The true history of Malifaux is lost to the annals of time. There are truths and deceptions buried in equal measure among the legends told by its native denizens, but humanity has been able to piece together these myths to create a plausible idea of what Malifaux was like prior to the opening of the Great Breach.

Old Malifaux

Long ago, Malifaux was inhabited by people similar to humanity. They loved and fought each other as humanity does, creating items of beauty and weapons of war in equal measure. Their earliest civilisations learned of magic and studied its use, and as one empire crumbled to make way for the next, magic and technology advanced in tandem with each other.

In time, the people came to believe that they were masters of magic and technology. They believed that they could solve any problem, rise to any challenge, and one by one, they solved the greatest problems that plagued them: poverty, disease, sickness, pain... Eventually, the most clever among them found ways to live without end and ushered in an era of peace and prosperity.

Gradually, however, these visionaries grew bored with their long lives and, being clever, they sought out ways to keep themselves entertained. Some created breathtaking art that pushed the boundaries of the senses, some set out to gather the knowledge of their people in order to share it freely with their brethren, and others delved deeply into hitherto unexplored realms of magic. Others altered their bodies and the bodies of those around them in ways they found pleasurable, creating new races through advanced science and magical ritual.

The Tyrant War

A handful of the bored immortals turned their attention toward darker pursuits. They found dangerous ways to waste their time, and, being clever, mastered each one in turn.

What was a thrilling dip into the dark waters for some became a headlong, breathless plunge into depravity for others. They found deep within themselves the worst perversions and most terrible desires, and knowing no limits, they turned these things outward onto their fellows. They revelled in the misery they caused and subjected their kin to cruel experiments and unspeakable sadism simply for their own amusement and edification. Illness and pain once again abounded in Malifaux.

Drunk on their own power, these entities cast aside their mortal names and souls like snakes shedding their skins... or perhaps, like moths emerging from cocoons. They assumed sobriquets to describe their new selves - Plague, Obliteration, Meridion, Despair - but to those who had not ascended, there was only one word to describe what they had become: Tyrants.

These Tyrants were so powerful that they seemed to be gods. The desperate people of Malifaux exhausted every available force to stop the Tyrants. They turned to new magic and explored technologies that had previously been too dangerous to consider. Terrible creatures were created through magical rituals and spawned in chemical vats to be unleashed upon the Tyrants in the hope of exploiting an unknown weakness. Armies the likes of which the world had never known marched in the shadows of terrible, continent-shattering war machines.

Despite the best attempts of Malifaux's people, however, nothing seemed capable of standing against the potency of a Tyrant's magic or their mastery of the sciences. The great machines of war were swept aside like children's toys, and entire armies were slaughtered in the blink of an eye.

Titania's Bargain

When all seemed lost, it was the queen of the people who rekindled the hope of victory. Titania gathered the scattered warriors, artificers, and mystics to her side and told them of her dreams and the machine she saw there. The machine, she claimed, would allow her to harness the power of death itself in order to destroy the Tyrants once and for all. The glimmer of hope was all that the survivors needed, and they turned all of their efforts toward the creation of Titania's Kythera device.

Unbeknownst to Titania's followers, she had betrayed them. The Kythera device was not designed to merely channel the power of death, but rather, to bring the personification of death itself - the Grave Spirit - into Malifaux; Kythera was a dimensional portal. As it began to open, the Grave Spirit completed its end of the bargain and infused Titania with its fell power. Only then did her subjects finally realized the full extent of the dark bargains Titania had made with the entity.

As their queen turned the power of the Grave Spirit toward the Tyrants, killing their physical bodies, the people who had built Kythera worked desperately to undo what had been done. In the end, they proved unable to close the device, but they did stop the portal from opening any further than it had. The corruptive, necromantic power of the Grave Spirit was seeping out of the device, but the entity itself had been prevented from crossing over and devouring all life in Malifaux.

The act of channelling so much necromantic power had killed Titania, but rather than dying, she passed into undeath and became a sentient, walking corpse. She expected admiration for defeating the Tyrants, but her subjects had seen what she had nearly unleashed upon the world and turned on her.

Undead had never existed in Malifaux before Titania, and her former subjects were concerned that executing her might release her corrupted soul, transforming her into a far greater threat than she already was. Instead, they altered the plans for Kythera and built a second structure - Nythera - to serve as a prison for Titania and those members of her court who were still loyal to her. It was believed that Nythera would keep her contained for all time.

The Great Binding

In the decades that followed the end of the The Tyrant War, the survivors gradually began to realize that the Tyrants had not been entirely defeated. Their physical forms had been shattered, true, but their spirits had endured Titania's assault and lingered in the aether as spectres of their former selves. Though relatively powerless in this ethereal form, the Tyrants could still exert their will upon the world in a limited manner.

Worse yet, they seemed capable of forming spiritual bonds with mortals, granting that mortal power as the Tyrant gradually consumed their soul and took their place in the world. Fearing the return of such powerful enemies, the people of Malifaux turned their attention toward trapping the Tyrants in magical prisons. The prisons varied in form and function, utilising whatever worked best to bind each Tyrant's power.

Many of the Tyrants had their own power turned against them. Meridion drew her power from the ley lines which crisscrossed the world, so the survivors imprisoned her within those same ley lines, forcing her to destroy the very power that gave her strength in order to escape. Obliteration's power stemmed from its ability to manipulate time and remove things from reality, so its jailers constructed its prison from the Tyrant's own spiritual form, ensuring that any act of escape would be tantamount to suicide.

Other Tyrants were too subtle or powerful to be bound in such ways, necessitating the need for cruder prisons. Plague was bound within the Necropolis beneath Malifaux City and warded with spells that would turn aside anything approaching, Cherufe was imprisoned in a cage high in the sky, where its flames sputtered and died without fuel, and Despair was sealed inside a fiendishly clever puzzle box.

One by one, each of the Tyrants was bound in prisons crafted from their own power. Some realized what was happening and chose to exile themselves to different realms of reality: Nytemare fled into the dream world, for instance, while The Dragon split its essence in half, leaving part of itself in Malifaux as it flung its other self through the dimensions and into another world entirely... Earth.

The passage between dimensions greatly weakened both that portion of the Dragon's soul and the barrier that separated Malifaux from Earth, though it would be millennia before the full ramifications of that weakening would be felt.

The Twisting

The people of Malifaux had won the war against the Tyrants and bound their spirits, but the price they paid for their victory was steep. The Tyrants had used their magic and science to twist the minds and bodies of their servants and enemies into useful tools, and now, the monstrous survivors of those experiments struggled to find a place in the world.

Some of these creatures, such as the Nephilim, turned their backs on their former masters and took to hunting down those who still served the Tyrants. Others turned to whatever fragments of magic they had scavenged from the fallen Tyrants, using it to mutate their forms into new shapes that their vengeful brethren would not recognise.

Gradually, the survivors of the war began to drift away from each other. The great cities - the sites associated so strongly with the Tyrants - were shunned as the people migrated into the wilds. With each generation, the trappings of civilisation fell further away, until the people had regressed into tribes and packs.

Distracted as they were by the aftermath of the Tyrant War, the survivors failed to realize that a far more insidious threat was growing in their midst. The Kythera device provided a link between Malifaux and the realm of the Grave Spirit, and its corruption gradually spread outwards from the portal, transforming the land and poisoning the minds of those who had survived the war. Those who had settled in the most heavily affected areas turned once again to the magic of the Tyrants, reworking their bodies into forms that could survive the spreading corruption.

Centuries passed, and with each generation, the various transmutative magics that had been worked upon the people seeped into their offspring and their offspring's offspring, until eventually, every one of their descendants possessed an ability to change its physical form. For many, this change became a fixed part of their growth cycle, such as with the Nephilim, who required red blood to grow larger, but others retained a greater control over their forms and learned how to change their appearance on a whim.

Hidden Pathways

The Dragon was the first entity to travel from Malifaux to Earth, but it was not the last. The fissure caused by its flight was unstable, and through the centuries, portals occasionally opened up between Earth and Malifaux, joining the two worlds for a short time.

6000 BC - The Falling Star

The half of the Dragon that had been tossed between dimensions appeared on Earth near Mount Etna on the island of Sicily. The Tyrant's arrival triggered a massive volcanic landslide that, in turn, caused a mega-tsunami that devastated the eastern Mediterranean coastline on the continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Weakened by its travel through the dimensions and now trapped in a world with far less magical power than Malifaux, the Dragon settled within the mountain's searing core to slowly regain its strength.

In the years that followed, the people of nearby Crete realised that symbols and icons bearing snake motifs had become infused with weak healing powers and began using such icons to ward their homes and heal the sick and infirm.

5400 BC - Journey East

Following rumours and legend, a Cretan shaman travelled to Sicily in the hopes of finding the source of the healing power her people believed resided within Mount Etna. She succeeded in discovering the spectral form of the Tyrant, which promptly possessed her and forced her to do its will. Believing that she had been chosen by the gods, the shaman travelled eastward as the Tyrant directed her from one land to the next, devouring whatever scraps of power it could find in order to regain its strength.

Though kept strong and youthful by the Dragon's influence, the shaman's body eventually failed her and she collapsed into a river in what would one day become Tibet. The Dragon found, to its horror, that it could not separate itself from its host's corpse, and millennia slowly passed as the Tyrant struggled helplessly within its cage of water and bone.

500 BC - Blood of my Blood

While hunting, a Native American hunting party came across a group of six Malifaux natives in what would one day become modern day Ohio. The hunters were confused by the strange-looking people they found and the incomprehensible language they spoke, but they took pity on the refugees and brought them back to their camp.

Over time, the natives of Malifaux learned the language of the hunters and took spouses from among the tribe, eventually birthing the first children who were the products of two different worlds. These men and women became known for their ability to run with the wolves or fly with the crows, a gift that they passed on to their children and grandchildren.

The descendants of those original hunters eventually split and went their separate ways, spreading their magic-infused bloodline throughout the native people of North America. The ability to shift shapes and walk with animals grew weaker with each subsequent generation, until they were only myths and legends, but in every generation, there were a handful of people with a stronger connection to their heritage.

220 AD - The Living Forest

A short time after the turn of the millennium, a portal opened deep within the Amazon rainforest, allowing a small group of plant spirits known as Waldgeist to wander curiously onto Earth. Undisturbed by this occurrence, the plant spirits began exploring their new home and communing with the surrounding trees.

Over the next millennia, the number of indigenous tribes living with the rainforest plummeted noticeably as the tree spirits and their offspring fought back against what they perceived as trespassers in "their" lands. Eventually, stories of its dangerous plant life would reach as far as northern Europe and eastern Asia, though few truly believed the strange stories coming from such an "uncivilised" land.

