The story of the Mankian Khanate’s expansion ends in the barren wastes of the former Utrian Isles. Utria is the ancestral home of the humans (characterised by dark skin and red hair), and for millennia had been the cold-war chessboard of the Elvish Empire of Akharb to the west and the Dwarvish Widburnese Empire to the east. Little more than a messy collection of warring tribes sponsored by greater powers, they fell easily to the Mankian Horde.

Nobody has ever taken responsibility for what happened next, and some simply blame a disease from the north that took on a particularly virulent aspect in the temperate south. But in less than a year much of the Khan’s elite forces, along with most of the human population were dead.