While the Hundred Kingdoms were being born in a wave of desperate refugees, violence, and hunger, the City States were flourishing, picking through the greatest secrets of the old Dominion and delving into the perplexities of archemy and divinity. Today, they are the greatest repositories of knowledge and the inheritors of the glory that was once the Old Dominion of Man.

At least that is what the Locutors of the City States would have one believe. It is true that while the Hundred Kingdoms were born from the desperate rush of thousands of refugees, the City States had already been founded on the highest principles of philosophy, ethics, and education available to mankind. In fact, the entire existence of the City States is owed to the presence of their founder, Constantius Domulexor.

Born Platon of Chorae, he started as a humble butcher’s apprentice, only to rise to the pinnacle of secular power within the Old Dominion, becoming the Maistros of the Dominion’s Collegia under the academic name of Constantius Domulexor. It was Constantius and his colleague, the unnamed First Magos of the Collegia, who identified Hazlia’s creeping madness. They, two of the most powerful and influential individuals within the Dominion, delved deep into the secrets of the divine and the Primordial, plumbing mysteries on the nature of divinity and power that have thankfully been lost. Both individuals were deeply changed by their research, and, while the First Magos sought to use his knowledge and power to kill his God, Constantius resolved instead to safeguard and protect mankind from the coming cataclysm as best he could. Using once more the forgotten name of his humble origins to ensure secrecy in the first stages of his schemes, Platon took on a subtle task of momentous proportions: the transfer of an empire’s amassed knowledge.