770 AD - The Rise of the Dragon

The Indian monk Santaraksita attempted to build a monastery beside a Tibetan river, but each time, the river surged upwards, knocking the temple back down. Terrified, the construction workers began to whisper of a demon hiding in the river and refused to have anything further to do with the temple.

Fearing for the well-being of the nearby populace, Santaraksita sent for his fellow monk, Padmasambhava, to help him banish the demon and purify the construction site. Instead, the two monks encountered the Dragon, which leapt from the bone fragments of the Cretan shaman and into Santaraksita.

Padmasambhava immediately realised that Santaraksita had been possessed by a spirit far more powerful than he could imagine. Bowing low, the monk approached the Dragon cautiously, giving it the respect he believed it deserved. Padmasambhava appealed to the Dragon's ego and, after a long conversation that stretched across three days, convinced the Tyrant that the wisdom of Buddhism would hold more answers to its plight than wanton destruction. The Dragon listened to the monk, but in its mind, it was already considering what would happen when its current host perished. None of the workers had been suitable hosts; only the monk had the spiritual fortitude necessary to house its essence. In the end, the Dragon agreed to allow the temple to be built, not out of altruism, but out of self-interest.

The Dragon spent the next few centuries wandering Tibet, gathering the wisest humans it could find and either bringing them back to its temple at Samye or inspiring them to build more temples that could house its greatness. Gradually, it twisted the tenets of Buddhism to fit its own needs, creating a dogma that had but one purpose: to prepare humans to become the Dragon's next host.

It would take countless millennia to amass enough magical power to ascend in the starved world of Earth, but the Dragon was patient and had ensured that when its host finally perished, it would have another ready to assume the honour of bearing its spectral essence.

1293 AD - The Masamune Nihonto

Back in Malifaux, a shaman with delusions of ruling over its people freed a powerful spirit from the magical wards which bound it. As the last of the binding enchantments fell away, the spirit revealed itself to be the Tyrant Shez'uul and possessed its horrified saviour.

Shez'uul's host was unsuited for such a potent spirit and began to fall apart almost immediately. The Tyrant was powerful, however, and it supplemented its host's life with the blood of those it killed, gradually transforming its unwitting host into a creature of flowing blood. The scattered tribes of Malifaux were forced to unite against the weakened Tyrant.

In the end, the Nephilim turned the tide of the battle by undergoing a ritual that transformed their blood into a corrosive black ichor that proved to be catastrophically destructive to the red blood making up the Tyrant's borrowed form. Rather than allow itself to be bound once more, the Tyrant used what remained of the power it had gathered to hurl itself through the dimensions, much as the Dragon had done millennia earlier.

The weakened Tyrant appeared in the Kanagawa Prefecture of Japan, triggering a mighty earthquake that devastated the city of Kamakura and killed tens of thousands. Realizing that it had barely survived the journey between dimensions, the Tyrant bound its fraying and ragged essence to a samurai lord and forced the man to slaughter those under his command to supply the Tyrant with their blood.

As the body count climbed higher and higher, a desperate prefect travelled into the mountains to petition the master swordsmith, Goro Nyudo Masamune, for assistance. Masamune gave the greatest of his blades, the Masamune Nihonto, to the prefect, who used it to cut away and imprison the evil spirit that had possessed his lord.

The prefect enshrined the sword in his home, where it rested until it was stolen forty years later during the Genko War. The blade passed into legend as Shez'uul influenced its wielders, subtly pushing them toward greater acts of bloodshed and violence, which the Tyrant fed upon like a starving prisoner.

1332 AD - Glimpses of Huitzilopochtli

In the fourteenth century, a portal between Earth and Malifaux opened in the Valley of Mexico, unleashing burned and twisted monsters onto the outskirts of Tenochtitlan. The Aztecs were unprepared for the sudden appearance of these creatures, and the glimpse they received of another world - of blasted plains that had been scorched during the Tyrant War and the titanic, charred beasts that lumbered through the still-burning flames - shook their civilisation to the core.

Once the portal had closed and the screeching beasts had been slain or driven off, the Aztec people struggled to interpret what they had seen. Many of the creatures they glimpsed were folded into their religion, becoming gods and deities. They believed that the world they had seen through the portal - Malifaux - was a vision of the future after the sun had perished, and in an attempt to avert this perceived fate, their beliefs led the Aztec people down a dark, bloody path.

Spurred onward by their "visions," the Aztec became more warlike and aggressive. Over the next one hundred years, they came to dominate the Valley of Mexico and its surrounding areas. Human sacrifice was not unknown before the Aztecs, but they took the practice to an unprecedented level, at one point sacrificing over eighty thousand prisoners over the course of four days.

This was done in the belief that the blood and beating hearts of the sacrifices would empower their sun deity, Huitzilopochtli, with enough strength to continue fighting against the "monsters" which beset him. If Huitzilopochtli failed, the Aztecs believed, then they would perish as well, for there would be nobody to stand between them and the horrors they had witnessed.

1575 AD - The Fury of Horomatangi

In the later half of the sixteenth century, the Maori of New Zealand witnessed a portal opening a hundred feet in the air above the ocean. The portal unleashed a deluge of water that poured down from the sky like a waterfall, bringing dozens of strange Malifaux fish to Earth. Unfortunately, the great Horomatangi, an ancient and titanic sea beast that had fought for Meridion during the Tyrant War, was also pulled into Earth's oceans by the resulting current.

Horomatangi proceeded to terrorize the people of New Zealand for the better part of fifty years, feasting on the Māori whenever they went to hunt or fish. The great beast was eventually defeated by the efforts of the Ngaatoro Sisters, two women who adorned themselves with poison and tricked Horomatangi into devouring them. The poison did not kill the great monster, but it did weaken Horomatangi enough to send it into a deep sleep, winning peace for the Māori people and cementing the Ngaatoro sisters as guardians of the island.

1642 AD - An Empire of Miracles

In the seventeenth century, another portal opened in eastern Africa, in the nation of Abyssinia. No monsters poured forth from the dimensional rift, and in their curiosity, the Abyssinians explored the seemingly desolate new world and discovered a cache of Soulstones.

The Soulstones were brought through the Breach in the belief that they were normal gemstones, but it was only after the portal closed that the true properties of the Soulstones were realized. When someone died near a Soulstone, the gem would become charged with magical energy which could then be used to cast spells of incredible power.

In the wake of their discovery, Abyssinia became known as a strange and mystical place whose people could wield terrible magical powers. Over time, however, the owners of these Soulstones fought with one another, and the gemstones which fuelled their incredible power were gradually lost or destroyed.

Eventually, the number of Soulstones grew so few that that the mystical reputation of Abyssinia faded into legend, and they became just another nation, albeit one with unusually advanced cities and some odd traditions.

1780 AD - The Formation of the Council

Gradually, the spellcasters, shamans, mystics, and healers realized that the meagre magic of Earth was dwindling. There were many theories on why the incantations and rituals that had worked for so long were becoming less and less effective with each passing year. Some believed it to be a natural cycle, a tide of magic that would ebb with time. Others thought that there might be a conflict between magic and science, that the growing industrialisation of the world might somehow be smothering the arcane rules of magic beneath the spreading influence of science.

The sorcerers, warlocks, soothsayers, and wizards of the world gradually came together to search for a new source of magic. Calling themselves the Council, the group travelled the world in search of a way to replenish Earth's magic. Their members travelled to the New World to speak with the shamans of the indigenous tribes and to eastern Africa to investigate rumours of their powerful sorcery.

At every turn, they found mystics who had noticed the decline of magic but had no answers to give them.

Eventually, the Council began to realize that there was a world beyond their own, and that much of Earth's magic could be traced back to encounters with that hidden world. Only the faintest of dimensional walls kept the two worlds apart... and with enough force, any wall could be knocked down.

1787 AD - The Great Breach

It took years of research and cooperation, but the Council came to believe that they possessed the magical power necessary to breach the veil between their world and the next. A great call was sent out across the Earth, passed from cabal to secret society to coven, asking anyone with even a shred of magical talent to gather at Santa Fe, in North America.

From all corners of the Earth and from all walks of life they came, the last of their kind. Hoary, bearded sages from the Siberian steppes, Abyssinian artificers, bespectacled Parisian demon worshipers, stoic Indian gurus, ancient Romani crones, far eastern souleaters, and wizened viziers from the Ottoman Empire, all converged on Santa Fe in one final, desperate gambit: a ritual to ensure that magical power was not forever lost from the world.

When the Council's leaders agreed that it was time, they called the entire city into position. The streets teemed with sorcerers and wizards at every junction, each prepared to do his or her part in the most powerful spell ever cast.

The ritual was gruelling beyond imagining. For a day and a night, the hundreds of gathered practitioners poured their last remaining magic into the growing spell. Some were overcome and perished from the strain of it, while others willingly relinquished the last of their life's essence in a final act of desperate sacrifice. The mages who participated were later unable to agree whether the ritual succeeded or failed, but the results were impossible to ignore.

As the ritual reached its zenith, the life force of the lesser sorcerers was torn from their flesh in a torrent of pain and power as the energies of the ritual raced out of control and consumed them. The sudden change in atmospheric pressure combined with the dangerous amounts of gathered aetheric energy to produce a massive shockwave that knocked the largest buildings to the ground while ripping the smaller structures from their very foundations.

In a single moment, Santa Fe was reduced from a thriving settlement to naught but ruin, insanity, and corpses. The city was gone, replaced with a ragged hole in existence and a scant few sorcerers and mystics who were shielded from the worst of the blast.

In the days and weeks to come, the few survivors found that their magical aptitudes had increased exponentially and that unimaginable power now coursed through their veins. Feats of aetheric manipulation that would have taken an archmagus numerous lifetimes to achieve were suddenly at their beck and call. The most powerful magi, conjurers, and shamans the world had ever seen crawled free of the ruins that had once been Santa Fe and peered through the dimensional rift that would come to be known as the Great Breach.

On the other side of the Breach, the surviving members of the Council found a city. Its features were both familiar and strange, as if all the great cities of Earth history had been stacked and shuffled. The buildings leaned and loomed over the streets, and unknown writing was carved in the stone or painted on doors. A sign hung above the city's shattered gates, bearing a word that they took as the name of the city and world alike: Malifaux.

Tentatively, knowing that the new Breach could collapse at any moment, the Council began to explore the city. Old tomes and artifacts littered the ground, and when they realized the power held by these arcane items, the sorcerers snatched them up as quickly as possible. Though joined by a common goal, the members of the Council had little in common with each other beyond their talent with magic, and soon tempers flared as magi and sages accused shamans and gurus of hoarding magical knowledge they believed should belong to them all.

