Heroes

The roster behind the lineups: here I chronicle every hero's story as I unlock them, starting with the baker who out-shoots everyone.

Chenko

The standout of the Epic and Rare roster and an arena mainstay from day one.

Generation

1

Source

Path of Growth, Hero Recruitment, and Watchtower Intel — available from the start

Full background story

Chenko doesn't look like an inventor. Street urchin, runaway, fugitive from something, take your pick, any of those reads far more likely at first glance. She also carries a blunderbuss the size of a small cannon, the sort of thing people around here call a lightning stick, and pointing it at someone tends to settle most arguments before they start. Whatever leverage she has in this world, she built it herself. Her strength begins and ends with her skill as an inventor, nothing handed to her, nothing borrowed.

She is more than happy to field-test her latest work on whoever deserves it. Rebels at the gates make for excellent target practice, and picking them off one by one is, by her own account, genuinely fun. No rebels around? A dangerous predator will do just as well.

Plenty of people have told her not to trust her newfangled gadgets so completely. What happens, they ask, if one fails mid-fight? "Then my enemy might survive," she tells them, and leaves it there.

Her first two working prototypes were both failures, expensive ones, and the money that had been paying for her gunpowder experiments was drying up fast. She was running out of room to fail again. If a rebel attack hadn't crashed her third demonstration at exactly the right moment, she would very likely have had to pack up and leave town rather than face her backers.

She was standing there, ready to show off the new blunderbuss, when the bell tower started ringing: rebel cavalry, at the gates, right on cue.

The flyer for the demonstration had promised plenty. "This slender new weapon must be seen to be believed, more reliable than any cannon on the market, guaranteed to convince you on the first shot. Nothing can block the dark lightning firing from its barrel. Built by the brilliant Chenko, foremost inventive mind of her generation. No governor's town defense budget is complete without one." Chenko shook her head reading it back. Two silver she had paid for that copy, and it still read like nobody involved had ever actually seen the gun fire.

A second flyer, pinned up around the same time, took a different angle. "Tired of armor that weighs you down? Sword too short for your liking? Here's your chance to work with the single most brilliant inventor you'll ever meet, one Chenko, master crafter of weapons, shields, and armor alike, assuming, of course, you can cover her rates. Find the house at 3-6 G Street and come see for yourself."

That flyer hangs in the royal museum today, decades old by now, kept as a small reminder of the years before the name Chenko meant anything to anyone at all.

Helga

A solid Amadeus stand-in early on. Falls behind from Gen 3, and her defensive kit does nothing in Bear Hunt.

Generation

1

Source

Early purchase reward

Full background story

At first glance Helga looks like anything but a warrior: hair long and gentle, clothes fine, voice quiet enough to be mistaken for shyness. Then she steps onto a battlefield and all of that falls away. Her lance is long enough and sharp enough to open a line of shields like a seam, and mounted, she comes down on an enemy formation like something out of a nightmare they didn't know they'd have. Valkyrie is the word people reach for. If you've made an enemy of her, the only sensible thing left to do is hope she's in a merciful mood.

Quinn is about the only man in town bold enough to claim he's her match, and he has said as much to her face more times than anyone's bothered counting, always followed by a confession of feelings that Helga turns down flat, every single time. It hasn't cured him of trying. His latest declaration: "I have to find out once and for all which of us is stronger, on the field or off it. Until I know, I'm not leaving this town."

Helga was born into a Viking tribe in the far north, daughter of two warriors well regarded by their people, and she was riding a moose before most girls her age could saddle one alone. Her gift for combat showed early too, but so did something the tribe had no name for: a refusal to keep making war the way her ancestors always had. Out hunting, she found herself unable to shake the feeling that life shouldn't be taken so cheaply, that there was something sacred in it worth more respect than her people gave it. The doubt kept growing. What could possibly matter more, she started to wonder, than simply living at peace with the people around you?

That question put her at odds with the tribe more and more as she got older, and one day it broke into the open. The warchief announced a fresh campaign, another round of raiding and plunder on top of the oppression he already kept his own people under, and Helga's temper finally gave out in front of everyone. It cost them both. The warchief couldn't let the insult go unanswered, so he handed down his judgment: Helga would fight the strongest warrior in the tribe, his own champion, to the death. It was meant to be an execution dressed up as a trial.

She won anyway. She cut down the champion in front of the whole tribe, and her victory bought her the one thing nobody expected her to get: her life, and a moose to ride away on. So she left, and she never went back.

But that single act of defiance never stopped eating at the warchief. What if letting Helga walk away only proved that a warrior could choose for herself when and where to fight? Once one person got to make that choice, his authority as chief meant less than it used to, and a tribe that stopped listening to its chief was a tribe some other, more united band of Vikings would swallow whole and put in chains. So after Helga vanished, the warchief turned on his own camp. Anyone whose loyalty looked less than absolute got driven out without mercy. It took him ten years of that to finally earn the title he wanted: Viking King. Even now, that old grudge against Helga still sits in his chest like a coal that won't go out.

Word has just come in from a scout: a lady warrior in traditional dress, unmistakably familiar, has been spotted in the new lands. It looks like another campaign is about to begin.

Jabel

Your first real tank and garrison anchor. Carries the early game, gets phased out around Gen 3.

Generation

1

Source

Free, day-2 login

Full background story

Tragedy carved out the beginning of Jabel's story. When bandits fell on her village and left nothing standing, she was the only one who walked out alive. What she did in the years between that night and the day she took her paladin's oath, nobody quite knows, not even those closest to her. But one line has never left her, not once, in all that time: "Never fear darkness. Fear only the despair of the faithless."

She rides in red armor now, lance in hand, and she has carried both across more kingdoms than she can easily name. Wherever she rides, something changes: a governor finds his nerve again, a family gets pulled back from ruin. She never stops reminding people that history still owes the world better pages.

Sometimes, late and half drunk, the past catches up to her anyway.

"My child, in this world you will see many things," her father used to tell her, an old man with tired eyes and gray hair thinning at the temples, gentle in the way only someone who has seen too much can be gentle. "It is not always easy to tell who is good and who is bad. But whoever you meet, remember what I've told you: defeat is temporary. True despair is only what you feel when conviction and heart have already left you." He said it so often that she learned it the way children learn songs, without meaning to. Then came the day he had to leave. "The Holy Ecclesia has given me a mission, I have to go. There may be trouble on the road, same as there might be trouble here. Watch over your mother. Watch over yourself. Be here, safe, when I come home. Can you do that for me?"

The memory always lands like ice water. Jabel comes back to herself slumped against the city wall, decides she's had too much to drink tonight, and shakes it off, and lies back down.

Her father was Aman, a man who had risen to the rank of Paladin within the Holy Ecclesia, sworn to keep the flock safe from harm. It was a position that brought the whole family a measure of respect in the village, right up until Cesares led his rebellion and took the Citadel for himself. The church did not survive that untouched. Its gentler teachings were set aside. Paladins who had once protected the faithful started seizing what little the faithful owned. Squeezed from both sides, by a king who had turned hard and a church that had turned greedy, the village found somewhere to put its anger while Aman was away: onto his wife and his daughter.

By the time Aman fought his way home, there was nothing left of it to save. He stood in the ashes and could not even say for certain who had done this, rebels, church men, or bandits who'd simply seen an opportunity in the chaos. Smoke hung over what used to be his village. Blood had already dried in the street. Whatever hope he'd carried home with him went out there, in the ruins, along with everything else.

Jabel's own words are carved into the stone by the entrance of the Imperial museum now, credited to her as First Paladin of the Imperial Cavalry: "Not everyone on horseback is a paladin. Not everyone in armor stands for something. I have watched the faithful give themselves up for each other, and I have watched noblemen take their pleasure tormenting the weak. Nobody's character is decided by the circumstances of their birth. Only faith does that, only conviction held pure, only the kind of idealism a person is willing to die for. That is what makes someone great, and that is what makes a true paladin. Be ready to spend the rest of your life searching for your own sacred light, even if the search takes you through a world thick with chaos and pain. Are you willing? Even unto death?"

Olive

A humble baker who became a deadly archer, carrying a mysterious northern past that hints at a truth she's not ready to reveal.

Generation

1

Source

Hero Recruitment, Intel Missions, and Conquest Battles

Main purpose

Joiner / Expedition

Full background story

War does strange things to people. Olive used to be an accomplished baker before the troubles. It was then she discovered her extraordinary talent for archery. War did not come easily to the gentle baker-turned-markswoman. Before the war, the only time Olive had ever so much as raised her voice was in response to troublesome customers.

Olive's archery exploits have attracted plenty of attention, even rumors that she is of royal blood. She hails from a far northern land, that much is known. There is something striking about the rumor of a runaway princess. But these questions will not be answered for now. The last person she caught snooping had to be rescued by the Village Constable after a head injury. After that her admirers learned to focus on the present.

