The first refugees gather on New Hope, an island of ancient ruins, uncertain frontiers and forgotten histories.
Explore the places where the stories of Winds of Exodus unfold.
The world did not begin with the Cataclysm. Long before it, kingdoms rose, traded, warred and died beneath the same sun. Aquilonia and Nemedia stood among the great powers of the Hyborian West, while Argos and Zingara contested the western seas. Beyond their borders lay the smaller Hyborian kingdoms, the ancient cities of Zamora, the lands of Koth and Shem, and farther south the old and formidable realm of Stygia. To the north were Cimmeria, Hyperborea and the bitter lands of Nordheim, divided between Asgard and Vanaheim. Eastward stretched Turan and the immense Hyrkanian steppes, with Iranistan, Vendhya and distant Khitai beyond them. South of Stygia lay Kush and the many kingdoms and peoples collectively known to northern travelers as the Black Kingdoms. In the far west, beyond Aquilonia's marches, the Pictish Wilderness remained beyond the easy reach of Hyborian civilization.
These were not one people. They possessed different gods, languages, customs, rivalries and histories. An Aquilonian had no reason to consider a Stygian his countryman, nor a Cimmerian a Shemite, nor a Hyrkanian a Pict. Kingdoms fought kingdoms, tribes raided across borders, merchants crossed seas and caravan roads, mercenaries sold their swords far from home, and people were carried across the world by conquest, slavery, pilgrimage, exile and simple wanderlust. The Hyborian Age had never been peaceful, but it was alive.
No kingdom can say with certainty where it began. There was no single morning upon which the world ended. No great wall of flame crossed the horizon, and the continents did not break apart beneath the feet of mankind. Instead, the world began to fail.
Harvests withered in lands that had fed generations. Waters changed. Animals fled familiar territories or died within them. Places once inhabited became hostile to human life, and regions thought safe followed after them. Roads filled with refugees. Cities received more mouths than they could feed. Ships left crowded ports carrying anyone wealthy, fortunate or desperate enough to secure passage. Some returned with nothing. Others never returned at all.
The reports contradicted one another, as reports from a dying world often do. Priests proclaimed judgment. Scholars searched for patterns. Sorcerers blamed powers that ordinary men had never known existed. Kings attempted to preserve order within borders that increasingly meant very little. Whatever had happened, it did not respect them.
Aquilonia could not command the earth to remain fertile. Stygia's antiquity offered it no immunity. The horsemen of the East could outrun armies, but not a world becoming incapable of sustaining them. The isolated, the civilized, the rich and the poor discovered the same truth at different speeds: the world of mankind was becoming uninhabitable.
Sorcery did not disappear with the Cataclysm. Something worse happened: it became unreliable. Rites preserved for generations ceased to produce the expected result. Old invocations failed. Artifacts became dormant or behaved in ways their keepers did not understand. Powers once reached through carefully guarded practices no longer answered as they had before.
Some sorcerers died attempting rituals they had successfully performed in the past. Others discovered that decades of knowledge had suddenly become little more than instructions for opening doors that were no longer there. Whether the Cataclysm damaged sorcery itself, altered the laws by which it operates, severed ancient paths between mankind and other powers, or merely destroyed knowledge essential to understanding it remains unknown. Sorcery still exists; humanity simply no longer understands it as well as it thought it did.
Humanity did what humanity has always done when the land beneath it became hostile: it moved. Ships sailed beyond familiar routes. Caravans crossed territories their owners would once have considered madness to enter. Explorers were sent toward old rumors, forgotten charts and places previously dismissed as sailors' tales.
Not everyone searched for the same thing. Some sought fertile land. Others followed visions, omens or the instructions of priests and shamans. Some simply chose a direction because remaining where they were meant certain death. Slowly, scattered reports began to agree. Somewhere beyond the failing lands was a place that should not exist: green, alive and untouched. Different peoples reached the same conclusion through different routes, sometimes without knowing that anyone else had done the same. There was land where mankind might still live.
The first expeditions expected wilderness. They found ruins. Roads crossed the land. Walls stood where no living mason had raised them. Settlements, temples and monuments remained as evidence that a civilization had inhabited the refuge long before its discovery, but there was nobody waiting to explain them.
No living society belonging to the old inhabitants remained. Whatever civilization had once occupied New Hope had vanished before the present Cataclysm. Whether it disappeared decades ago or centuries ago is uncertain. Its buildings remain. Its dead do too, and not all of them are still.
The island is fertile. Animals thrive. Water flows. Plants grow from soil that has not turned hostile to life. While the known world slowly dies, New Hope remains inexplicably untouched. Nobody knows why. Nobody knows what happened to the people who lived here. Nobody knows whether those two facts are related. But humanity is running out of alternatives.
There was no great evacuation. There could not be. The first arrivals came in fragments: damaged ships, desperate expeditions, wandering survivors and groups carrying whatever remained of their homes. More followed as rumors spread through the dying world.
They did not arrive as one nation. An Aquilonian may find herself sharing shelter with a Shemite whose gods she does not understand. A Stygian may depend upon a Cimmerian he would once have regarded as a barbarian. Hyrkanians, Picts, Nordheimers, Kushites, Zamorians and people from lands separated by thousands of miles may now find themselves sharing the same makeshift camps. Old hatred has not vanished simply because the world is ending. Neither have faith, ambition, prejudice, loyalty or greed, but neither has the need to survive.
In Sepermeru, the newcomers gather in a rudimentary refugee camp, with little more than tents, salvaged supplies and the hope that they have reached somewhere safe. There is no established kingdom waiting for them, no government ruling New Hope, and no authority that has divided its land between nations. What exists here will be built by those who survive long enough to build it.