By the end of the first night, these conflicts had erupted into outright warfare. Balls of fire, lances of ice, and bolts of lightning were hurled across the streets and into the sky as the mages attempted to steal the power of their peers or defend whatever magical relics they had claimed for themselves. Friend fought friend, and bitter rivals became desperate allies.

After a fortnight of intense battle, the mages began to gather together into cabals for their own protection, though others were driven northward toward the distant mountains or back through the Breach to Earth. Eventually, one faction succeeded in executing the last of their rivals and seized control of the city. The Council had been reborn.

1787 The Year of The Breach

Whether in the whispered rumours of the general populace or the secretive, hushed tones of The Guild, it is a word always spoken with fear.

For years it had grown more and more evident to everyone that magic was clearly in decline within our world; even the greatest of practitioners found it increasingly difficult to perform the most mundane acts. Some argued that we had become too dependent on magic, that the world was simply returning to a more natural state. Others countered that magic itself was natural, and that if magical practitioners such as healers could no longer ply their trade, the lives of all would suffer.

In 1787, the most powerful practitioners of the day came together and united in discovering new sources of power. Although the process of how they discovered this new power is still uncertain, they found a world just outside of our existence, with only a thin barrier separating the two. A barrier that could possibly be opened. The raw magical energy that permeated through was too powerful to resist.

Some likened it to breaking into the greatest of the tombs of antiquity. Those who felt keenest the weakening of their magics likened it to breaking out of one.

In the noblest feat of magical co-operation in history – some would call it an act of desperation – the sorcerers worked their greatest magic ever and tore a breach between the two worlds. The resulting destruction was unprecedented. Hundreds of the least powerful practitioners died instantly. The makeshift city where The Breach was opened was flattened, the life force of its inhabitants ripped from their bodies as unparalleled powers ebbed and flowed between the two worlds.

They say that great deeds require great sacrifice; both were accomplished that day.

It was called The Breach of The Great Boundary, a ragged hole large enough to sail a steamship through, torn from the very fabric of reality itself. Through it, just a reach away, was visible another hole, its edges raw and rough, and beyond that, a world like our own but lit by an unknown sun. Between the two, a featureless, lightless void. A twisted mirror of our world, framed by endless night. A cold wind blew through The Breach and brought with it the faint smell of old death. Thinking that with the blood of the dead the price of this new prize had been fully paid, expeditionary teams were quickly dispatched to scout this new land and bring back its secrets.

On the other side of The Breach, these teams found a large city, with features similar to many in our own world, but like none of them. It was as if all the great capitals from throughout history had been stacked and shuffled by the gods – gothic arches before Palladian villas, Lahore minarets beside Italian spires, rough brick chimneys from Empire factories over marble colonnades and Three Kingdoms pillar-gates guarding colonial mansion houses. However, all of those that crossed The Breach that day could feel that this new world was vastly different. The air was sweet with nectar and sap from plants no man had ever named, and sour with the scent of untilled earth above which strange constellations had forever spun. The sun shone brighter at noon, but darker either side, and at night the shadows from the two moons played tricks on men's minds. Many of the buildings bore strange writing, some carved into the facades, some painted onto doors.

After searching the City for two weeks, not a single living thing could be found, not a trace of human or animal. With no signs of battle, no corpses, no destruction, it was as if the inhabitants had simply disappeared.

A team led by Professor Mondragone of the Voynich Institute were allowed entrance to this strange new world to study the signs and symbols in an effort to learn what might have happened. After months of research, they found that the City had been called 0. To be Organised/Malifaux. The signs and symbols on the walls and doorways were simple store signs: merchant, tailor, blacksmith. Other signs, though, were puzzling: who needed a Death Surgeon and what were Mechanical Magics? No written records of trade or tradition were ever found, no intimate traces of the lives these people had lived. All that remained were the silent, forbidding bones of the buildings they had raised to protect themselves.

The explorers moved farther out, seeking answers, but also seeking the source of the magical power they sensed lay all around them. Several miles north of the City, they found a small mining town. There were a few wooden buildings, many of them crumbling. A large hole was cut into the hillside just west of the town, with a shaft leading down. Their delvings soon turned up a gemstone that radiated more magical power than any of them had ever seen. The stones came in a variety of hues, some more powerful than others, but within them there lurked a store of latent magical energy that a sorcerer could channel for his own purposes.

The scholars found references to these magical stones in old manuscripts. They were called ether, and the manuscripts spoke of great power within them. The scholars went on to speak of warnings of great danger, but the men in charge had ceased listening. There was a rush to mine these stones in great quantity, but as each stone was used it grew dark, its magical energy gradually depleted. Before long, however, for the city of 0. To be Organised/Malifaux was a dark and dangerous place, it was discovered that a person's death could replenish the stone’s magical energy. This morbid effect earned the gems the name of Soulstone, and earned the poor and unfortunate a new means of dying for their masters' causes.

After six months of exploration, The Breach was opened to the general populace. A thriving trade was established Earthside for those daring enough to harvest the Soulstones of 0. To be Organised/Malifaux. The crumbling boomtowns away from the City of 0. To be Organised/Malifaux were rebuilt, and those willing to brave the harsh environment populated these cities to work the Soulstone mines. Many practitioners moved to 0. To be Organised/Malifaux in order to further their magic, and with them came families and servants – an entire population.

Life in this manner continued for little more than a decade.

The salvation of magic was at hand.

Early Exploration

In all of their feuding, the Council's mages had not seen any sign of sentient life within the city other than themselves. The sheer size of the city made any sort of exploration difficult, however, and grudgingly, the Council retreated back to Earth to solidify their control over the portal.

A veritable army of mercenaries was chartered to ensure that the Breach was defended against anything that might come through from the other world. Small groups of explorers were enlisted to begin investigating the old city and its surroundings, and academics and archaeologists by the score were gradually brought to the ruins of Santa Fe to begin unravelling the city's mysteries.

Everyone brought to explore the new world was hired with great secrecy. They spread rumours of a terrible earthquake that had struck the city and of a virulent plague that had been awakened from some hitherto unknown underground cavern, blunting the desire of anyone to look too closely at what was happening in the desert.

One of the Council's first breakthroughs was the discovery of a great repository of books left by the city's previous inhabitants. Duer's Library, named after the explorer who first unearthed its hallowed halls, was a network of vaults and towers that were practically bursting with strange knowledge. A team of scholars worked around the clock for months, clearing collapsed stacks and diligently piecing together the eldritch tongue of those who had constructed the miraculous library.

At the same time, the Council's explorers began cataloguing the city and its surrounding areas. Beneath the city, they discovered an entire network of sewage chambers, conduits, passages, and catacombs. Many of these first explorers became lost in those twisting labyrinths, but those who emerged safely from the darkness brought maps that would become invaluable for future explorers.

All the while, the archmages of the Council set themselves to stabilising the Breach. Without any magical support, the Breach had begun to shimmer and quiver erratically after every passage. There was a concern that too frequent travel might cause the Breach to collapse in on itself or, worse, to rupture even further.

After much debate and research, the Council found a solution to their problem. Months of toil went into the construction of a massive stonework plinth and archway, carved deeply with mystic runes and sigils, which they built up around either side of the rift. When the last enchanted stone was fitted into place, the Breach finally stabilised.

By then, the explorers had begun to slowly filter their way back into the city. Some of their number returned laden with riches, some returned with harrowing tales of strange creatures or former Council members who had formed a cult in the distant mountains, and still others were simply never heard from again.

The greatest discoveries came from the band that wandered the farthest afield. Deep within the southern Badlands, surveyors had come across a deserted town, a few crumbling shanties and little more, perched near a mound of cracked and broken earth. In the centre of the barren hillock was an abandoned hole leading deep into the earth.

The burrow was a mine shaft of sorts, and at its lowest point, the men found a cache of Soulstones, the same mythic stones that Abyssinia had discovered one hundred and forty five years earlier. These Soulstones, however, were fully intact, and as the Council members studied them, their scholars pointed out references to the stones in some of the texts they had managed to decipher.

The Council knew from the stories and myths of Abyssinia that those in the possession of Soulstones could channel incredible amounts of magic, and they were even more potent still in Malifaux. Realizing that they would need more people to properly survey and mine the magical gemstones from the ground, the Council decided to share their discovery with the rest of the world.

1788 to 1790 AD - A New Age

The Council's announcement shocked the world.

Every tavern, saloon, town square, and boudoir was abuzz with debate. Pamphlets and newspapers were printed in abundance, either praising this new turn of events as the next step in human progress or decrying it as the utter ruination of mankind. Priests, rabbi, and khatib struggled to make sense of not only the knowledge that souls were real, as evidenced by Soulstones, but that there was an entire world beyond their own.

Diplomats, envoys, and politicians from all across Earth travelled to Malifaux to investigate the Council's claims. They were shown the wonders of Malifaux and were bewitched by demonstrations of magic the likes of which had previously been found only in fable and legend. They promised to share the secrets of magic and Soulstone with these nations, provided that they sent their citizens to Malifaux.

In short order, the abandoned city had become a thriving human settlement. First in the hundreds, then in the thousands, travellers made their way to Malifaux. The ruins of Santa Fe were built back up into a similarly thriving city whose only purpose was to support the city a stone's throw and another dimension away. The Council drew upon their potent magics to bring water up from below the desert, creating vast stretches of farmland whose only purpose was to feed the residents of Malifaux.

The mining of Soulstones was backbreaking work, but the Council paid the workers well, and boom towns sprung up around new veins almost as fast as the surveyors could discover them. The largest of the Soulstones were kept by the Council to fuel their own power, but others were shipped to Earth by the cartload and then divvied up among those world powers who had chosen to support the settlement of Malifaux.

Everywhere, people experimented with Soulstones, grinding them up as alchemical components, medicine, or as power sources for increasingly complex machines. Across the world, people with no previous talent for magic drew upon the energy stored within the gems to become powerful and influential mages. Some of these mages even began teaching others how to manipulate the unseen magical energies around them, creating distinct schools of spellcasting, each with their own techniques.

Benjamin Hanks, a Connecticut clockmaker, was responsible for the activation of the first construct. There had always been a great deal of debris around Malifaux that resembled piles of broken or inert machinery.

When Hanks fitted one of these machines with a Soulstone and tinkered with it, however, it was discovered that the debris was, in fact, a fully functional mechanical marvel. Many of the machines discovered in this fashion were simple, tiny servitors or mechanical replicas of different animals. A few, however, were fearsome clockwork titans capable of wielding an assortment of vicious weaponry.

The construction and animation of these constructs soon became vogue in the city, and functioning machines were sent back through the Breach by the droves, as curiosities for kings and courtiers, machines of death for generals and warlords, and objects of careful study for scholars and engineers.

