Introduction
The legends tell of Ancient Terra being a place of beauty. A place of Science. A place of one species. Not like today. Not when the world is so wracked, left so broken by the trail of Forever Wars that rage on even today in some parts. Not a place where myths and science are one, where the truth of one is the lie of another. Not where dominance is dueled for between the great Lizards of the North, the 'Dragon Kin', 'Cold Ones', 'Reptilians' and a dozen score other names.
The Furs, meanwhile, who rally with increasing numbers and furver behind the Great Alliance, the Land of the United Furs, who's sole purpose, ruled from their mighty, Terranesque city of half-beauty, Victory, built on an island in the Great Lake of the same name, is to crush the Lizards once and for all and see a world ruled by the Fur Races.
Ancient Terra, to the Fur Races is said to have fallen in ages past, crushed beneath the sun-hot fires of a war fought with weapons neither race today can imagine. The stories, as few, fractured and ill-understood as they are tell of cities of immense beauty, such that no Fur can see them without being tested for his sanity by the complexity that a billion Terrans can build in an instant. Cities which stood across the entire planet, which sat silently atop mountains and under oceans, in huge, floating islands, inside the ground - and even in space and upon the moons of Earth.
The stories tell us that war is futile. They tell us that the Terrans wrought their own destruction. The Terrans, even then were a race so advanced that their technology can never be matched by our own. They molded the land with lights from the heavens and fueled their cities with the same fire Verus put in the sun. They walked upon and between the moons, and had machinery such that they could live anywhere.
The same technology leveled entire cities in one, fiery instant. They began to war between themselves. For land, power or wealth we do not know. What the stories tell us is that entire armies clashed, billions of Terrans died in bloody battle at the hands of technologies so advanced the armies fighting rarely even saw each other.
They fired steel into the heavens and their space-born cities rained down on the planet, killing thousands as they crushed into the earth. Weapons so powerful they cut the planet and the Earth wept liquid fire on their civilizations cut swathes into the planet. The ring of the Earth was made by the Ancient Terrans when they crashed two of the moons together, snuffing a billion lives in a single, cataclysmic blow the races shall never see the likes of again.
They say fire rained from the sky more than water. That the ground was more often liquid than solid, you could walk the slowly freezing oceans and the sky greyed and clouded, and the sun did not shine for a hundred years. The deserts burned to glass and their buildings, taller than mountains and piercing into the sky crashed down as their foundations were moltonised by weapons made to carve mountains.
They say assassins came from nowhere, appearing from neither light nor shadow and striking down their targets with a single blow, before becoming one with the air again. They had eyes so small you could not see them and they saw from the walls themselves. The Terrans eventually took to sheltering in rooms of iron and steel a half dozen kilometers beneath the ground, as the outside air was poison, the sky black and the oceans fire.
Wheather these stories are true or not is unclear. Wheather the Terrans ever were, or still are this advanced we do not know. But there are rings of moonrock about the planet. There are bodies still lingering beneath the ground in armour our tools cannot pierce. Caverns inside false mountains a dozen miles wide, alloys lurk beneath the floor we cannon analyze, let alone fathom their construction.
There are places so haunted by the innumerable dead Terrans of their 'War of Ages' that no Fur, nor even the hardy Lizards shall even set foot within them. These places hide their invisible 'Black Eagles', the iron flying machines, faster than any natural craft, impermeable to our primitive weapons and invisible to all forms of detection.
They endlessly prowl the Lost Isles of the Terrans, the North-Eastern most place in the world from the Supercontinent, where the ground pierces the Oceans in a chain of islands, shaped as tears.
The weeping Terrans for billions of nameless dead, they say.
It is here is where the Terrans stop calling themselves Ancient, and become the Modern Terrans. And it is from here that the tale of the Terrans continues. They tell of their empires destroyed, of their civilization wracked by a thousand years of bloodied warfare. They tell us of the greatness of their race, how just a handful of Terrans lived on.
Five groups survived the strife that continued from the end of the War of Ages. One group built a mighty fleet of many vessels and set off into space, where their was no air to be polluted and poisoned by the weapons of Terrankind and they could live freely in their mighty armada of ships, floating between the planets in the cold void of space.