If Olive has a best friend that must be Chenko, the only customer who seems to like what she stocks on the shelves. Olive's baking skills are a mixed bag for others. Either there's "too much flour", "too much water" or "not enough of either". As some of her critics are fond of saying: "Olive's bakery shows that staying hungry is always an option."

North beyond the viking land stands the mighty Empire of Gold, symbolized by the emblem of curling golden flower buds. Said to be defended by great legions, a holy corps of warrior-priests, and ruled by an undying emperor of supreme knowledge and power, little has been heard of the empire for the last few decades. The sudden lack of news is rather mysterious. Is it any coincidence the southern lands have also recently seen an influx of proselytizers of a strange new sect?

Saul

Early filler. Fine while he is what you have, replaced without regret.

Generation

1

Source

Early events

Full background story

Saul smiles all the time, and it unsettles people more than they'd like to admit. He smiles when nobody's told him to stop. He smiles when it clearly costs him something to keep doing it. There's a version of the question everyone in camp wants to ask and nobody quite does: what is he hiding behind that grin?

Whatever it is, it hasn't slowed him down. Nobody organizes a supply line, a build, or a season's worth of army provisions better than Saul does. Something pushes him to keep doing it faster and better than anyone asks for, and in a world this broken, most people have learned it's kinder not to ask why.

The answer, if you dig for it, starts with the Pilgrimage Alliance, once a small unit under the old Royal Expeditionary Force whose job was keeping the peace at holy sites and looking after pilgrims. It didn't stay small for long. Refugees came looking for shelter and found a uniform to put on instead, and the Alliance grew fast enough, and ambitious enough, that the king eventually ordered it cut down to size. Saul ended up reassigned from there into the Order of Holy Paladins, the Holy Ecclesia's own heavily armed relic hunters. His unit went by a name that sounded almost gentle for what they did: the Wild Rabbit Brigade.

They went missing for more than a month, once, and that month is the worst thing that ever happened to Saul. He kept a diary through it, and what survives of it traces the Wild Rabbits' path into a half-legendary ruin called the Golden City.

The first entries read almost cheerful. "Our first week in the Golden City. Every building here is solid gold, if you can believe it. Nothing of value so far besides the statues, the place is dead quiet, empty as anything, but half the company can't stop grinning about the gold anyway. This much of it ought to be a gift to the mother church."

By the second week the tone had already curdled. "Nothing new this week except cracks in the ground where you can see raw gold glittering underneath, and something about looking at it too long makes a man sick and turned around. The whole city hasn't made a sound since we arrived. It's wrong, how quiet it is. We're pushing toward the center, where there's some kind of giant golden ring rising out of the ground. Everyone's on edge. We've lost a few men to desertion already, unless it wasn't desertion at all."

The last dated entry barely holds together. "I don't know what week this is anymore. Half the company's lost their minds, and I probably have too. Gold's no good to anyone, you can't eat it. All I know is nobody can look straight at that circular thing at the center of the city, whatever it is, it's cursed, it has to be. Holy Mother, watch over me. Keep whatever's living in this place away from me."

After that the handwriting falls apart completely.

"What else do I remember?" Saul said, his voice dropped low, while across the table Seth kept scratching notes into his little book without looking up. "Barely anything, until the Captain hauled me away from this enormous pile of gold. I think that's what saved me."

"What happened to the others?" Seth finally asked.

"Statues. Every last one of them. I'd have gone the same way if the Captain hadn't shoved his face-shield onto me first. Whatever that light was, when it hit our eyes, it couldn't reach mine, not through the shield. That cursed light gets into you. It reaches straight down into whatever a man's got for a soul." Saul let the silence sit for a moment before he went on. "Last thing the Captain ever said to me was run. Forget the city. Forget any of it happened. Just smile, he told me. Smile because you're alive to do it."

Saul's grin came back as he said it, twisted a little tighter than usual. Something about it looked different tonight. In the low candlelight it was hard to read anyone's face clearly, hard to tell how many of the drinkers around the table had actually been listening the whole time, or what they were thinking about now: a city built entirely of gold, maybe cursed, maybe not, and whether they'd have better luck in it than the Wild Rabbits did.

Hilde

Best garrison joiner of the early game; her healing stacks value across marches.

Generation

2

Source

Hall of Governors, daily deals

Full background story

Hilde was born into a noble house, but family circumstances sent her off to a church school while she was still a small child. It turned out to be the happiest stretch of her life. Where the priests around her found only a quiet, somber routine, Hilde kept finding reasons to smile, and her presence did something for that austere place that nobody quite expected, brightened it, in a way the priests themselves seemed grateful for.

At fourteen, everything changed. A hereditary eye disease that ran through her family finally caught up with her, the kind that takes sight away for good in the end, though never on any fixed schedule. Some relatives had gone fully blind within a couple of years of their first symptoms. Others held onto their sight for decades before it finally failed. There was no cure for it, no known way around it short of a miracle, and Hilde, still able to see when the disease first showed itself, learned that hers would likely take a few years to run its full course.

So she prayed. And through that devotion, she came to believe she'd received an answer: study pharmacology. Not as comfort, but as an actual task, a trial she had to pass through to win her sight back. From that point on she gave herself over to studying her own condition, day and night, praying all the while for the miracle that would let her win. The others at the temple tried gently to talk her into accepting what was coming. None of them, though, was willing to stand against what she insisted was a divine command. Whether it really was the hand of a miracle, or simply Hilde's own stubborn brilliance, her disease slowed its advance against every expectation, and she kept a portion of her sight that should have been long gone.

Word of her story reached an archbishop of the church, who found it compelling enough to invite her into the central cathedral to study at his side. It looked like an honor. It wasn't. Behind the invitation sat a colder purpose: he wanted her afflicted eyes for study, and eventually as an offering to someone far more powerful than himself. Under the cover of a baptism ceremony, he took them from her, and then used his standing in the church to make sure nobody ever learned the truth of what he'd done. Her own family, who had already written her off once the disease first appeared, never asked what became of her.

Hilde tells what happened next as her own miracle. A sound moved through her mind and pulled her back up out of the dark, and when she woke, she found she could sense everything happening around her anyway, without her eyes to do it. She calls the gift her spiritual sight. It sounds impossible, a blind monk living a full life as though nothing had been taken from her at all, but everyone she's helped since has come away describing her the same way: as compassion made flesh, someone who guides the lost through her prayers and mends what she can of the world with everything she once learned trying to save her own eyes.

Marlin

The long-term archer investment of this window, strong in Arena and Expedition alike.

Generation

2

Source

Hall of Heroes

Full background story

Even Forrest, a man not easily rattled, found himself puzzling over the great northern ship that had appeared in the harbor overnight. Its hull carried dents of every size, and a single massive gash ran from midship clean to the bow, as if something enormous and sharp had driven straight through the timber. Any child who wandered too close, any villager who lingered a moment too long, got chased off by an old man in a black tricorn hat and a red woolen coat who seemed to have claimed the wreck as his own.

The mystery held until Quinn, who had seen more of the world than most, took one look at the hull and named her: The Santiago, a ship lost at sea for thirty years. The old drunk guarding her turned out to be her captain, Marlin, once one of the Four Great Captains. In his best years Marlin had commanded close to ten ships and near a thousand sailors under his flag, a record the royal court itself had rewarded with that title. Sure of himself and his fleet, he once set course for open, uncharted water and, as was his habit before any long voyage, sent one last letter back to shore. "The waters before us seem calm, but I sense there is more to them than meets the eye. Be prepared, everyone! May glory be with the Santiago." That letter, creased and yellowed now, still sits in the royal library. Marlin and his ships sailed into the fog and were gone for thirty years, and nobody could say what had become of them.

The stretch of sea where the Santiago disappeared came to be called the Misty Tides, for the fog there never lifted. Over the years, men chasing the story of the lost fleet sailed in to find out what had happened, and none of them sailed back out; each one became one more name in the sea's grim tally. When the deaths climbed too high, the royal court closed the waters entirely rather than let panic spread. Word of it traveled inland all the same, and the region picked up other names along the way. Some call it the Demon's Delta. Others call it a door to the underworld. Nobody, after all, has come back from it alive to argue.

Except, of course, for the man telling the story to anyone at the bar who'll sit still long enough. "There's nothing down there. You ever hear of sea fog? Cold air meets warm air, that's all it is." A belch, a pause. "Won't clear, you ask? You know anything about magnetic fields? The field's all tangled up out there, traps the fog in place. That's what got us stuck too." "We have to believe in science," he'd insist, red in the neck from the effort. "There's no such thing as demons." He never once managed to talk science into a bar full of people who wanted a ghost story instead, and one by one they drifted off once it was clear there'd be no juicy tale tonight, until the old drunkard sat alone again in the quiet. "Demons? If there'd been one out there, me and my crew would've handled it ages ago. Wouldn't have stood a chance against us."

