The age of The Scepter, the age of religion of the the last cycle was perhaps the land’s darkest time. It was also the longest. The people of the land forgot the Gods and their ways. They regarded the old stories as myth and fables designed to scare and educate the little ones. “The Gods of old have long since forgotten us” they would say as they went about their daily chores.

The Gods, disappointed that the people forgot about them have indeed turned their backs in anger. They refused to keep the people of the land safe from plague and from drought – only one god still had faith in mortal-kind. It was Dalanos who made peace between the people and their Gods. It was he who reached out to one blind peasant boy called Albian.

“And I saw a figure draped in white. And the apparition spoke my name. And he told me his name was Dalanos.”

He appeared in the boy’s dreams and told him all about the old religions. Albian spread the words of Dalanos together with his brother and a friend from his village. Together they travelled the continent and brought Dalanos’ touch to the sickly and the poor. The people of the land gladly accepted their encouraging words, their healing touch, and the land prospered. A great fortress was constructed to honor Albian and Dalanos. Centuries later it was that fortress, the Temple of Albian, where the land’s greatest evil emerged.

Many years after Albian’s passing, The Father Abbot of the Albian Order of Dalanos looked over the temple’s walls into the horizon and was dismayed.

“… there were many non-believers still – even the village of Triel that dwelt beyond the forest to the north was overflowing with heathens. He prayed to Dalanos to smite them. To force them to stop their evil ways, to turn them from letchery, greed and lust to his holy path. For the Father Abbot hated them, loathed their very existence, trembled with rage at the thought of every sinful breath they took into their bodies. For in this holy land, even the air was sacred and they had no right to breathe!”

And Dalanos did not respond to the Father Abbot’s prayers. He was greatly saddened that this once great man was driven to such hatered. The God hoped this misguided old man would realize that his wrath and hatred were not the God’s way and return once more to the light. Unfortunately, in his blind rage the Father Abbot thought the God was testing him. And so began the shaping of the Hand of Dalanos, the church’s most evil of weapons. This was when the wide-eyed Soran, barely a man, merely a few weeks in the order of Albian, was taken… and broken.