Creatures, by their very nature, seem condemned to endure the pull of two opposing forces: the need for community and the need for separation. Two impulses that appear contradictory, yet coexist within nearly every species—and nowhere are they more evident than in humanity.

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Humans have divided themselves by gender, status, appearance, accent, nation, culture, and belief. More often than not, what is unfamiliar is regarded with suspicion, and what is different is treated as something that must be feared, excluded, or, at times, destroyed. Those who do not resemble us are rarely accepted as wholly our own. Across different ages and lands, human cultures and peoples have flourished in countless forms, and the very differences that made them distinctive became the boundaries by which they were divided. They spoke of other races, other bloods, other peoples; some even convinced themselves that certain men were less human than themselves. Yet there has always been only one human race.

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But it was not always so.

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There was a time when many peoples and ancient races shared the world, coexisting in a fragile but sustainable balance, much as the forces of nature coexist—each distinct, each necessary, each bound to the others by an order greater than themselves. But mankind came to believe itself above nature, and what it could neither understand nor command, it sought to dominate.

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So nature learned to hide.

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Not beyond the world, but within it—beneath a veil of shadow and deception, concealed in forests, mountains, kingdoms, temples, and among the very people who believed themselves alone.

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For centuries, the worlds existed side by side, separated by a veil that only a few knew how to cross.

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These are the peoples who lived behind it.

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