Zoe

The best F2P frontline and garrison hero, relevant deep into Gen 5. Her 40% HP heal keeps walls standing.

Generation

2

Source

Hero Roulette (F2P)

Full background story

Zoe doesn't say what she feels. She wears it, in her hair. Amadeus, who's known her the longest, says it's been that way since she was a girl: black when she's coiled up and patient, waiting for the moment to strike, yellow when the hunt is already on and the thrill of it has her lit up from the inside. When that color turns, she gives herself over to it completely, every fiber of her pulled toward whatever she's chasing, until she's caught it and pulled it apart with her bare hands if that's what it takes.

She's no knight, no elegant markswoman standing back from the fight. Zoe was raised the same way Amadeus was, an adopted child of the Unjust League, and she was born with strength most people never get near. She throws herself at the front line every time, and she doesn't just endure the wounds she takes there, she seems to feed on them, on the raw contact of a real fight with real stakes. She is not gentle in how she wins, and she doesn't pretend to be. Being called a villain has never once made her hesitate. To Zoe, winning is the whole point, and honor is a luxury she was never handed in the first place.

She grew up in the suburbs north of Noxholm, on the ragged edge where the town gives way to forest and the people who live there have nothing much left to lose. Even out there, nobody was spared: taxes that bled the poor dry, nobles who tormented commoners simply because it amused them, fanatical cults working their way through the district looking for converts. Zoe watched people betray each other over and over, neighbors, strangers, even their own families, because the nobility had already decided the poor didn't count for much, and the poor themselves had learned to pay almost any price just to see another day through. Growing up inside that taught her exactly one lesson worth keeping: get strong enough that nobody gets to decide your fate for you, strong enough that one day she could tear down everything standing against what she believes in.

Around the Adventurers' Camp she's something of a legend for all the wrong reasons, brawling in taverns, running underhanded plays to steal bounty jobs out from under other hunters, generally causing more trouble than anyone else on the roster. Mothers in town invoke her name to get unruly children to behave. And yet, somehow, alongside all of that, she's genuinely respected. She's taken home "Best Vanguard Captain" more than once at the camp, "Best Adventure Companion" too, and she even turned up as the lead in a romance novel by the bestselling author Smith. His book, Fluttering Heart, has a line in it that people who admire Zoe like to repeat: "The lady is like a rainbow. You only believe such beauty exists once you've actually seen it."

Eric

Durable hybrid tank with a team-wide stun chance. A garrison core piece from here on.

Generation

3

Source

Hall of Heroes, Swordland shop

Full background story

In an earlier chapter of his life, people called Eric "The Pious One" for how readily he'd raise the paladin's hammer of correction against anyone who spoke ill of the Ecclesia or threatened its name and its holdings. He lived by one line, repeated so often it might as well have been carved into his hammer: "whoever is not absolutely loyal to us is against us." Whatever task the Ecclesia handed him, Eric took on gladly, including the grim work of forced tithing. He didn't bend for a nobleman's flattery or a landholder's pleading. The tithe stood at ten percent, no more and no less, and Eric collected it by whatever means the job called for. It took a certain kind of person to do that work well. Every so often, some subject of the Ecclesia balked at paying, and on those days it helped that Eric could put his hammer through the door of whatever storehouse was hiding the difference.

Loyal as he was, Eric might have gone on that way until he died on some forgotten battlefield defending the church, if not for the levy that changed everything. His final assignment sent him to collect from a town the Ecclesia described as prosperous and thriving. What he found instead was a huddle of shacks, sick with disease, picked clean by bandits, and starving after a bad harvest. An order was still an order, so Eric carried out some version of the levy, though he took as little as he could from people who would struggle to survive the winter regardless. His restraint meant the grain he sent back fell well short of what the Ecclesia expected. His answer came back at the next waypost. The grain wasn't worth the cost of hauling, so burn it and move Eric on to richer ground.

Eric could barely process the order. Burn grain that could keep people alive through the winter? He stopped where he was and let his journey sit until he could make sense of what he'd just been told to do. It was during that pause that he crossed paths with Hilde, who had been handing out food of her own to help the town through the famine. Eric was floored to learn that Hilde herself had come to work for the Ecclesia only after her parents sold her into slavery as a child, unable to scrape together their own tithe. Something in Eric broke open hearing her story. He shut himself away for a full day of quiet reflection, and when he came out again, he announced that he was no longer a Paladin of the Light. He was, in his own words, a dark hammer, made for breaking chains instead of forging them. These days that same hammer still delivers correction. It just aims at a different kind of sinner now, the hypocrites who've earned nothing gentler than force.

Jaeger

High-variance archer whose squad-damage buffs make everyone else hit harder. Great with Petra.

Generation

3

Source

Daily deals, Swordland shop

Full background story

Quinn had better watch his back. There's a new favorite in the music town, and his name is Jaeger, a traveling bard who seems to have picked up a trade or two along the way. Applause follows him the way flies follow honey. Sighs of appreciation are just Tuesday. As for the constant requests of "would you be so kind as to play for us tonight, sir," Jaeger gave up trying to fill them all long ago. In a world hungry for exactly his particular mix of talents, he holds a governor's attention as easily as a beggar's. He draws a crowd at every crossroads he stops in, and he's collected no shortage of favors he can call in whenever he likes. These days there are even books written about him.

The Royal Library keeps several collections of the anecdotes he's told at parties over the years. One knight, in one of them, complains to his wife that he cannot sleep. "Why, you fool of a man?" she asks. "My armor wakes me every time I move," he sighs. She tells him to take it off. He looks at her, horrified. "And face you in the morning without it?"

A writer named Seth, not yet famous but working on it, has put together a slim volume of Jaeger's own lines called My Time with Jaeger. Some of the better ones made the cut: "Women are to be loved but never understood," delivered to a woman named Alice. "I have made a waste of time and time has made a waste of me," muttered after a poor harvest. And, offered as a passing thought before heading into battle: "To be or not to be, that is the question."

Separate from all this, and possibly connected to it in ways nobody has confirmed, there's an organization called the Wander, said to be one of the most tight-lipped groups anywhere in the kingdom. Rumor holds that it's a network of quiet operatives passing information back and forth from every corner of the land, run from the center by a traveler with eyes and ears in high places who goes only by the codename Y. Y is the mind behind the whole operation, able to stir up trouble wherever and whenever it suits their purposes. Nobody has learned who Y really is. What every governor in the kingdom does seem to know is that ignoring Y's reach is a fast way to put their own future at risk.

Petra

Best cavalry rally leader for several generations. Change of Fate rolls can spike to 600% damage; she stays a strong PvP joiner even on Gen 5+ servers.

Generation

3

Source

Hero Roulette

Full background story

The patrons of Petra's local gambling hole still have a hard time believing anyone, let alone this girl standing in front of them, could empty their collective pockets and almost bankrupt the casino. But that is exactly what happened. A 20-win streak? Petra was just getting warmed-up. Amadeus ambled over to the table and sacrificed two rounds to see if he could figure out the trick, for trick there must be. The house could accept the idea of a lucky streak up to a certain point. Obvious cheating demanded a response even if no sleight-of-hand could be identified. "Take her to the Governor!" someone in the crowd shouted, and the cry caught on.

It was Marlin who stopped the mob cold. Something about the pin on Petra's collar had been nagging at him, and it clicked all at once. "She's a royal fortune-teller!" The room went quiet, then loud with confusion. A royal diviner, here, gambling in a common house? Was that even allowed? The truth is the royal diviners keep to a closed and guarded guild, working for the crown alone. Foresight, however unreliable, is not a gift the crown hands out to strangers. That is why the guild's entrance exam is brutal and offers exactly one attempt. Fail it, and you never touch the divining arts again. Diviners read the future however suits them: some trust the stars, some the cards, some the shapes a fire makes as it burns. In King's Castle other methods were permitted but never much encouraged. The Chief Diviner himself preferred cards, since a deck fits in a pocket and never wears out.

The guild was held in such regard that even when Rebels seized King's Castle and drove out most of its staff, its diviners were left more or less untouched, which says something about whatever futures they had or had not foreseen for themselves that day. Examinations were still running when General Cesares, who led the Rebels, took a personal interest in the guild's work. Petra stood for her examination with both the Chief Diviner and the General watching, and when her results came back, it was the Chief Diviner's competence that got questioned, not hers. Cesares does not let an opportunity like that pass him by. He had Petra brought straight to the throne room for a private reading. Her fellow diviners spent an anxious few hours waiting to hear her fate, and when the General finally reappeared, he looked shaken. Within the hour he had ordered his forces to pull out of King's Castle and the land around it entirely. Petra glanced once at her worried colleagues, said something about not fretting over days set in motion long ago, and walked out through the same gate the retreating army had used. That was the last the royal court saw of Petra in her official capacity.