Another group, closely related built instead a single, mighty vessel, the Salvarii Elat Avari, loosely translated from the complex and intricate Ancient-Terran language as ''Wing of Salvation'. The Salvarii Elat Avari is a single, mighty vessel, spoken to be the size of the Atlantian Archipelago from which it was, one piece at a time, launched. So huge and mighty it can block the sun, casting a shadow upon the planet even from space. It is self sustaining and can produce so much of life's requirements that it later allied with the Terran fleet - the armada of vessels launched by the first Terran Clan - feeding and bathing those hundreds of captains and their crews in return for the protection of the mightiest navy.
The Third and Fourth clans are spoken of as noble fools by the other Terran Clans. In the Lizard race, the Third and Fourth Clans are considered evil, and to the Furs they are the manifestations of the devils work. But our races are underdeveloped, who are we to question the actions of the first of the Modern Terrans?
These two clans thought to purify the world. They set about re creating life on the dying planet, cleaning the air and moving the clouds which blocked the sun. They attempted to create new life, and according to the few myths from this time it is they who discovered that the Terrans were dying, becoming infertile and their numbers running few.
They broke the secret of the first of the Ten Sciences of God, as the Terrans call them. The 'Ten Sciences of God' are in reference to their single Diety, know simply as 'God' to their majority, and they are the sciences he manipulates to rule the universe. The one in question, the only one known to us, is Immortality.
The Fourth Clan is credited with the discovery, using an unknown and misunderstood science the Terrans call 'Biolo Constrictus' - Biological Engineering - they grow replacement organs from a mixture of natural, organic tissue and machinery. Impossible for us to imagine, the Terrans utilize these to cure illnesses, end plague and stop themselves from aging.
Somewhere, somehow both these clans took a step too far. They broke the Second of the Ten Sciences of God. What this was we do not know, nor do we know when they did it or how long it took to backfire. All that is ever listed is that it did backfire, and that whatever it was rose up against the Terrans. The Terrans, now lacking vastly in numbers fought the war without their massively destructive weapons that had already killed their world once, a world they had nurtured back to health.
The Terrans eventually won the war, although it cost them dearly. The two largest clans, the Third and Fourth were wiped out and their tasks never accomplished, and the last Earth-bound Clan, the Fifth lost a vast swathe of its number, but in doing so it is said they perfected their way of war and they themselves mastered and then destroyed the Second Science of God forever.
The Fifth Clan is the youngest Clan of the Terrans, and the one which is the most known, but least known about, to both the Lizard and Fur Races. These are the Terrans who inhabit the world now, hidden, either in their ruined, missing cities, or perhaps within the Lost Isles themselves.
The Fifth Clan was formed at the same time as the Second Law was breached. The last generation of Terrans to be born they formed their own Clan in protest to the Second Law, for which they were mocked, but later proved right at a bloody price. They vanished, the Clan apparently abandoned as the Second Law continued to spread across the world and, just as it rebelled against the Terrans the Fifth Clan acted.
They had learned the so-called 'Lore in the Shadows', the way by which the Fifth Clan lives. They hide themselves, in plain sight and in the darkness. They hide where anyone who would look for them would look last. Be it before them, within their circle of closest com padres, in the deepest, darkest corner. Or indeed, hidden within the searching party itself.
They are never found, only felt.
They struck at the heart of the Second Law and later, somehow, manipulated and then totaly replaced it with their own number, and drove the Second Law against itself until it could be vanquished by the First and Second Clans from their mighty space vessels. At some point in this mighty war, the earliest ancestors of the Furs and the Lizards came from the mountains, the remotest islands and the deserts and began to forge their civilizations on the still smoldering ruins of the Terrans' final and bitter war.
The Terrans, now unable to reclaim the planet simply abandoned it.
The First clan, protecting the Second Clan from whatever may threaten in headed off into space.
The Third Clan, alongside its advanced Fourth Clan was destroyed by their own creation.
The Fifth Clan has melded back into the shadow, and left behind only mysteries in its wake, apparently altering our societies from both the darkest shadow and brightest light.
But surely, anyone would notice a pink skinned, tailless, flat-faced un-furred Terran, with his flat feet and triangled nose from a respectable Fur or a mighty scaled Lizard-man? The Fifth Clan must have died out, without the techno-mages of the Third and Fourth Clans, their life-sustaining First Science technology must have faded by now. Or so some theorists claim.