Gradually, the pioneers coming through the Breach began to settle further and further from the city proper, often hoping to strike it rich by discovering a Soulstone vein. As they ventured further afield, reports of fantastical creatures and mythological monstrosities began to filter back to the taverns and public houses of the city. At first, these reports were laughed off, but soon the missing settlers and frantic stories became too great in number to ignore. Begrudgingly, the Council was forced to admit that Malifaux seemed to be inhabited and that the natives were not friendly.

They borrowed a term from Earth's past to describe the natives of their new home: the Neverborn.

1791 AD - The First Resurrectionist

As if the appearance of hostile natives was not enough, a new threat emerged from underneath the city itself in 1791. It was common knowledge that the sewers beneath Malifaux City were a labyrinth of twisting and dangerous passages, but there were rumours, fuelled by the first explorers of that subterranean maze, of forbidden knowledge interred within the lowest crypts. A few power-hungry seekers of ancient secrets took it upon themselves to discover the veracity of these claims, and one man, his name lost to the ages, had the terrible misfortune to find the knowledge he sought.

Exactly what happened in the darkness of those buried vaults is known only to that necromancer, though various penny dreadful novels throughout the years have made their own dramatic speculations. Some stories claim that the ancient corpse-guardians of the vaults rose up from the slumber of death to attack him, while others have speculated that he made some deal with death itself for the power he wielded. Whatever the case, the nascent necromancer escaped the Necropolis with a single tome that contained the secrets to life after death.

The unnamed necromancer used the blasphemous spells contained within the tome to raise an army of shuffling undead corpses. This unliving horde attacked the Council fortifications en masse, and all who fell before the undead legion rose and joined their ranks. The putrescent zombies attempted to tear the city apart, brick by brick, and as their numbers swelled, it looked as if they would succeed in turning the city into a necrotic monarchy of darkness, death, and despair.

The whole city rose up in defence of their new home. Members of the Council unleashed powerful magics with abandon, and their mercenaries manned battlements and sacrificed themselves to protect their employers. Even with all the power of the Council, however, the weight of attrition was against them, and it appeared unlikely that anyone would survive the onslaught. Desperate meetings were held in the besieged Council chambers as the surviving mages debated whether they should close the Breach, sacrificing thousands in order to keep the relentless dead away from Earth.

What turned the tide were the defenders that rose up, unexpected, from the city's populace. Miners brandishing pickaxes and musketmen firing flintlock rifles fought shoulder-to-shoulder with fire-wielding wizards and clockwork automatons. Whenever things looked their direst, whenever another battle line seemed sure to be swept away by the press of undead flesh, another hero emerged, as if placed into the fray by destiny itself.

During this battle, the Nephilim known as Lilith drew upon her considerable magic to assume a human form, allowing her to walk among the defenders of Malifaux City without alarming them. She was at the forefront of multiple battles, scything down putrefied corpse-soldiers with frenzied, gleeful abandon. When the battle was won, she disappeared into the shadows and reappeared wherever the fighting was thickest. She gave no sign of understanding any of the languages spoken by her impromptu comrades during these battles, and any attempts to thank her or offer her aid were met with a disgusted sneer.

It was a hard-fought battle, but when the dust had settled, the nameless necromancer had been defeated by the combined might of the Council and the new champions of the age. Unfortunately, the dark secret of necromancy did not die with that villain, and, like the undead he shackled to his will, it would rise up years later to terrorise humanity anew.

1792 - 1796 AD - An Age of Heroes

After the defeat of the necromancer, the city of Malifaux was rampant with danger and adventure.

It was a time of grievous villains. The dark mistress, Astarte, activated a colossal machine buried beneath the southern part of the city and nearly unleashed a terrifying, immortal weapon from the days of the Tyrant War onto an unsuspecting populace. Jean-Philip Archambault, the Quebecois madman, terrorized the streets of the city alongside his Legion de Morts Vivant, a pack of skeletal warriors, which Archambault had animated using the infamous Grimoire that he had stolen from the corpse of the first necromancer.

Evil men and women almost seemed to haunt the city, as if the necromancer's failed attempts to seize control had somehow been the catalyst that brought out the worst of humanity. The shadows of Malifaux seemed to grow darker, and soon, it wasn't safe to tread the city's cobblestone streets at night.

When things are darkest, however, even the smallest candle seems to burn brightly. The heroes which had arisen to defeat the necromancer had not abandoned the city, and colourful personalities such as the Jack o' the Axe, the stunning Lady Zorra, and Devilish McGuinne stepped forward to defend the weak. They fought for their own reasons, sometimes for truth or justice, but just as often for their own glory. Whatever their motivations, however, the people were grateful for their aid. They saved countless lives by dint of their courage and cleverness, and long after they perished, their legends continued to inspire others.

Amidst the heroes and villains, there were others whose true motivations were unknown. The mysterious Clockwork Queen seemed motivated by desires that found her on both sides of the conflict, and the puzzling exploits of the Masked Rider were inscrutable in their purpose. Perhaps most telling was the appearance of Kenshiro, the Weeping Blade, who arrived in Malifaux bearing a very special sword: the Masamune Nihonto. The blade and the swordsman were locked in a battle of wills, but Shez'uul was far stronger than Kenshiro, and each day, it eroded more of its bearer's mind and soul.

1797 AD - Paradise Lost

While the residents of Malifaux City were struggling with villains of their own making, a far greater battle was being waged far to the north. Some of the Council members who had fled from the initial battles over the city had travelled north, across the rolling scrubland hills, all the way to the foothills of the great Ten Peaks mountain range. The closer they came to the mountains, the more clearly they could hear the voices on the wind calling out to them.

As a group, the archmages braved the high altitudes, treacherous mountain paths, and chilling temperatures to climb further up the peaks, following the voices. When they arrived at the summit of the tallest peak, however, they found the spectral form of the Tyrant December waiting for them. December whispered to the archmages, promising them great power if they could free him from the mountain winds which bound him.

It took the better part of two long years, but the archmages were eventually able to break the bindings that had kept December imprisoned for so long. Roaring with victory, December's spirit descended upon them, shattering the spirit of the strongest sorcerer in an instant as the Tyrant possessed his body and forced the others into submission. Those who refused to kneel to the Tyrant were butchered and devoured by his chosen proxy.

Things had changed a great deal since December's binding, and the arrival of humans had brought with it an opportunity. The creatures themselves were fragile and worthless, and though his proxy soon grew fat on their flesh, it did nothing to sate the Tyrant's ravenous hunger. The portal they had punched between dimensions, however, was a font of magical energy, and December believed that by consuming it, he could ascend to true godhood.

Swelled by December's influence, the winter of 1797 was a particularly bitter and cold one for Malifaux. Those who were able took shelter in their rimemantled homes or taverns, their hearths raging to keep the deathly frost at bay. Those without proper shelter made attempts to warm themselves by burning trash or debris in abandoned tenements, trying, with desperate need, to stave off frostbite and an icy, benumbed death.

At the very apex of the weather's cacophonous bluster, December's proxy floated into the city, held aloft by the roaring mountain winds. The Council and the other heroes of the city were huddled in their homes, warming themselves by the fire as their doom floated unopposed past their frosted doors.

The Neverborn, however, had learned of December's escape and were prepared for his attempt at ascension. Lilith and her sister, Nekima, appeared from the shadows, attacking his proxy and his followers with a small army of monstrous Nephilim. It was a brutal battle, for though December was little more than a spectre, he was still a formidable opponent.

Using strong winds to push the Nephilim away, December pounced on the stone archway that kept the Great Breach stabilized and began to feed upon its energies. Had it not been for the sudden appearance of Kenshiro and the Masamune Nihonto, December might have succeeded in his plan and ascended to rule over all of reality.

Shielded by the influence of the Tyrant within his blade, Kenshiro was able to cut through December's winds and advance on the Tyrant's proxy. Though December panicked when he sensed the presence of another Tyrant, he relaxed when he realized that Shez'uul was still trapped within its prison. December unleashed a blast of icy wind at Kenshiro, intending to tear the man apart with shards of wind-blown ice, but he had underestimated the swordsman's speed and resilience.

Even as the ice shards impaled and killed Kenshiro, the swordsman raised his sword and brought it down in a killing stroke. The magical blade cut through the magical protections surrounding December's proxy, slicing the man in half and severing December's only connection with the mortal world.

December had invested much of his power into his proxy, and with the man's death, December's influence was greatly weakened. In his rage and anger, December spent what little power he had to summon up one last gale of wind, hurling the Masamune Nihonto back through the Breach and out of his fading sight.

In the aftermath of the battle, Lilith and Nekima took stock of the situation. Humanity had invaded their home less than a decade earlier, and already they had come under the sway of multiple Tyrants. December had been freed from his chains, and their world had nearly met its end.

The two sisters came to an agreement: humanity was too dangerous to be allowed to live. As they debated how to seal off the Breach, they were approached by a human witch named Zoraida. The witch claimed that she could seal the Breach through a powerful ritual, but only if the Neverborn agreed to her terms.

The sisters listened and agreed. With a devious smile, Zoraida gathered the necessary components for her ritual, which harnessed the aetheric energy left in December's wake and turned it back against the portal. The stone archway that kept the portal secure started to violently quake and rumble, and gradually, the rift began to shrink in size. The thaumaturgists back on Earth tried to stabilize the portal, but to no avail. Furthermore, those who attempted to cross through to Malifaux were cut off, as if the portal had been bricked over.

Meanwhile, Nekima took the rest of the Nephilim and spread out across the city, butchering every human they could find. In the morning, she hurled a corpse through the rift to send a message to the humans who had nearly destroyed her world. On its torso was carved a single, haunting word: "Ours."

The Breach lay open for a single moment longer and then closed in upon itself with an ear-rending, sonorous howl. The Great Breach was no more.

1797 or 10 PF (Post Foris)

The border town of 0. To be Organised/Malifaux became a thriving city over the next decade, growing fat and rich with the mining and trading of Soulstones.

However, the dangers of the land began taking their toll on those that moved farther and farther from The Breach. Rumours and stories began to circulate about tombs that held dark secrets and power even greater than the Soulstones. Entering those ancient burial sites had given life to the dead, waking protectors from another age. Expeditions set out, but few returned. Those that did spent their last breaths in tales of horrific creatures and beings of mythology and fables. Cartographers did roaring business with maps saying “Here Be Dragons” that lampooned the explorers as tellers of tall tales, and one in particular mocked the fanciful sightings, naming them the Neverborn. The name stuck, even after the killings grew, the mocking stopped and the nightmare things made believers of them all. No one knew where they had come from or why they had only now begun to show themselves, though it was quickly discovered that man was no friend of theirs.

While some explored above ground, others risked the tombs. Ancient secrets were uncovered, including the magic of reanimating the dead to use as slaves, and ways to manipulate flesh itself, turning a once living human into an abomination of undeath. The horrors unleashed were too much to bear, and these necromancers swiftly became outcasts.

