'Finally...'
"I never truly knew where to place this game within the story as I wrote it. To be exact, I still don't know if I have placed it in the right place even now. But it is always important to stress what I called semi-canonical..."
He said this aloud, though there was no one to hear.
As already mentioned, one of the defining differences of this VRMMORPG was its entirely original story. Originality here meant immersion into an existing lore, into a chosen moment of it. And to define that moment was itself an odyssey.
Much as Homer shifted his voice when he spoke of Odysseus — sometimes as Ulixes, sometimes as Odysseus — according to the reason and rhythm of the narrative, so too was the placement of this world a matter of choice. Not less significant was the question of when he left Ithaca, and when he returned. The same man, but with different names, different points in time, different resonances.
So it was with Primum Devir.
Nameless called this chosen point the Interregnum.
An intermediate period where no true kingdom stood, where all were hemmed in by their own smallness: the devastation of a fantastic world, governments broken, structures brittle, a marble-white silence of possibilities undefined. A time suspended, awaiting the emergence of power from the weakness of those entering the game.
It was the age to fill the vacuum of sovereignty — for power itself despises the void, and will not suffer it for long. From nothing, players would seize their strength and carve dominions of their own — either in themselves, or in the possession of the promised land within this virtual world.
Nameless himself had written it so: not a beginning, not an ending, but the midquel of a fracture. To choose the Interregnum was to force the players into the heart of uncertainty — the place where stories either rise or die.
Nameless muttered to himself.
Really, seven cigarettes a day and nothing but coffee for breakfast… perhaps it is possible for one man alone to build a VRMMORPG. Heh.
The graphics — they were exactly as he wished. Dark, a little gothic. The Interregnum demanded such an atmosphere, before any path could truly be set. That was natural.
Ahab had to begin his hunt for the whale before we could see the white fog of the sea. Nothing more natural than that.
Nameless exhaled a thin laugh.
Three million people, waiting for this. Waiting for something built on seven cigarettes and cold coffee. Waiting for a game the industry had already condemned as impossible.
"So much noise for an island…" he muttered, tapping the ash from the end of his cigarette.
And then the screen shifted.
The land appeared broken and vast, as if sculpted from marble dust. Cities stood hollow, their gates open, their banners in tatters. The silence was not absence, but weight — the weight of something about to be claimed.
This silence was not only atmosphere — it was history.
The Interregnum belonged to the Third Age of Primum Devir.
Its lands bore names that once meant order, yet now stood as husks, bones of governments long dissolved. Each title was the memory of a power that had ruled, no longer substance but echo.
There was Al Quds, where shrines had once bound desert and oasis together in a single sanctity. Now the domes lay silent, sand swallowing their courts, the theocracy reduced to dust that remembered holiness but could not breathe it.
There was Magna Res Publica, a canopy of endless forest where citizens once claimed to govern themselves. The assemblies had fallen quiet; the vines had risen higher. The res publica was now only a word, drowned in green.
Nameless dragged on his cigarette, shaking his head.
"Even ghosts pretend to be kingdoms…'"
There was Altum Petram, a land of stone, carved into bastions and fortresses. The rocks still stood, but their walls no longer sheltered command. The citadels were hollow, the towers burnt pale beneath an air that despised breath.
Nameless muttered, "Stone remembers better than men."
There was Dominium Valtus, vast and wet with the rhythm of monsoons. Dominion had once spread like tide over its coasts, ruling vassals as waves rule shores. But the dominion had broken; only the sea remembered its voice.
"The sea rules longer than kings ever could," he said, flicking ash into the dark.
There was Foedeus Ratzielus, far to the north, where cold held the earth in its grip. The land was barren, subarctic, yet broken by fire — volcanoes rose black against the snow, and in their shadow men endured. Clans bound themselves in federations, hardened by frost, dwelling where the heat of the underworld cracked the ice. It was a place not of empire but of survival, where every hearth was a fortress, and the smoke of the vents was the only banner left.
There was Imperium Pietrosum, , the former Imperium Veltrasianum, whose coasts recalled the seas of Rome. The word imperium lingered like a ghost upon the ports, though no legion answered. The empire had become coastline, stone still bearing the title of command but empty of command itself.
Nameless smiled faintly. "The old story of the sleeping king..."
There was Regnum Montanum, the kingdom of peaks. Thrones had been carved into cliffs, dynasties raised in the cold. Now no king sat, but the mountain still bore the name of regnum, as though the stone itself remembered crowns.
"Crowns weigh less than stone — that's why they fall," Nameless murmured.
So the world remained: names once sovereign, now abandoned. Not present powers, but fragments awaiting the hand of those who would dare to seize them.
Four great races stood at the centre of the world — all humanoid, each a variation upon the human frame. Around them clustered other four lesser kindreds: anthropomorphic shapes, beasts bent into the likeness of man. If the first were echoes of Adam, the second were shadows of Eden's menagerie, bearing snouts, scales, or claws upon their borrowed stature.
The four races counted among the humanoid kindreds, though not all endured the name with equal grace, where:
The tall and pallid Ratiols, sharp-eyed and long of limb, moved with a cold precision that seemed always to measure. The squat Petros, grey-skinned and granite-veined, endured like stone itself, short yet unyielding. The Sylvans, touched faintly by green, half-shadow and half-echo, bore in their gaze the mystery of groves. And mankind — frailest in body, yet most obstinate in will — remained the least defined, yet most unpredictable of all.
Beyond them stirred the draconic strains:
Aspids, serpent-born, whispering through silks and smoke; Basilisks, crowned in fire, dazzling yet oppressive as living idols; Crimson Lions, scarlet-maned, half-beast, half-king, forged of war; and the Draconites, whose broken wings and faint scales carried the last and heaviest echo of their sires.
Thus the world bore eight pillars of kindred: four of man's shape, four of dragon's. Between them stretched the long field of rivalry, alliance, and contempt — a theatre of races, each remembering too well the origin it dared not admit.
And over these ruins, the law was harsher than any king.
In the Interregnum, no mask could hide weakness, no trade could buy life, no ceiling could halt the climb. The law was naked, and it spared none.
And so the stage was set. A broken land, eight kindreds, a law without compromise. Three million souls poised at the threshold. And among them — the one who had written the law, now bound to live within it.