Excerpt from “The Definitive History of Aeldra” by Petra Corsian.

 The first attack only confirmed what we’d already known: The Blights had been with us for years.

 Starting with the dawn of humanity, it seems, there have been creatures in the dark. Monsters that feed on human flesh, blood, souls. Always in different forms, but always there, lurking behind us and ready to strike. Over time these stories became legend and speculation. Superstition, only for those with little intelligence and too much time on their hands.

 Of course, there have always been those who knew the truth. Humans who turned our species from prey to predator, who started a war against the parasites of our people and nearly won. After centuries, the Blights were almost entirely gone, barely even a threat to humanity’s new dawn.

 Then, out of nowhere, they returned. Stronger than ever, legions of them crawling up out of the dark and striking back with a vengeance. The city of Embren was the first to fall. The rest of the world came crashing down within a matter of years.

 Everything humanity had was lost. We were back in the stone age, huddling around fires and flinching at noises in the dark. We travelled in packs, too small to be called tribes and too fractured to be families. For ten years, humanity was a thing of the past.

 That was almost a century ago. Now, the city of Embren, the Blights' first target, is the center of a new empire. One of many states that sprung up in the world’s reconstruction, the Aeldran Empire is humanity’s stronghold. It brought our technology further than ever before, allowing us to finally fight back against the Blights. Embren is the face of a world-wide resistance to the monsters in the shadows.

 The Blights still haunt us. Every day there are more stories of destruction and death. But for the first time in human history, we can haunt them.