Other practitioners focused their studies on the machines that were found throughout the City and the surrounding land. Although many of these devices were rusted and incomplete, some could still be animated simply by placing a Soulstone inside the metal. Something in the Soulstone knew the function of the machine, and imbued it once again with purpose and power. Many of the machines were simple things, little more than toys. However, there were other machines – mobile machines with great weapons – that could be brought back to life with the right Soulstones and a practitioner with enough knowledge.

In the winter of 1797, one of the worst blizzards to hit 0. To be Organised/Malifaux during the time of man’s occupation arrived, and at its height the Great Boundary became unstable. Despite the best efforts of the Breach sorcerers, The Breach began to shrink in upon itself. All attempts to pass through were rebuffed, as if some invisible force was standing in the way. And then from Earthside, sounds of a fierce battle drifted across The Boundary from 0. To be Organised/Malifaux, accompanied by screams of horror and suffering that were heard all throughout Breachtown.

In the early morning hours of that long night, despite the most desperate measures taken, The Breach shrunk to the height of a man and a choking smoke rolled through it from 0. To be Organised/Malifaux. Just before dawn the screaming and sounds of battle fell silent, and the Breach sorcerers drew closer in a fearful huddle, exhausted Soulstones scattered around them. Then a mangled body came hurtling through the opening and landed with a sickening thud as The Breach of The Great Boundary closed in upon itself with an earshattering howl. A single word was carved into the ruined flesh of the corpse:

“Ours.”

1798 - 1802 AD - Fear and Confusion

The closing of the Breach shocked the world. One moment, Malifaux was a wellspring of magical power, and the next it was gone, an entire city of people vanishing overnight.

A great many people from all across the world had settled in Malifaux in the decade since the opening of the Breach. When the Breach closed, there was not a corner of the Earth that was unaffected by their loss. In every nation and every city there were men and women who had lost brothers or sisters, children or parents, or husbands or wives. Within days of the news, makeshift memorials had sprouted up all over the world.

Newspaper headlines were garish and sensational in their coverage of the loss of Malifaux. Wild rumors and theories propagated around the globe. Many refused to believe that the Breach had actually closed, thinking it a ruse or a trick intended to raise the price of Soulstones. Others believed that whatever had attacked the residents of Malifaux was coming to Earth. Apocalyptic signs and portents were preached loudly on street corners from Saint Petersburg to New Amsterdam, and the world was gripped in the throes of grief and panic.

In addition to the colossal loss of human life, the source of the world's Soulstones - the fountainhead of every major magical and technological advancement of the past decade - had been lost. Soulstones had already been one of the most sought-after commodities in the world, and in one fell swoop, it had also become the rarest. Institutions began to horde their meagre supplies, and governments began to seize whatever Soulstones they could from private citizens.

Any Soulstone uses that were not deemed essential were immediately ended. This included, tragically, many large public works in addition to most medical applications. If a person was not well-connected, their Soulstones were stripped from them and added to the government stores. Nations began to look to their neighbours in an attempt to gauge just how many Soulstones they had managed to accumulate, and politicians and diplomats desperately tried to sign treaties to keep the peace.

1798 or 11 PF (Post Foris)

A time of shock and turmoil fuelled the panic that ensued after the Fall of The Great Boundary. Many Soulstones were exhausted to shattering point, but even the magics that had opened it the first time failed, and The Breach could not be opened again.

Magic was once again threatened, and soon wars were launched to secure the remaining Soulstones. Depraved and dark acts were enacted to capture additional life forces within the stones to overwhelm new enemies.

The Guild, a society of ruthless merchants, politicians, and practitioners, was formed to bring some semblance of order to the chaos. This organization took control of the Soulstones with an iron fist, and made their headquarters in Breachtown. They passed a law that forbade anyone from possessing Soulstones, except Guild officials. Breaking that law was punishable with immediate execution – in the presence of a Soulstone, of course.

With the number of charged Soulstones quickly dwindling, The Guild instituted measures to ensure their power did not diminish. Soulstones were replenished at hospitals, prisons, madhouses and even orphanages. Although considered cruel by some outcasts and activists, The Guild promoted it as a necessary act of preservation.

1803 - 1814 AD - The Black Powder Wars

At first glance, it appeared as if the various treaties that were signed after the closing of the Great Breach would be enough to usher in a fragile peace. As time passed, however, paranoia began to set in. Everyone had seen the power that Soulstones could unleash, and no nation wished to be caught off guard should their neighbours launch an assault to claim their Soulstones. Diplomats became spies and troops were mustered along borders.

When the first shots rang out in the spring of 1803, it was as if the entire world had released a collectively held breath. Fuelled by their own meagre supply of Soulstones, the Bulgarian people attempted to revolt against the crumbling grip of their Ottoman rulers, triggering a series of cascading alliances and treaties that dragged all of Europe into a war that would later spread to engulf the rest of the world. With sabre and flintlock, soldiers fought and died for their countries, musket lines holding against the spirited charges of fearless cavalry.

Unlike in previous wars, however, the great nations of Earth now had access to considerable magical power. Amongst the musket lines and cavalry charges, practitioners wielded eldritch energies and rained down fire upon enemy encampments. Animated constructs marched alongside flesh-and-blood troops, and some nations, such as Spain, employed necromantically-infused soldiers, ensuring that their battalions would keep marching even after death.

In Africa, a loose coalition of Soulstone-starved nations marched into Abyssinia from the north while opportunistic bandits and pirates began gnawing at its borders from the south. They found themselves facing a powerful empire that rose to the challenge of war and fought off Egypt, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire in numerous fierce battles.

Further west, the South American colonies of the Spanish and Dutch launched attacks on Brazil, while Mexico pushed northward, seizing the territory of Texas (and its numerous Soulstone warehouses) from Spain. Everywhere, armies fought and died by the thousands for gems that often were so small they could be set into a ring or brooch.

Despite the outbreak of war, however, not every nation was immediately pulled into the conflict. The nations of Japan, China, and Vietnam, for instance, banded together in a peaceful alliance through numerous marriages that tied their royal houses together with bonds of blood, becoming the Three Kingdoms. This kept eastern Asia peaceful for many years, but eventually, the increasing weakness of their neighbors could not be overlooked. Near the end of the war, the Three Kingdoms broke their stalemates and truces and marched on Eastern Europe, Russia, and Western North America.

To the victors went the spoils, not the least of which was a cache of freshly-powered Soulstones, for death was a constant on the battlefield. The Black Powder Wars, as they came to be called, were a time of diplomacy, spycraft, and open warfare the likes of which had a lasting impact on Earth.

1815 - 1896 - The Rise of the Guild

When the dust had settled, a number of national borders had slightly changed, but the one clear victor wasn't a nation at all: the Guild of Mercantilers.

While the Black Powder Wars were started for national interests, the war was soon hijacked by a second, hidden conflict that raged around the world at the same time.

A handful of hidden cabals and secret societies had spurned the Council's call to restore the world's magic, thinking it to be either a foolish endeavour or part of some elaborate trick. When the Council succeeded, they were incensed and were forced to spend the next decade scrambling for Soulstones like commoners. Other groups had formed around Council members who had fled back to Earth during the initial battle for the city.

While the Breach was still open, these shadowy organizations had wanted to seize control of Malifaux and its Soulstones, but the power and backing of the Council and its archmages had made that prospect dangerous at best and suicidal at worst. After the Breach's collapse, however, these shrouded syndicates saw their chance and redoubled their efforts at amassing power.

The most important generals and politicians of the Black Powder Wars were brought into these cabals, where they could seize control of Soulstones and use magical powers for their own purposes. It was not one conspiracy, but several, and their members used politics, swords, pistols, and lies to outmanoeuvre each other and the nations they pretended to serve.

By the end of the war, one of these sects had gained de facto control over the vast majority of the world's remaining Soulstones, and with it, the world itself. The Guild chose England for its central headquarters and seeded their people into the courts of every major nation on Earth. As the world began to rebuild, laws were passed that forbade Soulstone ownership by anyone without Guild authorisation. Anyone caught violating this ban was executed, often in the presence of the very Soulstone they had illicitly obtained.

The only way for a nation to gain access to Soulstones was to accept Guild liaisons. At first, it was only one Guild agent who would ensure that the nation's Soulstones were only used in a prescribed manner, but as the years passed, more and more liaisons and inspectors were required, until eventually every major nation had an entire cadre of Guild operatives within its court. These agents took to dictating the policies and politics of kings and presidents, and those who refused to dance to the Guild's tune found themselves cut off from its Soulstones. Worse yet, they were frequently punished for their insolence with severe embargoes by whichever of their neighbours proved more willing to follow the Guild's guidelines.

Gradually, the Guild's iron grip tightened around the world. By dictating the movements of other nations' armies, the Guild was able to bring disobedient countries such as India and the Three Kingdoms to heel, turning them from independent nations into occupied police states. Only Abyssinia seemed able to resist their influence, and the Guild had no interest in antagonizing the advanced nation so long as they were content to limit their influence to Africa.

In under a century, the Guild had brought peace to Earth, but it was the peace of a prison, enforced only because none of the prisoners had the power to defy their jailers.

1897 AD - The Breach Reopens

With all of the Guild's power, they were still unable to reopen the Breach. They made many attempts to force the portal back open over the following decades, both by repeating the original ritual and by devising new ones. Despite all of their power and all of their Soulstones, however, Malifaux remained closed to them, like a door that had been firmly wedged shut.

One century after its calamitous closure, just as the Guild seemed ready to abandon its efforts once and for all, the Breach suddenly and inexplicably reopened. The Guild quickly enacted the protocols they had prepared for such a possibility. Armed forces that had been deployed across the world were immediately recalled to guard the Breach, and high officials met in secret to debate the meaning of its reopening.

Despite all of their precautions and planning, a great panic swept through the Guild. Its leaders used all of their influence to send thousands of soldiers and tons of ammunition through the Breach in the expectation that the Neverborn would either be waiting for them or would soon learn of the portal's opening and launch an attack. Hundreds of thaumaturges and mages, meanwhile, worked to stabilize the integrity of the portal.

When, after a full month, there had been no sign of any sort of Neverborn army, the Guild created the Malifaux Resettlement Corps, armed them with heavy weapons, and sent them scrambling through the Breach to begin scouting the city.

The city was empty. There were a few signs of a recent battle - fresh bloodstains on stone walls, scatterings of shell casings, hastily erected barricades - but no corpses, either human or Neverborn. The city had once been home to thousands of people, but whatever had happened to them, there were no bodies to be found, save for a single corpse found hanging in a twisted tree near the portal's opening. The Resettlement Corps returned to Earth and made its report, and the Guild moved quickly to secure the city.

