The Conjurers’ War and The Locusta

Unbelievably, the two men who started this devastation, Emperors Francois and Nikolae survived. Between their Battle-Wizard guards and their own cunning to survive, they had manage to avoid the Locusta, their own people, their human enemies and the now unrestrained barbarian tribes once kept well away from their borders.

In the wilds of the desert, they came across each other. They had both long since regretted their weakness of mind, they had no reason left to want to kill each other and decided to work together. Their team of wizards numbered one dozen only. They were the last of their kind and were the world’s last hope.

A year went by as they studied their enemies and worked out the best way to counter the efforts of the Conjurers. In the end it was decided that half of them would to work on a Dispelling, an anti-conjuring, to create a rift back to the worlds of the Locusta. The others worked on a great spell that would enable them to control the very elements, to call lightning from the sky in great thunderstorms and to rend the ground with earthquakes. As a team, they would create a rift and then use the elements to force the Locusta into it.

The emperors knew that they would not be able to destroy all of them at once. They worked on a plan where they would pick off small groups of Locusta, drawing attention to the fact that someone out there had worked out a way to destroy them, that they no longer had free reign around the world.

The Saints smiled on their efforts. For a year they travelled from mountain to valley to hill to coastline, finding groups of two or three Locusta and attacking. Eventually, the remaining Locusta decided that they could no longer ignore this threat. Setting the trap, the Emperors attacked on the ruins of Algundy, the former Gristik capital, killing half a dozen Vitter-creatures and then setting camp and waiting.

Four hundred Vitter and Ferbin arrived within an hour. Another hour later and there was nothing living left within one hundred miles. The Emperors dead. Their wizards torn apart by the Locusta and their own mighty magics. The Locusta killed or banished. And a continent, once the jewel of civilisation, destroyed and populated only by the desperate and the wild.