race. Their passing would herald theextinction of Aisens first offspring. And the irreversibleascendancy of her adopted heirs.Unsurehow to begin his account, Veiron glanced at the nearby shelf thathoused the journals of his predecessors for inspiration. He recalledan entry he had read when he was just a lad. He rose and retrievedhis grandsires journal. Sitting at his writing desk once more, hequickly flipped through the crisp pages. He soon found what he wasseeking and began to read.** * *Theycame in that time before written history in this world. A wondrousrace of great daring and spirit. It seemed their fate to sufferextinction. They defied fate instead and won their battle to prevailagainst impossible odds.Theancient scribes wrote that their world began to die. The climateslowly changed. An unending winter set in, killing plants and beastsalike. They realized that sickness and starvation would destroy themif the cold did not. And so the sharpest, most farseeingmindsamongst them gathered together and strove to discover a way for theirpeople to escape oblivion.Theywere masters of the mind arts. They harnessed mental energy to healor wound, to save or slay. They could communicate without speakingthough they never forsook speech. Language was important to them forthey were a highly cultured people who revered their teachers as muchas their soldiers.Yetthey were first and foremost a warrior race. Their history was markedby conflict, the extension of borders routinely realized through theuse of force and the attainment of power and property more oft thannot achieved by conquest. Fortunately, by the time of the GreatFrost, they had learned to eschew war for the most part and live inharmonious coexistence.Itwas this general peace, this conscious will to cooperate, that wonthem salvation. They were learned enough to surmise that they werenot alone in existence. At the behest of their scholars and leaders,they joined their consciousness in a shared endeavor to discover ifthere was another place to which they could relocate their race.Theysaw it in that collective minds eye. A world similar to theirsthat appeared untouched by sentient life. It held the hope ofsurvival and promised a future for their kind. And so they cametogether on the last continent that could still sustain them. And forthe second time, and likely the last, they joined minds, each andevery survivor of that deadly winter. They harnessed the energygenerated by that joining and channeled it into the creation of acorridor by which they could pass through the void to their new home.That was how they came to the world they named Aisen.Itwas only upon their advent that they discovered the presence of anascent homegrown race alike to theirs in appearance andintelligence. They called themselves the gelra.Thecolonists had to make a choice. They were numerous, long-lived andstrong. And they were possessed of a power with which they couldeasily overcome and supplant the gelra. But these ancient ones werewise. They comprehended that the indigenous population possessed whatwas needed to thrive in this strange new world. They choseassimilation over extermination, breeding with the native inhabitantsover many generations until the distinctions between them blurred andfinally disappeared.Weare the progeny of that wondrous era. The children of the