War was supposed to be the greatest disaster of their age.
The Second Race War should have raged for decades. Wounds between humans, elves, beastkin, dwarves, drakonians, orcs, and ancient races ran deeper than memory, their grudges fueling slaughter across blood-soaked fields. Borders burned, cities crumbled, each side swearing to fight until the others were dust.
Then the Holes appeared.
They tore through the planet without warning, rips swallowing land, sky, and souls alike. Entire battalions—elf, dwarf, beastkin, human, drakonian, orc—vanished in an instant, no matter their banner.
The Holes spared no one.
The first weeks were chaos. Generals accused enemy factions of wielding forbidden powers. Priests wailed that the world collapsed under sin. Scholars scribbled, desperate to find a pattern in the destruction.
Then the truth sank in.
The Holes grew.
Unchecked, they widened, devouring cities in days. By the end of the first month, half the world's population was gone, erased into nothing.
No crown, no army could stand against them. The Holes consumed everything in reach.
Fear, not victory, ended the war.
For the first time, every race stopped fighting—not out of choice, but because the Holes would devour them all. They had to stop it.
They hurled everything at the Holes: steel, arrows, fire, prayers, sacrifices. Nothing worked. Blades shattered. Arrows vanished without echo. Even offerings of blood and bone failed.
Yet from those voids came something else.
A breath of power—mana, wild, unshaped, endless. It seeped into the world, threading into flesh and bone, choosing without reason. Some awoke changed, wielding forces no sword could match. Magic was born, not from gods, but from calamity.
But even that power slid off the Holes like rain on glass.
Until the first one dived in.
No one remembers their name. Some say a human knight who refused to abandon his city. Others claim an elf, blessed by mana, believed the secrets of this power lay within the Hole. A beastkin warlord, a dwarven champion, a drakonian—the stories shift with the teller.
What mattered was this: they entered. And when they returned, bloodied but alive, the Hole was gone.
Simply gone.
No fading, no shrinking. One moment, a wound tore through the earth; the next, nothing remained.
Hope—terrible, fragile hope—spread like fire through dry grass. With it came a name.
The knight—or elf, or whoever they were—spoke of what lay beyond. A world unlike their own, strange and hostile, full of things that defied reason. A place that tried to unravel them, test them, crush them.
The Outer Verse. The world beyond the Hole.
At first, it was whispers, tales from those too shaken to trust their own words. But more survivors emerged—different races, different powers, all carrying the same truth.
They had faced the Outer Verse and lived.
And with their stories came revelation. The mana bleeding from the Holes—wild, untamed, choosing without pattern—was useless against the hole. No blade of fire, no storm of lightning, no woven spell could touch it. Yet in the Outer Verse and through the Hole, that same mana was the only shield between life and death. To enter without it was to be unmade.
Some whispered the first delver should never have returned, that no mortal could endure the beyond. That perhaps the Hole had allowed it, curious to see what followed.
One truth stood above all: to close a Hole, you had to face the Outer Verse and survive.
So they did.
Delvers rose—volunteers, sacrifices, the desperate. One by one, they stepped into the dark. Many never returned. But those who did, every time, closed the Hole behind them.
The people saw them as more than mortal. Survivors of the Outer Verse were celebrated, feared, envied. They bore scars and nightmares, spoke little of what they saw. But their return meant another city spared, another army saved.
The Order of the Depth rose from the ashes of war, unbound by crown or bloodline. It gathered survivors, warriors, mages, scholars under one banner—not to study the Holes, not to worship them, but to challenge them. To send the strong—or desperate—into the Outer Verse so others could live.
It was the first time the world stood united.
Not for peace. Not for love. Not even for survival alone.
But because there was no other choice.
It was a war not against flesh and blood, but against the unknown.
The Outer Verse was both battleground and executioner.
The world changed.
The Second Race War faded, buried under a new reality. Alliances formed from necessity, not trust. Soldiers who had been enemies weeks before stood shoulder to shoulder, blades aimed not at each other, but at the silent rings that consumed all.
The Holes cared nothing for pride, the Outer Verse nothing for lineage. Only survival mattered.
By the second year, the Second Race War was a memory, swallowed as surely as kingdoms had been. This was no longer an age of war.
It was the age of the Outer Verse.
For every delver who returned, a city stood.
For every survivor, a hundred did not.
The world did not end. Not yet.
But no one believed it would last forever.
The Outer Verse was not just a name.
It was a promise.
To see tomorrow, you had to walk into the dark.