Whether her strangeness comes from the gift itself or from something else entirely, nobody can say for certain. What is certain is that if Petra tells you to steer clear of garlic for three days before your reading, or insists that nothing will go right unless she starts her morning with olive oil and eats a heavy meal right beforehand, you do exactly that. If she decides her readings should happen at some kingdom waystation instead of a proper parlor, that is where you go. Fortune-telling is one of the easier trades to check against results, and by that measure she has earned the title Great Diviner honestly. Nobody can point to a prediction of hers that clearly missed.

Alcar

Frontline muscle for the garrison core and paid arena teams.

Generation

4

Source

Hero Rally

Full background story

Alcar once carried the title of Flagbearer in the Praetorian Guard, a rank held by exactly one soldier in the entire legion at any given time, earned only by outlasting every other man who competed for it. Outsiders rarely understood what the title actually demanded: total strength paired with total loyalty, proven again and again until nobody else remained standing to challenge it.

He still remembers what he said the day he took up the standard, though these days he's less sure he still believes it.

"Giving up was never something we knew how to do. We held the line, and we held it again, and we did not fall back an inch. Weapons up, every one of you. This is what a vow to the Emperor actually looks like, carved in honor rather than words."

"Nothing gets through us while we're still breathing. We carry courage in one hand and the victory that's coming in the other. If keeping the Emperor safe costs us everything, then that's the price we pay."

Some nights he's still back in that memory, the day they named him Flagbearer, before the cold of some far crueler winter night drags him back out of it. He remembers gripping his weapon tighter at the sound of running footsteps, remembers voices arguing somewhere close in the dark.

"They only sent us because command's already written this fight off. Understand that much, Alcar."

"Exactly. The empire's finished. Mark my words."

"I won't believe that's true. His Majesty would never let it come to this, never just look on while it happened."

"Then where is he? Tell me that. The empire's gone, and whoever holds the power now, it isn't him."

"Winning this fight, however impossible it looks, is the only road left that ends with us seeing His Majesty again."

Then, quieter, meant only for him: "Alcar, please. This isn't easy for any of us, but it's exactly why the two of us are standing here tonight."

He has never managed to remember, afterward, whose voice it was that finally talked him into raising his weapon that night. By every rule he'd been raised on, the empire's fate wasn't supposed to be a Praetorian's concern, men like him lived and died for loyalty alone, not for politics. None of that mattered once the fighting actually started.

What he carries now is two kinds of pain at once: the pain of having lived when the men beside him didn't, and the pain of a man who feels he broke faith with everything he once swore to. Strip away his armor and his body reads like a record of both, scars from battles that nearly killed him laid over scars he gave himself afterward, hunting for some way back to whole.

These days the man who was once Flagbearer has traded that old life for a much smaller one, in a town that has never once heard his name spoken with any reverence. He seems content with the trade.

"There was a time I thought I could fix the world," he says now. "I let that go a while back. These days all I try to get right is myself."

Margot

The cavalry counterpart to Rosa: arena specialist with strong joiner value.

Generation

4

Source

Hall of Heroes, Swordland shop

Full background story

"Want to see some real magic?" Under the paint, Margot's grin went crooked, her hat rocking with each little laugh she let out. The wealthy magnate in front of her, still chuckling at the mime routine she'd just finished, didn't notice the golden dagger until it was already resting against his throat. She didn't say the next part out loud, just shaped it with her lips: "Thanks for watching my performance." That alone was enough to freeze him where he stood. The blade found his arteries with a precision that left no room for noise, and he dropped with a thud. Margot wiped the paint from her face with gloves already stained red, closing out one more job the only way she knew how to think of it, a performance.

"Loser," her father used to spit at her. "You'll starve if you can't land the tricks!" Standing over the body, she felt her mind slip backward without asking permission, back to practice sessions where the smallest slip earned her small body a beating she was too young to defend against. He never once looked at her like a daughter. She was a tool that either turned a profit or got put back in its place. Thunder cracked, rain came down hard, and the storm dragged her back into the present. She shoved the body out of the way and limped off down the alley. Even through the downpour, the blood on the cobblestones stayed impossibly bright.

Later, an employer offered her three hundred gold to kill a governor, when her usual fee barely cleared ten. Margot noticed almost too late that the man's sword hilt carried the Cesares crest. She knew the target by reputation, a governor who had beaten back several Cesares assaults already and had somehow talked a handful of neighboring towns into an alliance besides. What a fascinating man, she thought. Too bad for him. She was the Revel Fang, and she was about to earn three hundred gold.

Her sixth attempt on his life failed like the five before it. She couldn't understand how a man that weak had earned people willing to die for him. There was a broad-shouldered bodyguard who kept putting his own body between her blade and the governor. There was some flashy character who acted like he didn't have a care in the world right up until the moment he was needed, and then moved like he'd been waiting for it. And there was a small, unassuming fortune-teller who somehow always sensed trouble coming before Margot had even started her act. No target had ever left her feeling this outmatched. She burned with it, and started planning her seventh attempt.

Rosa

Arena queen and the Gen 4 Bear Hunt rally host. Battle Focus makes all squads immune to stuns; weak only as a joiner.

Generation

4

Source

Hero Roulette, premium

Full background story

Rosa is the kind of woman people call impossibly charming without meaning to exaggerate. Her eyes hold something like a night sky full of stars, and when she dances, nobody in the room manages to look anywhere else. Those who've studied her performances closely talk about her sense of rhythm, bold and unrestrained, and the way she catches the light off the tavern's mirrors and bends it to her will until the whole stage seems to glow around her alone. By the time the audience realizes what's happening, she's already taken something from each of them.

Seth, a regular at the tavern who writes on the side, once tried to put the whole town's feeling for her into words: "Tonight, I whisper to you, my beautiful muse. You've stirred my heart, and blurred my gaze. The thoughts I hold deep within, I dare not let escape my lips."

Onstage, Rosa never fails to leave a crowd stunned. The moment the curtain drops, she becomes someone else entirely, distant and cold as a glacier, and anyone who tries to close that distance finds themselves pushed back out into the cold with it.

Then came the night the rebels came for the town. Families huddled in their cellars and prayed. Even hardened guards on the wall were shaking under the assault. Rosa climbed the wall instead of running from it. With no lute, no music but the crash of catapults against stone, she danced anyway, her dress soaked through with blood and snapping in the smoke like a flag someone had raised on purpose, and something about the sight of her put the fight back into everyone watching.

There's a journal that sits open on a table somewhere, bound in a strange leather gone pale and soft at the corners with age. The writing on the left side has faded past reading, save for a few words: "To... my dearest..." The right side has held up better. "If separation was written in our fate, why were our paths made to cross at all? Perhaps nothing in this world truly holds meaning. But if I must give our encounter one, then let the part of me you changed remain by my side, in your place, forever." Small round marks dot the corners of the page, the kind water leaves when it falls from somewhere close above. A door opens. The tavern's biggest star steps out of the cold night and into whatever warmth is waiting for her at home.

Long Fei

Best Gen 5 garrison infantry thanks to a rare invincibility mechanic.

Generation

5

Source

Hero Roulette

Full background story

Somewhere outside of time, an old man and a young one sat regarding each other in silence.

"You've already seen what I'm going to choose, haven't you," the young man said at last.

"Little of an Elder I'd be, if I hadn't," the old man replied.

"Then why bother giving me a choice at all, if you already know the answer?"

"You're not here to choose," the Elder said, eyes gleaming. "You made that choice already. You're here to understand why you made it."

The young man looked away, oddly caught out, as though something in him had been seen straight through. He muttered, half to himself, "So... may I have the red one, then? I think it suits me."

After that his awareness came loose from his body like a feather lifted on wind. The wound in his side, the one that should have killed him, drifted further and further away, and with it went the pain, and then the rest of it too: the rage, the grief, the flashes of joy, all of it dissolving into a gray nothing. One of the last coherent thoughts he had, before even that slipped away, was of his wife, and what would become of his family once he was gone.

Then he was floating in a sea with no shape and no feeling to it, until two hands seized him and hauled him back down into gravity. Something hot and sharp poured down his throat, some kind of liquid, and with it came his legs again, his arms, sensation returning limb by limb until he had a body once more, and control of it. His hearing was the last sense to come back, and the first thing he heard clearly was a man's voice shouting somewhere close by: "Hurry, come quick, Long Fei's alive! He's really alive!"

Years later, a strangely dressed traveler wandered into a crowded market town. His black hair was pulled back, his training clothes neat despite the road, a belt shaped like some bronze beast at his waist and a deep red gourd hanging beside it. He walked with an odd, unsteady gait that somehow never once put him in the path of a vendor's flying elbow or a spilled pan of oil, each stumble really a small, deliberate turn. He drifted through the market taking in everything with open curiosity, stopping here, lingering there, before finally wandering back out through the town gates with that same rolling, off-balance walk.