The Resettlement Corp swelled as the Guild sent more and more of its soldiers sweeping through the city, checking every building for Neverborn before moving on to the next. Smaller groups skirted the edges of the city and began clearing sections along the southern wall, intending to push any Neverborn northward toward the river, where they would have no cover and could be easily dispatched by the larger forces on the opposite bank.

Throughout the entire operation, however, the Guild never encountered anything more dangerous than a few rats. Once the first districts were secure, the Guild sent engineers and expendable laborers through the Breach to begin construction on a central fortress from which the Guild could manage the reclamation process. The citadel, which was christened the Guild Enclave, was soon bustling with personnel, including the newly appointed Governor General, Herbert Kitchener.

The newly created Industrial Zone began turning out weapons, ammunition, and steel rails for the reclamation effort, and hundreds of civilian workers were brought in to keep the assembly lines rolling at all hours of the day. These workers needed other people to make their food, tend their wounds, mend their clothes, and pour their drinks, and somewhere along the way, the city passed from a military garrison into a full colony.

Eventually, the Guild realised that there were no threats lurking in the shadows of the city and turned their attention toward the real prize of Malifaux: its Soulstones. The nations of Earth, eager to regain access to Malifaux, supplied the Guild with a workforce of convicts and indebted laborers, and scores of troops were redirected from the resettlement effort and marched north to serve as guards and supervisors in the newly reopened Soulstone mines.

The mines were more or less intact from the days of the first Breach, but the Guild cared far more about results than safety in those first days. The resettlement process had all but drained the Guild's coffers, and its leaders were eager to see the results of their investment. Cave-ins, asphyxiation, and flooding claimed nearly a third of the early diggers, an acceptable figure by the Guild's estimation.

A Convenient Quarantine

As more and more of the Resettlement Corps left to watch over the convict miners and their indentured peers, the soldiers remaining in the city received orders to cease their advancement and fortify their current position. It soon became clear that the Guild had no real interest in continuing the push into the uncleared areas of the city, which drew the ire of those living in the cramped and overcrowded slums that had sprung up in the Resettlement Corps' wake.

The Governor-General settled the matter by proclaiming that the unsettled areas of the city were filled with monsters and nightmares and were too dangerous for settlement. To reassure the citizenry, he commanded the Resettlement Corps to turn their temporary barriers and blockades into a permanent barricade and announced that the dangerous parts of the city would be quarantined. When the last of the barriers had been erected, the Governor-General disbanded the Corps and restructured them as a constabulary force, marking the end of the Guild's resettlement efforts and the beginning of the Guild Guard and the Quarantine Zone.

The Growing City

As time passed, the Guild slowly expanded the habitable portions of the city. A grouping of smaller corporations had come to Malifaux to make a name for themselves, and the Guild allowed them to build their homes and offices along the city's northern perimeter.

Using whatever resources they could purchase, these industrialists built up a neighbourhood that, to this day, looks more like a frontier town than part of a larger city. Though many attempts were made to come up with a catchy name for the district, most everyone just ended up calling it the New Construction Zone.

This area was not the only district that would come to be known as the New Construction Zone, however. To the south of the Industrial Zone was a stretch of burnt and collapsed buildings, many of which seemed to have fallen off into the nearby river. Some of the settlers saw promise in the devastation and descended upon the district with saws, hammers, and wooden planks. They cut away the collapsed buildings, and in their place, they built a haphazard collection of densely packed homes and warehouses.

The confusion between the two districts soon gave way to further clarification: the ordered settlement built along the northern walls of the city came to be known as the Northern New Construction Zone - or the "NCZ" for short - while the ramshackle maze of buildings that jutted out over the river became the Southern New Construction Zone, or the "SCZ."

In other areas, the residents of the city simply moved into whatever buildings they found waiting for them. The Guild wasted no time in laying down rails that would enable them to more safely and easily ship Soulstones from the northern mines back through the Breach, and people settled around these lines, both in the Northern Hills and within the city proper.

1897 or 110 PF (Post Foris)

Exactly one century after it had closed, down to the very minute, the Great Boundary tore open the veil separating Earth from 0. To be Organised/Malifaux. However, unlike the first breaching, the death and damage was relatively minor. The sudden return of The Breach caused panic throughout The Guild, as they were certain that whatever calamity had befallen 0. To be Organised/Malifaux a hundred years earlier was about to be played out Earthside.

But that did not occur. After a month of intense battle readiness, The Guild sent a heavily armed expeditionary group through The Breach. They found the City empty and partially in ruin, the signs of a battle having been fought. Some of the signs of combat appeared fresh, as though the battle of a century past had only just ended. However, as was the case one hundred years earlier, there were no bodies to be found.

The Guild moved quickly. It now had access to the first new supply of Soulstones in a century. The Guild also knew that power and profit lay in controlling the Breach, not in back-breaking labour in the mines. With the Breach secured, they could set their own price for Soulstones, and those Earthside would not care what they did so long as the Soulstones kept on coming.

The Guild issued a call to the criminals and outcasts of Earth – come to 0. To be Organised/Malifaux and with hard work and luck buy your freedom, or rot in jail for the rest of your life. Many of the great powers of Earth were only too keen to empty their prisons, and a sentence of “life in 0. To be Organised/Malifaux” became a common one around the world. Many wretches volunteered as well, drawn by the glittering promise of a fresh start, and before long The Guild recruiting stations were a familiar sight to the poor and the downtrodden, families bidding farewell to fathers who passed through their doors, most never to return. And then there were the enemies of The Guild or those who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and woke up shackled with a sore head on a train through the Breach.

Naturally, where opportunity exists, so do exceptional people willing to face the unknown, no matter the dangers. 0. To be Organised/Malifaux had an influx of rough but skilled men and women seeking power, treasures, and adventure. The Guild made some effort to stop them, but in truth they cared little provided the Soulstone supply was not interrupted, and for the first time in a hundred years, magic was flourishing again.

With a work force comprised mostly of social undesirables, criminals, and radical elements, The Guild put a martial force in place to watch over the Breach and the trade in Soulstones. Life is harsh and hard in 0. To be Organised/Malifaux; for those that buck the system or do anything that might halt the shipment of The Guild's precious stones, it is also short. However, there are those that garner so much power or wealth that they are virtually untouchable. Every man, woman, and child within 0. To be Organised/Malifaux strives for this – power to live their lives at their will or to buy a return trip through the heavily guarded Breach.

1898 AD - Special Divisions

As the city grew and prospered, the old threats of Malifaux once again reared their ugly heads. Among the first were the Neverborn, which began attacking the settlers who braved the desolate Badlands and the loggers who traveled into the Knotwoods at the city's western edge. Rather than deploy their own troops to deal with the scattered reports of attacks in the middle of nowhere, the Guild instead chose to institute a generous bounty on Neverborn corpses.

There had always been people willing to travel to Malifaux in the hopes of starting a new life, but with the high price the Guild was paying to those willing to kill monsters, they suddenly had the attention of every mercenary, bounty hunter, soldier of fortune, and big game hunter across Earth. They flocked to Malifaux in an attempt to prove their mettle and earn a fortune, and in doing so, the core of what would become the Neverborn Hunters came to exist.

It was an exceedingly dangerous profession, and most of those who signed the Guild's charter and accepted their tin badges and shoddy shotguns never returned from their first hunt. The notable exception was Perdita Ortega, a small wisp of a girl who somehow managed to put three fully grown Neverborn into the ground within her first week. With the money she earned from those first kills, she purchased a quality pistol and started cutting a swathe of death through the Neverborn in the Badlands.

Much of the money that Perdita earned from her kills was sent back through the Breach to purchase passage for the rest of her family. First it was just her brothers, but then her father, her cousins, even her grandmother had made the trip into Malifaux. With each new Ortega, the family became progressively more capable and deadly, until eventually the Neverborn had learned to fear their name.

The Ortegas settled in the blasted lands of the Badlands and turned their profits toward the construction of a fortified ranch, which they named Latigo. Though technically free agents, the Guild turned Perdita and her family into heroes and reaped the benefits of their larger-than-life exploits, which proved that mankind no longer had anything to fear from Malifaux's natives.

The Neverborn were not the only enemy that reemerged in those early days of resettlement. The rotting dead were once again spotted walking the streets of the city, but unlike previously, where they served a single master, they now shuffled to the commands of an entire cabal of necromancers that operated secretly, under the veil of darkness.

The emergence of the Red Chapel Killer, a serial killer with a flair for the dramatic and a taste for prostitutes, inspired dozens of independent newspapers to decry the inability of the Guild Guard to protect them. When it was revealed that the Red Chapel Killer had not only murdered multiple prostitutes and young women but had also animated their corpses into shuffling zombies, the outcry became so deafening that it reached all the way back to Earth.

In response, the Governor-General outlawed independent newspapers and set up the Department of Public Relations, which was tasked with publishing a daily newspaper - the Malifaux Daily Record - and producing content for the city's aethervox station, ostensibly to ensure that the city's residents would have access to "impartial" news. The Department of Public Relations was also tasked with monitoring the aethervox stations for seditious broadcasts and with locating and destroying anyone attempting to slander the Guild's reputation.

It was only when the Governor-General's personal staff was killed and reanimated as mindless undead by a particularly brave necromancer that the Guild finally took notice of the threat building within their city. Dubbing the necromancers the "Resurrectionists" in a public aethervox speech, the Governor-General announced the formation of a task force designed to hunt down these rogue sorcerers: the Death Marshals.

The Governor-General placed this new "special division" under the direct leadership of Lady Justice, a mysterious swordfighter who appeared among the Guild's ranks seemingly out of nowhere. Though blind, Lady Justice seemed to possess an uncanny ability to sense things that others could not, and with her companion, the Judge, at her side, she set about recruiting promising candidates from the Guild Guard and the city's mercenaries.

There were countless rumours surrounding Lady Justice: some claimed that she was a former necromancer who sought to atone for her sins, while others whispered of a terrible confrontation with a Resurrectionist that had claimed the woman's family and her eyes. Still others whispered that Lady Justice was teaching the Death Marshals the same dark magics used by those they hunted and that her eyes had rotted away from overuse of those dark magics.

Whatever the truth, the Death Marshals proved to be remarkably effective against the Resurrectionists. The number of zombies walking the streets fell sharply, and despite their grim visages and stoic natures (or perhaps because of them), the Death Marshals soon became popular favourites of the people. Lady Justice's image was blazoned across banners all throughout the city, reassuring the populace that the Guild would not tolerate those who violated the dead.

Not all of the Guild's so-called Special Divisions were as well received by the populace, however. Early in the resettlement process, the Guild noticed that even people without any sort of magical training were starting to develop magical powers. There had been rumours of such things occurring in the days of the first Breach, of course, but the Council took a fairly liberal approach to magical study, and in any case, most of the people who settled in Malifaux in those days weren't the sort to start much trouble with their neighbours.

