Having won a great victory, we promptly forgot it.

The deeds of the First Incursion faded into legend,
the foes into tall tale, and the powers which protected
us into superstition.

Certainly a Kurian or two still lurked in remote mountain ranges and deep jungle ruin. Their fierce creations, the Grogs, were hunted down and killed, remaining in our history in the experiences of Beowulf and Greek dramatics. The Lifeweavers retreated into the mists of the pagan pantheons, and perhaps served as inspiration for Merlin or Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu.

In the three-and-a-half thousand years allotted us, humankind rose farther than even the Lifeweavers would have guessed. But with our achievements came the hubris that accompanied forgetting our origins and the danger that still potentially lurked outside our world.

The first tremblings of the earthquake to come rippled through the late eighteenth century. The Kurians managed to open a small, but ultimately fatal, door on the island of Haiti during the bloody insurrection against the French and Spanish colonial powers. The Kurians had discovered a way to open gateways between worlds, at a great cost in vital auras. To open more doors, further harvests of death would be required.

The Twentieth Century would provide for them amply....