He was nearly clear of the walls when a gray-haired stonemason, twin swords slung across his back, stepped out of the shadows to block his path.

"You've been trailing me since I arrived," the stonemason said. "Patient, for a stranger. You're not from around here, and you're no rebel either. So who are you?"

"My name is Long Fei," the traveler said. "My master and I came down from the mountains to see something of the world, but we got separated along the way. This town's better than most of the places I've passed through. Might be worth waiting here until he catches up."

He reached for the gourd at his belt and twisted at the cap, but it wouldn't give. "Guess it's still not the right time," he muttered, almost to himself.

"Thinking about staying, are you," the stonemason said. "You'll have to earn that first."

Steel met gourd a heartbeat later, twin blades against a single stubborn traveler who fought like he had all the patience in the world. When the dust settled, the stonemason looked him over with new respect.

"So your father's here in town too, is he?"

"My master, not my father."

"Ah. A red-nosed old fellow, walks like he's about to fall over? That'll be Marlin, then."

"Never heard the name. And for the record, that 'about to fall over' walk you're describing is a real technique, the basic footwork of our sect. It's called Above And Beyond."

"Fine, fine, lost me completely there. Tell you what. If I track down this master of yours, will you let me have a taste of whatever's in that gourd?"

Long Fei considered the offer for a moment before he answered. "This gourd's no ordinary wine skin. My master says it only opens when the time is right."

Thrud

A force multiplier for cavalry armies. Takes over rally lead from Petra on Gen 5+ servers.

Generation

5

Source

Daily deals, Kingdom of Power

Full background story

"Here lies a child of war, born under a roof of thunder, washed clean in blood and broken bone. Here lies a child of glory, a bringer of songs through the storm, the one before whom enemies shake and bare their teeth. For her the Golden Gates lie open, until the day the stars go dark and the sea takes back the land."

So say the skalds of Thrud the Wolf-Kissed, eternal warrior of the North.

What is left to tell of Thrud and Helga that the inns haven't already sung a hundred times over? Everyone knows the two of them are cut from different cloth. Thrud's temper is famous on its own: the rashness, the taste for wine, the hunger for battle that never seems to run dry. The taverns of the Northland have made a small industry out of retelling her exploits. Her weapons of choice, twin axes she can throw as fast as she can draw them, are almost as well known as she is. So is the white coat she wears, cut from the pelt of a direwolf that some say fought and died at her side, and that others swear was no ordinary wolf at all but a lost heir of Fenrir himself, still watching over her from wherever wolves go once the fighting starts. That is where her name comes from. Wolf-Kissed, because death and wolves alike have kissed her more times than anyone can count and let her walk away regardless.

Even a warrior like Thrud served under greater names once. Long before Ivar Ironfist's hair turned gray and his sun began to set, Thrud was nothing more than one soldier among many under his command. Those were good years for raiding: towns burned, ships loaded to the rails, coastlines that learned to dread the sight of Ivar's longship on the horizon. But plunder has a way of corroding the men who chase it, and ambition crept into blades that had once been raised for something purer. One misstep, and any chieftain, however great, can lose everything he built. A younger, hungrier generation rose up and pushed the old chiefs aside, and there is no sadder fate than the one waiting on the other side of that fall for a retired Viking lord. Better by far to die on the battlefield than live long enough to become something men laugh at behind your back. Denied a warrior's death, the old ones often end up wandering, shaking a fist at a world that has stopped listening to them.

It was Thrud who eventually found Ivar in his wandering years. "I'll give you the honorable death you were owed," she told him, low and even. "Rise, Ironfist. Fight me. Give me your finest duel." They say the old man's dry eyes were nearly wet at the offer, that he understood at last he might still see the halls of Valhalla after all, denied to him for so long by the simple bad luck of not dying with a sword in his hand. The blade that finally freed him from the earth ran red, and by every account the heart of the man it killed was glad.

There is another story, the one Jaeger tells best, about the shore of the Western Sea, where rows of iron shields once stood against a wave of attackers that nearly broke them. Spears splintered. Arms and legs grew heavy with wounds. The line began to waver, men glancing at each other with the particular fear of soldiers who know they're about to lose, and then Thrud appeared. She said nothing. She only lifted an axe in each hand and ran straight into the enemy line. One woman, alone, against a wall of shields. Picture it. The laughter on the other side turned to screams fast enough. Blue light flickered somewhere in the chaos, and out of it came a great white wolf, Fenrir himself, some say, answering a call only Thrud had made. The enemy line broke and ran, and everyone there understood, without needing to be told twice, exactly who had saved them that day.

That's how Jaeger tells it, anyway, to whoever gathers to listen, and every time the crowd glances toward Helga to see if her face gives away whether it's true. She was there, after all. But she only smiles from the doorway and keeps whatever she knows to herself.

Vivian

Best offensive support in the game: a +25% army-wide damage buff nobody else matches.

Generation

5

Source

Hall of Heroes, Swordland shop

Full background story

The only child of the fabulously wealthy Ostervilts, young Vivian wanted for nothing, no jewelry was too expensive, no toy out of reach, except for her absent parents' love. This flaw in her childhood, her overwhelming sense of loneliness, was compensated by endless attendants and gifts.

Young Vivian quickly rebelled against her parents' strict schooling regimen. Instead of studying numbers, she wanted to study the chaos of life, out in the streets, marketplaces, and alleys. That was where the stories roamed. That was where the adventurers traveled, eager to share tales of the wonderful world outside the walls of Vivian's gated estate.

The name of the Ostervilt family carried great weight on the tiled streets of Craftstone. It was probably more than a rumor the family collectively controlled more than half the town's assets, public and private. The word "fortune" was synonymous with the Ostervilt family; literally by their riches and figuratively in the common saying, "If only I was born an Ostervilt!" Skilled financiers to the tenth generation, money from all quarters of the world seemed to flow inexorably into their hands. With their Midas touch, Ostervilt financiers could transform the common works of any painter or sculptor into hot-selling products. Somehow they had a knack even for finding treasures buried at the repossessed properties of their various creditors. Money talks. And in Stonecraft, they say money flows down to the politicians and up to the Ostervilts.

Vivian's childhood was defined by a friendship with a tall and lanky young man with distinctive golden hair and a flair for adventure, which is how they met, searching for stories at the bazaar. Vivian was drawn to his confidence. He would go on endlessly boasting about how one day he would accomplish something great for his family. Vivian would reply sometimes that she had set her sights far more modestly on "only becoming a famous bounty hunter." Since adventure could not truly be found outside their gated upbringing, the adventurous pair had to find it in the underground black market, the bustling tavern, the scary encounter by unguarded cemeteries at night there in Stonecraft. It was good practice for a future life of heroism, aiding the weak, opposing the unjust in public. And through it all their friendship deepened.

This important chapter in Vivian's life came to a jarring close when Vivian's young friend mysteriously disappeared. She searched high and low for any sign of him. Before returning home that day she noted the dark outline of smoke rising up over the town. One of the major estates was on fire! A crowd had gathered and when Vivian asked what was wrong, they said the house belonged to one of the members of the City Council. Yet no one went to help. Disgusted, Vivian turned to leave. She didn't realize the previous day's outing with her friend was the last she would see of him for many years.

Soon enough Vivian came of age as her parents feared. She threw off their shackles and embarked on her own brave adventure out into the wilderness of life. She was no longer a young and defenseless woman. She knew how to handle herself. Her only regret leaving Stonecraft was that the most important person for most of her adult life had vanished and she still had no idea why.

Fate brought Vivian and her childhood friend together once more in the streets of Stonecraft during one of her infrequent visits to the family estate. She caught sight of the dashing young wanderer from across the street and, overjoyed, flashed him a bright smile. He gazed at her solemnly and said nothing. "I can't believe you never sent word! Couldn't you have told me what happened? You know how long I've waited for this moment? How much I missed you when you disappeared out of my life?" "I was all dolled up, ready to teach those gangsters a lesson! What happened to our plan? You never showed up!" Years later Vivian remembered their unfulfilled escapade as clear as day. "You're not going to say anything? Hello?" "You remember my surname is Lafayette, don't you? You don't remember... please tell me you have some idea of what happened to my family after my father was exiled from the Council." Vivian had never connected those particular dots before. Had her childhood friend actually told her he was a Lafayette? The only time she heard that surname was in hushed tones around the dinner table. "The Lafayettes are troublemakers! The ones stopping the Council from doing what must be done!" "I'm sorry for what my father did... if he did anything to you... But that's not me." "You know I don't like you talking to beautiful ladies." The sound of laughter came from nearby. Who was she? "I know you had nothing to do with what happened. But it was a big deal to me, and... I think it's best if we don't speak again. Goodbye." Vivian still wonders if that will be their final goodbye.