A good portion of the people who came through the second Breach, however, were convicts who had been brought to Malifaux against their will. When these men and women realized that they could turn invisible, throw fireballs, or transform their bodies into those of deadly animals, they turned against their Guild overseers and jailers.

In a matter of weeks, chaos had engulfed the Guild's mines, slowing their Soulstone production to a trickle. Countless convicts escaped into the wilds, some of them working their way back to Malifaux City or other settlements, where they posed as legitimate and respectable citizens. Others revelled in the new power they had inherited and attacked the Guild and anyone else around them.

The Guild realised that they had a crisis on their hands. Bringing in more convicts only seemed to make the matter worse, as the problem just repeated itself over again with new faces. Eventually, the Guild opened up its mines to paid workers to ensure that they remained functional while they dealt with the problem at hand.

The solution came in the form of a headstrong woman by the name of Sonnia Criid. Criid had come to Malifaux in search of arcane lore and Soulstones, and she had already launched a number of solitary excursions into the Quarantine Zone and Necropolis beneath the city in search of the relics of Old Malifaux. Each time, she returned with a tome, relic, or ritual that offered new insights into the nature of magic, as if the ancient books of the city were somehow calling to her.

The Guild placed Ms. Criid in charge of its newly formed Witch Hunter Task Force, earning her loyalty with the promise that she would be given access to every spell, tome, and artifact she recovered from the rogue spellcasters. Criid took advantage of the situation, commandeering room after room in the Guild Enclave for her ever-expanding libraries, as well as a room in the deep basements that she called the Yellow Crypt.

The Witch Hunters quickly became the least popular of the Guild's Special Divisions. Criid was ruthless in her persecution of people who used unlicensed magic, and countless families were destroyed when Criid or one of her subordinates appeared, declared someone to be a spellcaster or witch, and hauled them away without any sort of trial or defense. Many were executed, but the strongest were taken to the Yellow Crypt, a warded room in the Enclave's basement. There, Criid burned away the sorcerer's magic and mind, leaving them a charred and broken creature that she dubbed a Witchling Stalker.

1899 AD - The Rise of the Union

While the Guild was struggling to deal with the threats of the Neverborn, the walking dead, and rogue spellcasters, another faction was growing to power in the shadows. The convicts the Guild had shipped to Malifaux to work in the Soulstone mines had proven to be too great in number for the Guild to handle, and in order to meet their production quotas, they were forced to hire greater numbers of independent miners and workers.

As the people settling in the Northern Hills banded together to support one another, so too did the workers in the mines band together for mutual safety. In the darkness of a mine there are countless things that could go wrong and take a miner's life, and often, the only way to prevent disaster was to trust that everyone else in the mine would have your back if things went wrong.

These bonds between miners, whether convicts or free workers, were cemented by the frequent accidents and tragedies of those early days. Cave-ins and other disasters drew the survivors together, and it wasn't long before entire settlements had banded together in a common purpose: to keep the miners and their families safe at all times.

This sense of comradery grew rapidly, and the Guild failed to see the danger in what was happening before it was too late. When a group of miners became trapped underground for days after a torrential rain flooded their mine, the story spread like wildfire. All across Malifaux, people heard how the Guild had forced the miners into the flooding depths, insisting that a bit of rain wasn't any reason to stop working.

One of the men that escaped the mine, Erick Ulish, rallied his fellow workers around the idea of a union that would provide all of its members with mutual support and safer working conditions. The idea caught on, and soon most of the Northern Hills had come together under the banner of the United Miners Union.

Within a few months, the Union had brought in enough money via membership dues to finally address the safety concerns of the Guild's mines. They began hiring engineers to help create more stable passages, better lighting, and a solution to the constant threat of cave flooding. It was into this environment of need that Doctor Victor Ramos appeared, bringing with him a cadre of skilled and loyal engineers.

There wasn't a man in the Miners Union who didn't recognize Ramos' genius for both engineering and organization. With much of the Union's dues going towards paying for these engineers, it only made sense to include them in the Union as well, and after a vote, the United Miners Union became the Miners and Steamfitters Union. By the time the Guild had realized what the happening, the M&SU had managed to spread its influence across nearly every mine in the north, giving it access to enough manpower and technology to make it a legitimate threat to the Guild's power.

Dr. Ramos was initially in charge of improving miner safety, and everything he touched turned to gold: he was able to leverage the threat of worker strikes into bargaining power with the Guild, which in turn lead to higher wages, increased safety regulations, and a program that would allow convicts to transition into paid laborers with good behavior. Similarly, the mining constructs that he created proved to be invaluable companions to flesh-and-blood workers.

When President Ulish suffered an unfortunate mining accident, Ramos was the natural choice for his replacement.

Unbeknownst to either Guild or Union, Ramos was a skilled mage who was paying close attention to the Guild's newly created Witch Hunter Task Force. He felt that he and his ilk were doing nothing wrong and that the Guild's apparent vendetta against their kind was simply due to the amount of power that such mages might be able to bring to bear against them. He decided that there was safety in numbers and founded the Arcanist movement in the shadow of the growing Union. He drew its first members from miners and convicts who had manifested magical powers, shielding them from Guild attention in exchange for their loyalty and service.

1900 AD - Rising Tensions

Gradually, Malifaux fell into an uneasy peace. The number of random people manifesting magical powers plunged dramatically, which the Guild took as a sign of the Witch Hunters' success at their assigned mission. In reality, the Arcanists were recruiting from the ranks of the miners and their families, turning anyone with useful powers into protected - and hidden - assets. Those who held the Guild in contempt had their anger channelled towards more productive ends: the sabotage of Guild property and the theft of Soulstones.

Under Ramos' leadership, the M&SU took a more political role in Malifaux and began to point out the worst of the Guild's fascist policies and tyrannical decrees. They funded rag sheets that ran smear campaigns against the Guild's leaders, staged strikes to draw attention away from Arcanist missions, and gradually tightened their grip on the Northern Hills.

The greatest achievement of the Union came in the form of the Hollow Point Pumping Station. The epic construction project was the brainchild of Dr. Ramos, who hollowed out the monadnock mountain at Hollow Marsh to serve as the structural basis for a series of gigantic water pumps. The pumps kept the caverns of the region (and thus, the nearby mines) relatively dry during the region's frequent storms and earned a great deal of prestige for both the Union and Dr. Ramos.

During the grand opening of the Pumping Station, however, an assassin's attack resulted in the deaths of dozens of Union personnel. The Governor General and President Ramos were both present for the attack, which was fortunately blunted by the presence of a pair of highly skilled mercenaries that had been invited to the party. In the aftermath of the attack, accusations flew from both the Guild and the Union, with each blaming the other for the attack.

The murder of Duncan McSweeny, the Vice President of the Union, a few days later only seemed to ignite tensions further. All across Malifaux, the Union's workers went on strike, halting the excavation of Soulstones and turning the tension between the two organizations into outright violence.

Though the Union and the Guild would eventually reach an agreement that would see the workers returning to their mines, there were other events taking place that soon eclipsed the strike in the city's newspapers, both official and illegal.

The Red Chapel Killer, now identified as a former haberdasher by the name of Seamus, claimed the city's headlines when he murdered Molly Squidpiddge, the star reporter of the Malifaux Daily Record, during his theft of the Soulstone known as the Gorgon's Tear. More shocking still, Seamus then crashed Molly's funeral, murdered a great many of the woman's friends, and used the Soulstone to resurrect her as a sentient undead creature.

In the years to follow, the undead reporter would prove to be a constant companion at Seamus' side, much to the annoyance of the Death Marshals and the horror of her surviving friends and loved ones.

Midway through the year, a convict woman by the name of Rasputina arrived in Malifaux as part of a convict shipment. Bound in chains for the crime of drowning her only child, Rasputina's sentence was deferred from incarceration to forced service in a Guild-funded saloon. After she proved difficult to tame (as the scars on her would-be patrons would attest), she was transferred to the far north, to a chain gang that worked in the shadows of the Ten Peaks.

As she toiled in the mines, Rasputina heard a disembodied voice calling to her, promising her power in exchange for service. The voice grew louder as winter approached, and eventually, she capitulated to its requests. The next morning, a blizzard blew down from the Ten Peaks, covering the mine in heavy snow and blinding the Guild's guards with icy winds. Rasputina escaped in the confusion, following the whispers of the voice up the side of the mountain.

At the summit, she found others who had been called by December, as well as the disembodied spirit of the Tyrant itself. None had been strong enough to contain his essence, but Rasputina proved to be a suitable host. She accepted December's bargain and gained considerable control over the winter winds and snow in exchange for accepting the Tyrant's essence into her soul.

1901 AD - Kythera Opens

After the first thaw of the year, an archeological expedition led by Professor Heilin set out for the Bayou to investigate the ruins that had been spotted at the swamp's heart. Though not much was thought of the professor's expedition at the time, it proved to be one of the most significant events of its time.

The ruins that the professor had chosen to investigate were none other than the Kythera device. After a week of diligent study, he had succeeded in translating some of the fabled runes carved into the towering structure. When he intoned them aloud, however, the ancient machinery of the portal grinded into action, slowly reopening the dimensional portal that led to the realm of the Grave Spirit. Professor Heilin was unprepared for the structure to begin moving beneath him and fell from the top of the ruins to his death in the swirling waters below, but the rest of his expedition managed to escape to safety.

Sensing that the portal had been opened, the Neverborn, led by Lilith, tracked each member of the expedition down and murdered each of them with poison, in the hopes that their illness would be attributed to a toxic Bayou plant or a fearsome curse. Only one man, Philip Tombers, escaped their wrath, and then only because he was committed to the Guild's sanitarium.

Lilith was preparing to finish Tombers off when Rasputina, now flush with December's considerable powers, appeared at the head of a powerful snowstorm and attempted to claim the man for her own. The opening portal was slowly allowing the Grave Spirit to force its way into the world, and the Tyrant wished to have nothing further to do with the impossibly powerful entity that had killed its physical body.

Tombers perished in the battle, but he was resurrected into unlife as a talking head by Seamus, the Red Chapel Killer. Unbeknownst to Seamus, he was being manipulated by the Tyrant known as the Gorgon via his companion, Molly. By speaking with the animated head of Philip Tombers, Seamus was able to learn the magical phrase that would throw the gates of Kythera wide open.

Gradually, the Neverborn came to realize that the situation had progressed too far to stop: December had chosen a new host, and humanity had learned how to open Kythera. Rather than attempt to prevent the coming disaster, an almost impossible task by this point, they decided instead to manipulate fate and turn the disaster to their advantage.

