The Forgotten

*"My grandpa told me that the Forgotten were ten feet tall, and slobbering beasts that barely looked like a man."*

*"That's not true. My father said they were beautiful, like of angels, killed by the Empire's soldiers who were so ashamed they covered it all up."'*

*"You're both wrong, they weren't men at all but beasts who walked on four legs, with huge fangs and claws. They soon as eat you as look at you."'*

The Forgotten were the original inhabitants of the western shores of Indagar and controllers of The Well. Almost nothing is known about them or the war that The Minsheng Empire waged against them which led to their destruction. What is written is that the Emperor decreed that all record of the Forgotten were to be stripped from history and their very existence wiped from all memory. Writings of the Forgotten were destroyed. Anyone who spoke of the Forgotten or who recounted stories of the war was to be punished by the iron first of the Empire. Even referencing the Forgotten in public could have resulted in a death sentence.

What still exists is the Imperial decree which established the expunging of the Forgotten from the historical records. It reads that the Emperor, so disgusted by the very existence of the Forgotten, saw it as the duty of the Empire and of all mankind that they be completely eradicated. As a result, nothing is known of the Forgotten nor have any been seen for over a thousand years. Where they disappeared to, no one alive knows.

Many historians and archaeologist have dedicated their careers to chasing down the ghost of the Forgotten. Historical digs have established broken trinkets, pottery, and other remnants of villages that scholars speculate couldn't have belonged to the earliest colonists from the Empire. It is through small discoveries such as these that speculation exists that perhaps the Forgotten had inhabited Indagar for many hundreds, if not thousands of years due to the soil depths at which some discoveries have been made. Crude tools, metal fabrications, and pottery have established that the Forgotten must have at least had formed some sort of more advanced civilization, and the centralization of artifacts also establishes that they likely had villages or possibly even small cities. Some ancient pottery shards also show artwork, fragments containing pictures of animals and bits of human like figures establishing that the Forgotten must have had a sense of culture.

Historians have long speculated that the Empire, being entirely unlikely that they could have possibly wiped every Forgotten from existence, probably drove the Forgotten back into the Deep Swamp. It is therefore speculated that they probably went extinct there as the Deep Swamp is entirely inhospitable at best and utterly lethal terrain at worst.

To the current day, parents tell their children ghost stories about the Forgotten, often describing them as hideous beasts who come in the night to prey on children. So complete was the purging of the Forgotten from the historical record by the Empire that these fictional terror tales are about as close to reality as anyone in the present has ever come to knowing of the Forgotten.

--Neil (talk) 16:16, 25 October 2016 (AST)