Sophia

Her whole kit sows Confusion debuffs. Fun and disruptive, but a sidegrade unless you lean into it.

Generation

6

Source

Hero Roulette

Full background story

Nightfall could not hide the magnificence of the approaching envoy. All eyes were transfixed by the four great horses pulling a mighty black carriage. Whatever dark pigments used to achieve the effect must be rather remarkable. It did not resemble black paint so much as a portal into absolute darkness, by which no light was reflected on its dark exterior.

Once arrived, the occupant of the stately carriage stepped down with a deep sigh. The villagers continued to stare, a noble lady, no doubt, whose beautiful dark dress and bodice contrasted brilliantly with her albino-white skin. The magnificent red hair above her shoulders and hat to which a scarlet rose was pinned only added to the dramatic entrance. She regarded the crowd with a certain coolness that was not totally without warmth. And when she spoke, the crowd hung on to her every husky word.

The few guardsmen that accompanied the carriage was hardly an escort of honor. Besides, how had they managed to carve a path through the rebellious areas full of strife and civil war without a brigade of soldiers? Such questions could be asked later. What mattered now was this ambassadorial envoy had arrived and the great welcome feast would shortly begin.

"You should know that marrying me has a cost you may not want to pay in the fullness of time..." The Count loved speaking in such riddles. His wise manner and deep voice seemed out-of-place for his youthful appearance. "I will go to the ends of the earth with you." Sophia gazed lovingly at the handsome man across from her, not a shred of doubt in her voice. She had cast aside all rumors when pursuing him. His pallid-white face that never seemed to see the sun was no obstacle either. Instead, she loved his rosy red lips, the cultured hands that excited her so much when they tapped her on the shoulder, and his dark eyes full of mystery. In the end Sophia obtained the prize that she wanted: marriage to the Count and a new life as his Countess. She didn't want to spoil the occasion of their magnificent wedding by questioning why the ceremony and banquet had to be conducted at night, nor the strangeness of the enormous crowd of new faces, odd music, and reliance on candlelight. She was with her husband now. She was determined to overlook anything else. If Sophia had not been head over heels for the Count, she might have taken the time to reflect on the peculiar absence of mirrors in his villa or why she never saw any of his friends during the day. Nor did she seem to notice the eerie smiles, the grins from ear to ear that lit up guests' faces from out of the corner of her eyes. Truly Sophia's heart had chosen for her that night. And this decision could never be changed.

The village's troubles began only a few hours after Countess Sophia's arrival. The town had taken in an enormous number of vagabonds, refugees, and miscreants in recent years, but had placed them all outside the city limits and the protection of the law. This camp meant to give hope to the hopeless was ruled by an iron-fisted, cruel man. His abuses seemed to imply he had forgotten that at one point he had been a refugee himself. He used the camp's disorder to work with rebels from outside for his and their enrichment. The only thing the sentry saw in the fading light was a strange rose on the wind. But he had no time to marvel. As soon as the rose touched his skin, he stumbled. And then, shaking and shivering, stood up again and walked with dogged determination into the center of camp. Soon after the entire camp was wakened by the screams of horses and people fleeing from fire within. But only the veterans recognized the true nature of their emergency, the horrible crackling of fire intermingled with swords slicing flesh. The fire raged long and hard that night. Barely any of the camp remained next morning. Shortly before sunrise, the lady in black who had so enchanted the crowds walked out. No one saw her. She still had in her eyes the same cruelty, yet somehow her makeup was also smudged by red tears streaming down her cheeks. She was holding the rose, the source of so much trouble. The red-blood of the rose was a fine match for what it had wrought that night. It glowed eerily.

Immortality, it's said, is the cruelest sentence ever passed on a living thing. Endless years look, at first glance, like endless freedom: time enough to wait, to hope, to chase adventure, to love without holding back. But who is left standing beside you once time has finished taking apart everything you spent those years building. Sooner or later you learn to see your own mortal longing for what it really is, a blade aimed at the one soft place in you, waiting for the moment you're least prepared for it. Every soul starts that road from a different place, but the destination never changes. You watch, one by one, everyone you ever loved get taken by time. And then, at the end, it comes for you too, for the very heart in you that loved and burned and never once stopped overflowing with feeling. So begins the novel's famous opening passage on immortality, from "Four Hundred Years of Solitude." Certain critics of the day dismissed the whole book as "so much trash," yet even they couldn't quite explain why its unflinching account of what eternal life actually costs stayed with so many of its readers. As for what inspired it, the rumor that persists is a single chance encounter, one evening, between the author, a governor, and a mysterious woman known only as Countess Sophia.

Triton

Heavy infantry damage in Conquest, though his skill text promises more than it delivers. Premium acquisition, modest gain.

Generation

6

Source

Hall of Heroes, Swordland shop

Full background story

A soldier of fortune found him. Whatever treasure the man had hoped to pull out of the Temple of Tides, the secret chamber he broke into after weeks of prying at old stone was not it. The room had sat sealed for longer than anyone could guess. Cold air rolled out of the opening, far colder than the season had any right to produce, carrying with it a reek of salt water so strong the soldier clapped a hand over his nose. Somewhere inside, machinery ground against itself, loud enough to rattle his teeth. He stepped in anyway.

At the center of the chamber stood a vast metal cabinet, egg-shaped, ringed by circle after circle of fine metal channels running out toward the walls. A pale, almost see-through blue liquid welled up out of the cabinet and crept along the channels until they brimmed full. That was when the room lit up: gold, red, white, color flaring in a space that had no business holding any of it. And that was when the cabinet cracked open and a man spilled out of it, half falling, half crawling onto the stone floor.

He looked no younger than forty, going by the white threading through what hair he had left, but he was breathing. The soldier could see it, a slow rise and fall of the chest, barely there, proof enough that whatever this was, it hadn't killed him.

The stranger had a great deal of catching up to do. In the weeks after he woke, he peppered everyone around him with questions that only made them more uneasy: why did they plow their fields with animals instead of machines, why did whole families sleep above a ground floor kept for livestock. "You truly have nothing to light a room after dark except torches?" he asked one baffled farmer, and got no answer that satisfied him. His name, he told them eventually, was Triton.

Triton has since learned a great deal more about the world he woke into, and he understands its people and its tools far better than he did that first week. It isn't really a compliment to say so. In the era he remembers, the one history here still calls the Age of Kings, even the poorest household had tidestone lamps to light its rooms, and ships that needed no oar or sail carried people between the great ports as a matter of course. His own age had its share of failures. Feeding people, clothing them, keeping a roof over their heads, none of that was among them.

What happened in the centuries between is something Triton still can't fully account for. The world he lives in now is gentler than most he's heard described since waking, he'll grant it that much, but the cost of that gentleness has been steep: everywhere he looks for traces of the old knowledge, he finds superstition instead, or history rewritten past recognizing. Worse, he's come to suspect the rewriting is deliberate, the work of rulers who profit from a people that no longer remembers what it used to have.

He still remembers the sound shrapnel makes passing close enough to take an ear off, the way blood and torn earth threw themselves into the air around him. But for a few inches, he'd thought at the time, and then put the thought away, because there was no room for it. The Loyalists were making their last stand to buy Tide King Atlas the time he needed, and dead men or not, they meant to die well.

Triton's one job was to keep the rebels off the Temple of Tides long enough for the King to reach stasis, long enough to keep some ember of the kingdom's return alive for later. Then the whole temple shuddered and the lights failed, and a wave of cheering rolled up from the rebel lines outside. Oh no, Triton thought. The energy cores. That was his responsibility.

He gave his men the order to hold the line and went for the inner chamber himself. What he found there stopped him cold: the stasis capsule standing open, and empty. Before he could make sense of it, something shoved him hard from behind, straight into the capsule, and the door sealed behind him with a sound of finality he felt in his chest.

Liquid began pouring down around him almost at once, and with it came a cold certainty: he was the one going to sleep now, not the King. He beat his fists against the inside of the door, uselessly, loyal even then, unable to understand why he'd been chosen to survive when so many better men hadn't. Through the glass, Tide King Atlas looked back at him and smiled, a smile with equal parts sorrow and tenderness in it. It was the last thing Triton saw before the dark took him.

Later, Triton pieced the rest together from the King's own words, left behind for him to find. "Dear Triton. Forgive me for taking the liberty of preserving your life, my loyal servant. I am too sentimental to go down with my empire, and I ask your pardon for that indulgence. If someone must tell later generations what became of us, let it be you. Our civilization may end with me, but it may also begin again with you. I always counted you a brother and my greatest minister, and I could do no less for you than this.

