Prologue

I was a scholar, a Historian to be precise. It's not really what I wanted to do with my life, the pay was terrible and you spent your life living in secret. The world is nothing like it used to be, and although no one knows for sure, it's generally agreed upon by today's historians that human society as it was ended about a millennium ago. No one knows what truly lead to this break down, and the majority of all knowledge had at that time was destroyed. After society broke down, humans went into a regression, our ancestors were so busy fighting that little to no remnants of the advancements made pre-breakdown survived. For 300 years there was a continuous war until humanity was left with nothing but stone tools and there was so few people left that no tribe could form an army. The bits and pieces that historians have managed to put together from that time frame paint a horrific image of what it must have been like to live at that time, although things aren't much different now. The world is now ruled over by tribes of differing sizes, with different ways of ruling their territory. The one common denominator was the stronger your tribe was at war, the more territory your tribe controlled. There's almost always a war for territory going on in the world. The worst, and best, profession to have was that of a scholar. They were generally treated well enough, even though the majority were enslaved for one tribe or another. Each tribe wanted to have the best scholars, for obvious reasons. This lead most free scholars to live secluded lives hiding from the tribes for fear of enslavement, and for frequent raids by other tribes to try and steal another's scholars. There were no international laws here, the closest thing would be tenuous inter-tribe treaties that were frequently broken. There were no civil rights or any kind of real laws anyway, whatever the tribe leader(s) said was law in their territory. In this world you got what you took in life and kept what you could keep others from taking.