One of the more powerful Neverborn leaders, the Swamp Witch, Zoraida, contacted Viktoria Chambers, the current owner of the Masamune Nihonto. When Viktoria passed through the Breach, fate reshuffled around her and the possessed sword she carried. Zoraida manipulated the young mercenary into an encounter with a Doppleganger in the belief that the shape changer would kill Viktoria and steal not just her form but also her sword, and with it, her destiny.

What Zoraida did not know, however, was that the Masamune Nihonto was a prison for the Tyrant Shez'uul. Rather than allow its chosen host to be slain, the sword enhanced Viktoria's strength and speed, allowing her to best her duplicate. When the blade passed through the Doppleganger's body, it trapped the creature's soul instead of killing its physical form, just as it had done to Shez'uul centuries earlier. Left with Viktoria's form and memories, the duplicate surrendered to its twin, who spared its life. The Doppleganger warned Viktoria about what it had been told would happen at Kythera, and together, the two of them set out for the ruins to stop the Tyrant December.

When the Viktorias arrived, they found that others had been drawn to Kythera as well. Seamus and Molly had been captured and taken prisoner by Lady Justice and the Death Marshals, while Sonnia Criid had bested Rasputina and clasped her in manacles that prevented her from drawing upon her magic. Criid's research had revealed the true purpose of Kythera, and her conversations with Molly had confirmed her fears that Heilin's expedition had accidentally opened the portal. It was her intention to use Rasputina as her proxy in the ritual to seal the portal... a ritual which would almost assuredly cost the one intoning it their soul.

Fuelled by the might of a Tyrant, however, Rasputina's power was far greater than Criid had anticipated. Once she had learned the phrases she needed to close the portal, Rasputina broke free from her confinement and called out the words that would close it. As the last of Kythera's gears grinded to a halt, December felt the power that the Grave Spirit had stolen away with his death return to him, and with it, he willed himself into a physical form.

It was only the appearance of the two Viktorias and the Masamune Nihonto that saved the day. Using the blade, the two swordfighters cut December down, much as the swordsman Kenshiro had dispatched the Tyrant's host a century earlier. In the confusion, however, Molly freed Seamus from his bonds, and the Gorgon whispered the words needed to open the portal into Seamus' ear.

With a mighty shout, Seamus forced Kythera's portal wide open, heralding the entry of the Grave Spirit into the world. The personification of death itself crawled upwards from the depths of the dimensional portal. The Grave Spirit would have devoured all life in the world, were it not for Victor Ramos' sudden arrival in the Leviathan, a colossal construct that he had been building to wage war on the Guild.

Instead, Ramos turned the massive cannons of the titanic war machine on Kythera itself, shattering the device, collapsing the portal, and sealing away the Grave Spirit once and for all.

1901 or 114 PF (Post Foris)

Four years have passed since the reappearance of The Breach. Much to the Guild’s displeasure, it has been learned that several other Breaches have been discovered. While none are nearly as large as the Great Breach, The Guild is now faced with the loss of total control of access to 0. To be Organised/Malifaux. This, in turn, means that they may not have a complete monopoly on the Soulstones, though they do their best to crush any competition.

Although 0. To be Organised/Malifaux itself is well on its way to being rebuilt by the Governor General of The Guild, there are large portions of the City that see little, if any, human habitation. In these areas, the darkest parts of the ruins, intelligences both ancient and malevolent lurk. The Governor General has declared these portions of the City off-limits to all and has erected walls and bulwarks; many of them cutting across streets and alleys in an attempt to restrict access to – and from – the darker side of 0. To be Organised/Malifaux.

The Governor General has the nearly impossible job of keeping a giant and chaotic city of vying interests under control. He has found that the most expedient way to deal with this problem is to issue writs to various factions across the continent. This gives them limited power to police a part of the City or the outer towns and keeps them at each other's throats. After all, if they are fighting one another, they are not fighting him.

The men and women in 0. To be Organised/Malifaux hammer out a life amongst its harsh lands. Towns and other settlements have sprouted up farther from The Breach, ostensibly to work the Soulstone mines, but also to escape the looming presence of the oppressive Guild and their laws. However, as some seek distance from power, others have learned that should a person have plenty of Soulstones, influence, or simply enough power of their own to give The Guild pause, then they are fairly free to make or break the rules as they see fit.

There are whispers and rumours of covens and other groups that have wriggled out from beneath the thumb of The Guild to forge their own power base in the ruins and the hinterlands. More than one skirmish has occurred between competing factions in the last year, as well as within The Guild itself.

To make matters worse, the Neverborn have resurfaced, making their presence known to all within 0. To be Organised/Malifaux. These hellish creatures take on forms ripped from myth and legend, from nightmares buried deep in the mind of man, dark and terrible shadows on the cave walls. What their goals are and whether or not they were responsible for the loss of the original colonists or the re-opening of The Breach is known only to them. All that is certain is that no-one is safe.

Recent discoveries of powerful artifacts of a bygone era have brought keen interest from the various powers within the land, and wild speculation that perhaps one of these artifacts caused the destruction of The Breach one hundred years ago. Along with the scramble to recover Soulstones, every organization and faction with resources to spend is searching for them. However, every attempt at retrieving one risks attracting the attention of the Neverborn, and it is only the truly strong, or the very lucky, that manage to retain control of these precious items for long.

The Guild can feel their power slipping away. Entire groups of people are appearing in 0. To be Organised/Malifaux without their knowledge and bringing chaos in their wake. Mercenaries are renting themselves to the highest bidder, and it is not always The Guild.

Even though The Guild has declared necromancy a crime, and put out a bounty on all who would call themselves Necromancers, few are willing to try to capture them. When those that have attempted it do make it back, it is almost always as one of the shuffling Undead.

In an effort to retain their power, The Guild has stepped up their already cruel and heavy-handed authority, swearing that they will stop at nothing to completely control 0. To be Organised/Malifaux, along with everyone and everything in it. Everyone can feel it; they all know it’s coming.

In the dangerous and deadly world of 0. To be Organised/Malifaux, things are about to get much, much worse.

1902 AD - The Awakening of Tyrants

The tensions between the Guild and the M&SU increased with each passing year until they finally spilled over into chaos in the spring of 1902. Union rioters took to the streets and lit fire to numerous Guild holdings, filling the Downtown district with flames. A smaller group of rioters even attempted to march on the Governor's mansion to burn it down, but they were quickly executed by Guild sharpshooters stationed on the mansion's roof.

Despite these defences, however, the Guild still suffered a significant loss. A decorated Guild officer, Captain Gideon, turned on his employers and, in a moment of supposed madness, murdered the Governor-General's son, Francis. Gideon was arrested for his crime, but he was brutally murdered in his cell before he could stand trial for his crime.

Amidst the riots, however, more insidious threats were beginning to awaken. With the destruction of Kythera, the Grave Spirit's influence upon the world had been lessened. For the spirits of the defeated Tyrants, it was like a heavy weight being lifted from their shoulders, and gradually, those ancient entities began to strain at the boundaries of their prisons.

Nytemare returned from its self-imposed banishment to the realm of dreams in the company of a small boy, the Dreamer, who could manipulate reality at will. Cherufe reached out from its orbital prison, touching the mind of Sonnia Criid and subtly manipulating her in ways that prepared her mind and body for her eventual possession. In a frozen lake at the centre of a Soulstone geode, Witness opened her eyes and stared upwards through unyielding ice.

The shackles that had bound the Tyrants for millennia had been rattled by Kythera's destruction, and now, minds which had long ago withdrawn into the contemplation of their own misery began to look outward once more.

The Piper's Plague

The first Tyrant to escape its confinement was Plague. The wards surrounding the Tyrant's prison beneath Malifaux City were designed to turn aside anything living that approached them, but a twist of fate bypassed them in a manner that the Tyrant's long dead jailers hadn't intended. A burning building, lit aflame by the Union rioters, tumbled downward and smashed into the ground, shattering the street and collapsing a portion of the sewers beneath it. The ratcatcher Hamelin was in those sewers, and the resulting catastrophe knocked him into the brackish waters, which spilled out into side channels that had long ago been sealed away.

When Hamelin finally regained consciousness, he found himself in Plague's ancient, now-shattered prison. Rather than directly possessing Hamelin, Plague pushed its essence into the insects and larvae that the sewer water had carried into his prison, possessing their bodies and then forcing them to devour the rat catcher's form and essence.

Now clad in Hamelin's body, Plague was able to stroll out of his prison with minimal effort. In the weeks that followed, a terrible contagion spread out across the city. The Death Marshals initially believed the plague to be part of a new Resurrectionist plot and moved quickly to quarantine the Breach, lest the plague spread from Malifaux to Earth. The disease was more virulent than anything humanity had seen before: it was carried by rats and insects that seemed immune to its effects, but once it had infected a human host, the disease ran its course in minutes, rotting away flesh in the blink of an eye.

Soon, the plague had engulfed the entire city. Rumours spread of a man in a wide-brimmed hat who moved among the swarms of rats and infected, a pipe pressed against his lips. Soon, these glimpses of Hamelin the Plagued had given the outbreak its name: the Piper's Plague.

The Event

The Death Marshals did their best to eliminate what they believed were zombies that had been killed and reanimated by the plague. The "zombies," however, proved to be living people who had been ravaged by the disease and were now being controlled by Plague, similar to how it was controlling the swarms of rats that had boiled up out of the sewers and into the streets. The Death Marshals were horrified by the revelation, and the throngs of rats took advantage of their shock to swarm over them in waves of infected, biting fury.

In the days before Titania and the death of his mortal form, Plague had been working on an energy amplification device that would allow the Tyrant to ascend to godhood. After his death, the original inhabitants of Malifaux had turned the device to their own purposes and used it to imprison the Tyrant Cherufe.

Plague easily found half of the key to the device in the Necropolis beneath the city, and he tracked the other piece, which shaped like a small ring, to an observatory in the Forlorn district of the Quarantine Zone. The Tyrant snatched the ring from its owner, a prostitute-turned-Resurrectionist named Kirai Ankoku, and activated the device, bringing Cherufe's prison, the Red Cage, crashing down to the ground like a meteor.

Unbeknownst to Plague, however, Kirai had been touched by the influence of the Gorgon, and by drawing upon the spirits of the underworld, she was able to defeat Plague. Plague had intended to harness the amplified aetheric energy released when the cage collided with the ground and punch a hole into the aether, but in his absence, the energy exploded outward across the world in an uncontrolled purple shockwave. With no way to understand the cause of the shockwave, the people of Malifaux took to calling its appearance "The Event."

While the shockwave passed through most people without much effect, anyone with significant magical powers was "super-charged" by the wave of aetheric energy. By embracing this energy, the mages were able to temporarily shed their mortal forms and become something greater than a mere human... and something far closer to a Tyrant.

1903 - 1904 AD Martial Law