The History of the World
Esca the Moor banished Slate sometime in our prehistory, approximately 200,000 years ago, shortly after the last dinosaurs were killed. This period is considered by science as the dawn of mankind, that point where we as a human animal came to exist in much the same evolutionary state that we live in today. But the scientific facts are skewed by forces science cannot account for.

Dinosaurs reigned, and man lived with them, and you who read this are a skeptic, I know. But you should know that the Pallium is a much older set than you realize. It is older than the Catholic Church, older than anything that exists today other than the Pallium. The history of man began not hundreds of thousands of years ago, but millions and millions of years ago. Civilizations have risen and fallen that have never been heard of and never will be, all before it was thought possible for a man to walk upright and carry a stick.

Dinosaurs, too, thrived over a much longer span of time than is currently believed, and though they are thought of as mythical creatures, so, too, did dragons live, and when they did, they ruled Earth as nothing else ever has. During this period of Earth’s history many creatures existed which are now unknown to science and are considered creatures of myth and fantasy. Creatures of magic, imbued with magic and with magical abilities. Monstrous snakes, leviathans of the deep, creatures that in fact could perform many of the fantastic feats that today are only thought of as fantasy: turning other animals to stone with a stare, growing to megalithic size, breathing fire.

Science will teach you that a giant meteor crashed into the Earth and, as a result of the dust cloud that rose and suffocated the sun, the dinosaurs perished. But in fact, the dinosaurs were killed out of existence. Murdered, as it were, by dragons. Dinosaurs were considered a game animal by dragons, and with voracious appetites the dragons ravaged them, as they ravaged the planet. And when the dragons were all dead and gone and new game needed to be found the dragons began hunting humans.

As game goes the human animal is meager competition, especially when the hunter is a dragon. But humans are thinkers, and were much better equipped to hide, to remain hidden, and, should the need arise, to devise a plan for survival, even if that included battle. Dragons had never encountered a species which could defend itself with tools and weapons, and which could devise schemes and armaments and defenses to keep the dragons at bay. It was a species also that could command the forces of magic, as dragons always had, and in this, humans, along with the dragons, were unique. So, rather than a game of brawn and ferocity, the humans tested the dragons’ mental prowess. Hunting humans became like a puzzle for them, to work out their patterns, their movements, the way they think. The dragons held competitions to see which of them could kill the most humans in a single attack. Humans responded by fortifying themselves in defensible shelters using magic and weapons which grew more and more complex as the worldwide siege endured. But dragons ultimately had the upper hand, the power of flight and fire and raw strength gave them too much of an advantage against the humans, and the numbers of humans dwindled.

At the point when Esca Moor banished Slate, Earth was a tumultuous place due to the gravitational draw of two moons. The surface of the planet was much more active then—volcanoes, earthquakes, tempests, tsunamis, etc. For this reason we can surmise that, though science has figured out a lot of how the planet has shifted and what it once looked like, they really have no concept of the time involved. The changes which caused the continents, which were once joined together in one super landmass we refer to now as Pangaea, to drift apart once was thought to have occurred over the course of millions, perhaps even billions of years. Of course, science doesn’t acknowledge the existence of the once and other moon, so they have no idea how much more quickly the plates shifted. With Slate and Luna both in orbit, the planet’s landmasses were ripped apart.

With Slate gone Earth’s temperamental environment calmed down significantly and came to resemble something more like what we know today. Continental drift still occurs, as do earthquakes, storms, volcanoes and all other manner of environmental calamity, but the level of scale is dynamically diminished. Suddenly, the sun began to shine and the wind, which had always been at gale strength even on a calm day, settled. The Earth’s rumble slowed and finally became virtually unnoticeable. Mountains stopped spewing ash and fire. The coasts of the continents became habitable places, and people could actually go down to the sea without fear of being wiped out. Higher ground no longer was vital to existence, because the tsunamis withered and the flash floods which struck on all corners of the globe became more and more rare.

But the damage was done by that time. All the great civilizations had collapsed. The dragons had wiped out the dinosaurs and a majority of the people, too. Had Esca the Moor not destroyed Slate, in all likelihood, mankind would have been driven to extinction within a few short years.

As for the civilizations themselves, we know that cities existed. How vast or populous we do not know. We presume they were small, due to the inherent difficulties in building anything with the planet in such a tumultuous state, but we believe the cities were built in pockets of land, tracts which were comparatively scourge free. We have an account of a great tower built of ivory which was the last standing proof of the ingenuity of early man.