"All this was millennia ago. Villages grew to towns and then to great cities. The cities united; states and realms spread along the rich valleys of the Brown River, on the shores of the Round Sea and the Western Ocean, and in the jungles and deserts of Alketch. Civilization flowered and bore its fruits: wizardry, art, money, learning, war. Records of that time are so scarce as to be almost nonexistent. Only beguiling fragments of chronicles remain, mostly in the Library at Quo, a teasing sliver of a civilization of great depth and richness, of sublime beauty and wisdom and truly foul decadence, a society that parented first wizardry and then the Church and the great codes of civil law.

"I am virtually certain that some kind of tradition existed then regarding the Dark Ones, simply because the word for them was in the language. Sueg -dark- isueg -an archaic, personalized form of the same word. But they were only a vague rumor of shadow on the edges of the oldest legends-the misty memory of hidden fear. And if there was such a tradition, it did not connect them with the stairways themselves. So they remained, rooted in the abysses of time, an ancient mystery buried in the heart of civilization.

"Of the destruction of the ancient world we have no coherent account. We know that it happened within a matter of weeks. That what struck, struck worldwide, we also know-a simultaneous siege of horror. But the horror and the confusion were so overwhelming that virtually no record was preserved; and since defense against the Dark generally entailed uncontrolled use of fire as a weapon, we lost what little information we might have had about their coming. We know that they came-but we do not know why.

"Unable to fight, humankind fled and retreated to fortified Keeps, behind whose massive walls they led a windowless existence, creeping forth by day to till their fields and hiding when the sun went down. For three hundred years, absolute chaos and terror held sway on the earth, because there was no knowing where or when the Dark would come. Civilization crumbled, fading to a few glowing embers of the great beacon light that it had once been.