I know it will be hard for you to understand why the strength of the Tides went to preserving you rather than crushing heresy. It is because dishonesty was allowed to take root under my rule, and what I planted when I broke faith with our allies has now been harvested. The Tides never betrayed me. If blame belongs anywhere, it belongs to our nobles: in betraying me, they betrayed our people too. Don't forget how good and kind we all once were, Triton. This war is only the price of the innocent blood already on our hands.

I will call on the power of the great Tide myself to end this and to keep you safe. You will wake into a world I cannot picture, one of ignorance or one of knowledge, I have no way of knowing which. I know only this: keep faith with your promises and your oaths, and you will be able to make the world remember us, and remember the Tides." Tide King Atlas.

Yang

The Gen 6 hero to build. 7,200 base attack, the highest at launch, plus the first direct rally Lethality buff of the generation.

Generation

6

Source

Standard events (F2P)

Full background story

In the frozen wilds, "Yang" is more than just a name. It's a legend carried on every icy wind. They call her the "Winter Huntress," and her reputation echoes across the endless snowfields. People trust Yang, not only because she can track any beast or find her way through the worst storms, but because she never loses her head, no matter how dire things get. In a crisis, she's the first to take charge. Whether it's finding shelter, reading the winds, or building a fire, she's always steady and never rattled. Even when danger closes in, she makes tough calls without hesitation, calmly organizing everyone's escape. The harsh polar climate hasn't worn her down. If anything, it's made her even more clearheaded and unshakable under pressure. But don't mistake her for some grim, silent type. Yang has a mischievous streak. She'll crack a joke around the campfire or build a goofy snowman with her board just to get a laugh. Her chilly sense of humor is legendary, and her jokes help keep everyone's spirits up, even in the coldest nights. She knows better than anyone that out here, losing your nerve is far more dangerous than any blizzard.

A century ago, the polar regions were just a distant frontier. A cold land, yes, but they were home to thriving communities. The royal oracles once urged the kingdom's fleets to sail north, and for many years, the two lands built strong ties by sharing supplies and aid. Those were prosperous times, with endless convoys heading into the snow. But one fateful day, a fleet found its way blocked by shifting ice. Only then did people realize a terrible storm had struck the polar lands. Seas froze, the cold deepened, and entire villages vanished beneath the snow. Thankfully, those earlier alliances helped some survive. But soon, the polar seas were sealed in ice, cutting off all travel and trade. Years later, when the ice finally began to thaw, a group journeyed south, only to find the kingdom gone. Rebels had torn it apart. Royal bloodlines were scattered and forced to live in hiding. The crown was lost, but the burden of old grudges remained. That night, the elders of the polar lands gathered in secret. After a long, heavy silence, they made their choice: someone must go and seek out the last of the royal line.

Oh, how the bards love to sing of her, lutes in hand, in the dusky twilight: "Winter mountain sent, boots of snow, not knowing which way to go, told by stars where to follow, oh, the road is long, but still she must sing on and on. North wind blowing, bonfire sowing, lost footprints flowing, 'till she knew where she was going. Oh, to raise a glass to hope, to laugh as long as winter's snow, 'til she knows which way to go, joined to a fantasy that never overflows, goes or slows..."

The wind still howled outside, the fire crackled in the darkness. Yang packed her things for the journey, fumbling more than usual with the straps, clearly lost in thought. "The place you're headed won't be any kinder than these frozen plains," the elder said softly. "Right now, you don't seem like the legendary Huntress. What's troubling you?" Yang looked up. "...I worry that if things are too different out there, I'll end up changing too much..." The elder pulled his coat tighter, a gentle smile on his face. "There's nothing wrong with change. Life's a voyage, and every sea you cross leaves its mark on your ship. To keep going, you patch it up and sail on." He looked Yang in the eye. "When friends drift away, you learn to take the first step. When family tests your patience, you learn to stand on your own. When no one seems to notice your efforts, you start to doubt yourself." Yang sat in silence. The elder poked the fire, making the flames leap higher. "But what makes a ship itself isn't the wood it's built from, but that it always knows where it's headed." Outside, the storm still raged. Yang fastened her board to her pack, her eyes full of resolve. The path to legend was waiting, and she was ready to face it.

Ava

The cleanest rally upgrade of the generation, with bonus Bear Hunt joiner value from her first-skill Defense Down.

Generation

7

Source

Cavalry rally packs

Full background story

"Come closer. Relax your face. There, just like that." The girl held her brush loose in one hand, watching a young couple settle in front of her, and in a handful of strokes she had them down on canvas, the light falling just right, the color note-perfect. Skill like that shouldn't have belonged to someone so young, so unknown. Nobody in town could say her name or where she'd come from. She turned up in a city out of nowhere and disappeared from it just as fast. The one thing anyone could say for certain about her: she never took a booking after dark. "An evening sitting? Sorry, I'm already booked for tonight."

By morning the words would be back on the wall of some governor's Town Center: Art comes first. Justice follows. Ava. Above the signature, an oversized painting of two crossed guns, one loaded blue, one loaded green, caught the eye of everyone who passed. The paint inside seemed to shift in the sunlight, like it was already deciding where to aim. Every passerby stopped to admire the piece. People marveled at the artist's boldness and unmatched talent. Only those who knew better understood, the governor of this town was about to be in trouble.

Night fell. The governor stood ready with his soldiers. Soon, a paint bomb exploded in the crowd. Beautiful yet corrosive liquid splashed across their armor. White smoke rose as chaos broke out. "Catch that damn Ava!" he shouted, to no one in particular, and got his answer a second later when a shape dropped in front of him: two guns, two colors, and under the paint-flecked hood, a girl with her hair pulled up into two round buns, the graffiti hero every villain in the region had learned to fear. Then his whole field of vision turned the color of her guns.

He woke the next day in the busiest square in town, painted head to toe as a clown, ringed by fresh graffiti spelling out exactly how he'd been robbing the place blind for years. Nobody in the crowd had any sympathy left for him. They cursed him, they laughed at him, and they cheered for the graffiti hero nobody could catch. Somewhere in that crowd, watching, Ava allowed herself a satisfied smile. She had lost count of how many villains she'd left standing in a square exactly like this one, and there would always be another dark corner somewhere for her to paint.

Who gets the next one, she wonders. Could be you, dear governor.

Charles

The defensive anchor: sustain, damage reduction and enemy-Lethality cuts. The safest Gen 7 investment.

Generation

7

Source

Garrison packs

Full background story

The whole kingdom lit its lamps the night Charles was born. His father, an aging king who had waited a long time for an heir, doted on the boy from the start and named him successor before he was out of the nursery. Barring disaster, Charles would grow up to be the youngest king the realm had ever crowned. To make sure he was ready for it, tutor after tutor was brought in to shape him, morning to night, and Charles gave them nothing to complain about. He sailed through nearly every lesson they set him, and the expectations piled higher with every one he passed.

What none of those tutors knew was that Charles hated all of it. He had no real interest in being king. Given the choice between another lecture on statecraft and an afternoon locked in his room tinkering, he chose the workshop every time, and lately his project there was a piloted mech, built piece by piece in secret. He used to imagine the day it was finished: he would climb inside, walk it straight out through the palace gates, and keep going until the kingdom was a speck behind him. He wasn't planning on coming back.

The mech was finished sooner than he had hoped, and so, as it happened, was his excuse to use it. A neighboring kingdom the realm had feuded with for years chose that same season to invade. In the chaos that followed, nobody would notice one more figure slipping away, and Charles took his mech down an escape route he had rehearsed a hundred times in his head. Along the way he passed the tutor he used to resent most, standing between a knot of enemy soldiers and a group of fleeing civilians. He passed the old butler, a man who used to stop for breath every few steps, now swinging a weapon he had clearly never trained with. He passed the shopkeeper who always slipped him sweets as a boy, curled on the ground and shaking.

"None of this is mine to fix," Charles told himself, sealed inside the mech's cockpit. "I finally have my freedom." Then the mech's fist connected and sent enemy soldiers flying, and a very large, very metal figure landed in front of the invading army's front line before Charles had quite decided to put it there.

"What in the world is that thing?" Panic rippled through the enemy ranks, while back in the capital, word spread the other way. "It's the prince! He's come to save us!" With Charles leading the charge, the defenders' morale caught fire, and with the mech tearing a path through the enemy line, the battle turned fast. In under half a day, the invaders were in full retreat.

"Long live the prince!" followed him everywhere after that. The capital he had always found so dull looked different to him now, brighter somehow, and the palace that used to feel like a cage felt, for the first time, like somewhere he actually wanted to be. Maybe it isn't so bad here after all, he thought. I'll stay a while longer. That night he fell asleep with a faint smile on his face.

Wee & Woo

Artillery twins: long-range area damage plus a joiner buff that keeps them useful outside their own march.

