For hundreds of years during the Third Age, before the Dynasty of Trians founded tributary states there by the start of the Fourth, the many peoples who inhabited the Island continent of Aetherosia, which was raised upon the shell of an Island Turtle that resembled a gigantic alligator snapping turtle covered in moss and was discovered by the Chuseiian seafarer Aetheros, who settled the island-continent with his people after an asteroid impact destroyed the industrial civilizations of the Second Age, were once taught the nearly-lost elemental magic of their First-Age forebears by the Gods and Mages of Water, Earth, Air and Fire, and soon strove to preserve the knowledge and practices of such magic, much of which were lost during the industrialized Second Age, in four different monasteries that specialized in Water-Magic, Earth-Magic, Air-Magic and Fire-Magic. Over time, as these elemental monasteries grew in prominence, four major Elemental Provinces emerged in the vast lands west of the Great Canyon of Duhum-Bazad, where the peoples there specialized in an elemental magic practice of their own choosing depending on that province’s geography and dominant element as well as its qualities; The Aetherosians who inhabited the hot, arid desert regions of the Sands of Fate and Hills of Fire specialized in Fire-Magic, the Aetherosians who dwelled in the swampy wetlands of the Green Marshes specialized in Water-Magic, and so forth. But during the start of the Forth Age, a new multiethnic wave of various invading human settlers from overseas would gradually push the Ancient Aetherosians out from their homelands with their advanced weapons and technology and established cities, city-states, and later feudal kingdoms which soon became tributary states of Triania. Some of these newly-founded states were industrialized, although some of them would assimilate into ancient Aetherosian culture and become, in the words of some prominent Trianian historians, “more Aetherosian than the Aetherosians themselves”. However, the descendants of the Ancient Aetherosians, such as the Udolai of the Green Marshes and the people from the Hills of Fire who maintained an class of priestesses known as the Fire-Maidens, would continue to uphold their elemental magic in certain hidden and remote areas of untouched wilderness with the help of the island-continent’s elves and fairies, and over time, some of the descendants of the second wave of invaders, such as a few dedicated families of human sorcerers and sorceresses, would soon strive to keep and preserve this wisdom for the benefit of future generations as they established universities and libraries in many of Aetherosia’s biggest cities and towns. But as the Fifth Age arrived and the hyper-industrialized Arpanian and Thubanian Empires wrestled for control over the former tributary states of the Trians, the Elemental Magic of the Ancient Aetherosians seemed to be in jeopardy…until a certain young mage from the Southwestern Lands who has been well-versed in this sacred knowledge of controlling, manipulating and conjuring Water, Earth, Air and Fire, will be foretold to fulfill the Prophecy of the West…
