability that allowed its users to manipulate their surroundings in new and fascinating ways. A beautiful, savage tool, dependent on its users in the way that most tools are. Was exousia the beginning of our strife, the beginning of the wars that split us into kingdoms, the beginning of the bigotry that split us into unequal demographics? Were the Kyverns damning us? Or did we simply infuse the exousia with what already existed within us, using it for our preexisting ends? Were we damned from the very start?

Of course, this isn't for me to decide, but I can't bring myself to believe that the eternally damned would be given a place like this, the water and flowers and sunsets, the life and love we can find in every corner of it. Istoria is my home, and I hope more than anything that we can make it the paradise I know it's meant to be.