Generation

7

Source

Archer packs

Full background story

Can't tell Wee from Woo? Easy fix: whoever's standing next to Wee is Woo, and whoever's standing next to Woo is Wee. Still stuck? Doesn't really matter, honestly, because the two of them are rarely apart long enough for it to come up. You basically never see one without the other. People stopped bothering to treat them as two separate people a long time ago. Twins this close eat together, sleep in the same room, get into the same trouble, and go to war side by side without a second thought.

On a battlefield, that closeness turns into something the enemy dreads. Nobody can get a clean lock on either of them. All the other side ever sees is one nimble cannon sweeping the field, throwing shells from every angle at once, and by the time the smoke clears, both the enemy's formation and the enemy's nerve are in pieces.

Ask Wee about his brother and he won't stop for a while. "Woo's the smartest person alive, easily. Full marks on everything, ever since we were kids. He built this cannon we're running around with, designed it, improved it, all of it himself. Me, I just carry stuff and help out where I can. Woo's just a genius, that's all there is to it." He says all this with Woo standing right next to him, turning steadily redder.

Woo, who barely talks otherwise, turns out to be exactly the same about Wee. "Wee's incredible. Strong, fast, none of that comes easy to me. Brave too, always first to step up when things get dangerous, not like me. And kind, if anyone needs help he's already there before I've even noticed. Honestly, Wee's the best person there is." Whenever he says it, Wee looks over at him with something gentle in his eyes.

"I don't want to be around you anymore!" Nobody remembers which of them said it first, but it happened: Wee and Woo split up, once, for real. Each of them was telling himself the same private lie: he'll have an easier life without me dragging him down.

It didn't go well. Without Wee around, Woo couldn't move half his own equipment, went quiet and useless trying to haggle for supplies, and his experiments stalled out completely. Without Woo, Wee made a mess of fixing his own armor, counted his money on his fingers because he'd never learned to do it any other way, and let his living space fall apart around him.

"I can't live without Wee." "I can't live without Woo." Neither of them remembers deciding it out loud. They just ended up back together, inseparable again, as if the whole thing had never happened.

Diana

The wilderness rangers' youngest rider, raised from infancy in the saddle and about to face her first Netherfiend alone.

Source

Hero Recruitment, shards

Full background story

Diana is the youngest rider in the wilderness rangers' cavalry, and word of her red hair, her looks, and the ice behind her eyes has traveled well beyond her own camp. Soldiers from every kingdom nearby have found reasons to want an introduction. None of it buys her anything within the corps itself. Reputation or not, every ranger faces the same trial before they are trusted to ride alone, and hers is still ahead of her: somewhere in the dark desert waits a Netherfiend, a thing that has worn down far more seasoned fighters than her, patient enough to wait for a traveler at their weakest moment. Lately it is the one thought that will not leave Diana alone.

She came to the rangers as an infant, found on a routine patrol through country too bleak for most things to survive in, let alone a swaddled baby. She did not cry, not once, not in a place that should have made her scream. She only looked up at the commander with an expression too calm for someone that small, and watched him decide what she was worth. He did not hesitate long. He lifted her onto his own saddle and rode on, and from that moment she belonged to the rangers, for whatever death or glory their road would bring her.

Whatever guided that commander's hand, it seemed to be watching over the whole company that day. He had ridden out expecting losses, a hard fight, blood on both sides. Instead his men came home without so much as a scratch between them, and no one could quite explain why. A miracle, some said. Others simply decided the foundling had brought them luck, and from then on it became something of a habit for rangers heading out on patrol to stop by the child and say a few words to her first, just in case.

She was still barely more than a girl when she rode her first mission alone: two days and two nights waiting out near a watering hole thick with swamp flies, tracking a bandit leader who was bound to need water eventually. When he finally stopped to drink, she killed him before he had time to notice she was there. The soft-faced child had grown into something nobody who only saw her face expected: patient and immovable once she had chosen her ground. She has become one of the pillars of the unit, and there is nothing she holds closer than her adoptive father and the code the rangers live by.

"Every member of the rangers is free. Every member is part of a greater whole. Only three principles govern our every action. Follow these, and you may call yourself a ranger without shame or challenge. Hold them fast to the last, for if you deny them, we shall deny you. First: never oppress the weak. Second: respect freedom of conscience, and never press another into your service. Third: there shall be no betrayal in our ranks, even if it costs you your own life."

She carries those words closer than anything else she owns. Ask Diana about most things and she will give you almost nothing back. Ask her about the rangers, though, and something in her face opens up, and the words come easier than you would ever expect from someone so guarded.

Edwin

A quarry foreman haunted by a mining disaster, still carrying the guilt of who he couldn't save.

Source

Hero Recruitment, shards

Full background story

Edwin is a strange one, too sharp to be dismissed as the village fool, too odd to be comfortable company for most people. At work he says almost nothing. It is only once the drink is in him that the quiet cracks open, and then he will hold a pub captive for hours with theories and stories nobody else would dare say out loud sober. People forgive him the strangeness easily enough, mostly because the stone he hauls up from the quarry keeps arriving on schedule regardless of what he believes about the world.

He does not have many friends left, not since what everyone still calls, carefully, "the accident." Ask the people who knew him before and they will tell you about a different man entirely: handsome, easy with women, built like someone who worked with his hands and enjoyed it. The mining disaster took that man somewhere Edwin has not been able to follow him back to. He was the foreman of the crew that got trapped underground that day, and some part of him has never stopped carrying that.

The memory comes back to him whole, voices and all. The miners below, screaming for anyone to hear them: "Help us! Help!" His own voice, cracking: "Just hold on. I'm coming!" Someone grabbing his arm before he could reach the shaft: "Are you crazy? If you go down there, you're dead too!" "But I can't leave them!" And the answer that has never once let him alone since: "The storm's already shifted the foundations. It's impossible. Just bad luck, Edwin." Still they called for him, fainter each time, until there was nothing left but "Help us. Don't leave us down here to die, Edwin. Please." And afterward, once it was over, the same calm voice telling him how the story would be told: "Relax. I'll handle the report to the governor. Just give me a reason it happened, and I'll see to it he knows none of this was your fault."

The morning it happened, the sky had already gone the color of old iron, and the men on their way to the pit moved through air so heavy it felt like wading. Edwin himself was still in bed, paying for a hard night of drinking, when he half woke in a dormitory full of the night shift filing in around him. Someone nearby muttered that they might be in for a real storm today. That was when the dream took him, the way it always does. "Don't go!" He came up out of sleep shouting, chest heaving, his nightshirt stuck to him with sweat. The dream never fully lets go of him, not even now. But morning had come regardless, and Edwin got up to meet whatever it had brought.

Howard

A disgraced Imperial Cavalry guardsman turned village sentry after a prison break gone right.

Source

Hero Recruitment, shards

Full background story

Howard served in the Sixth Imperial Cavalry, a distinguished guardsman who had long since made peace with the idea that his life belonged to His Holy Emperor whenever it was needed. His finest hour came during the defense of the Imperial Palace against General Cesares, when he was handed the southern wall, a stretch of the perimeter everyone privately agreed could not be held. His men held it anyway. That was the problem. Every other unit on the wall that day broke, and the Imperial bureaucracy has never forgiven anyone for making it look bad by comparison. Howard found himself stripped of his rank before he understood what he had done wrong, and when that somehow still wasn't punishment enough, an imperial warrant for his arrest followed soon after.

Imperial prisons are exactly as filthy and miserable as their reputation promises. Howard's one piece of good fortune was landing near a chef named Gordon, who took it upon himself to look after him as well as a man in that place could. Everything that happened afterward could only have worked with someone on the inside. "Don't eat tonight's cookies," Gordon told him one evening, breezing past the cell like the words meant nothing at all. The rest of the block, delighted at the extra rations, ate every cookie they were handed. Then came the thumping, a string of heavy impacts somewhere below the floor, and Howard's last clear thought before the dark took him was that he really should have taken Gordon's advice and skipped his own cookie too.

He woke up rolled tight inside a coarse rug, with Gordon crouched beside him grumbling about "all of that darned sleep-talking" Howard had apparently done along the way. Whatever Howard mumbled in his sleep, it was enough to make Gordon repeat lines like "You don't like my pizza?!" and "It's not stealing if it's in the recipe, is it?!" back at him with open disgust. Gordon kept walking, and somewhere in the middle of it Howard noticed the air had changed. It smelled like freedom.

That was how Howard became chief sentry of the village that had, however roundabout the method, saved his life. His years in the army made him the obvious choice for the post, but it became far more than a job he was qualified for, it became one he cared about with everything he had. The first real test came fast, a surprise Rebel attack that caught the village short on decent weapons and forced Howard's men back into the old town fort, a structure that was itself barely standing. It was Chenko, the village's self-styled "great inventor," who tore a door clean off its hinges and started hammering it into a shield on the spot. From that day on, Howard was known through the village as the guardian who fought behind a plank for a shield, and its most loyal defender.