The World of the Walled City

Billions of years ago, in the dark cold of space, a planet came into being. Third from its sun, this orbiting hunk of stone became a blue-green jewel that alone in its solar system gave birth to life. Over countless generations and multiple catastrophes, species lived, evolved, and died out, until one particular species evolved and grew above all others.

That species called themselves Human, and they became masters of the world, a world they named Earth. Humanity expanded across the world, into every climate. They flew on steel wings, dove to the bottom of the ocean, and even had the hubris to go beyond Earth’s boundaries to the Moon above. But that hubris went even further, leading to disaster.
 

No one knows precisely what happened or what caused Humanity to turn on itself. Maybe they became so covetous of what their fellow men owned that they turned on each other. Or Humanity finally faced some threat beyond themselves that forced them to unleash their most fearsome weaponry.
 

Radiant fire scoured the surface of the planet, burning Humanity away as it ravaged the land and sea. Massive explosions levelled entire swathes of the continents to leave behind only blighted lands filled with corruption and corpses. This moment was the Collapse of Man, and with it, the world called Earth seemed doomed to join its celestial brothers and sisters in desolation.
 

But something else happened in that moment of doom – the great energies unleashed by the Collapse roused a new power, something building for countless millennia inside the planet. The Earth itself woke from Her slumber to become Gaia, the first divinity of this new age – and magic came with Her. Between Her divine hand and this new surge of rejuvenating power, the Collapse didn’t wipe out all life from Her face.
 

Instead, Gaia brought about a Rebirth of life. Channeling the raw magic that now permeated Her surface, She took the essence of Humanity and fused it with the surviving animal species of high enough intelligence and adaptability to cope with the change to mind and body. Though great wastelands still scarred Gaia, life teemed across Her surface once more and, where there had once been only one species above all others, there now reigned hundreds, if not thousands.
 

Those species, the Folk, lived, loved, expanded, and built. And, in one land, at the outlet of one river, they built more and higher than any city before them. They named it quite simply The Walled City, a metropolis built five cities tall, filled with Folk of all kinds from across Gaia, and made legend by the stories made within its walls.