"The first Curse, the Curse of Bones, was created by a mage who was searching for immortality. He was, they say, the greatest mage who ever lived, with access to more mana than any mage before him, and with knowledge that is still unrivaled to this day. One of the elvenfolk, he was. All of the great mages were elven, since none could match their lifespan and experience. But for this elven mage, whose name is lost to history, even the thousand years of life elves are known to live was not enough, and he has spent hundreds of years researching ways to prolong his life.

Life, however, follows its own rules. And while the mage could slow down his aging, he could not completely stop it, let alone reverse it and return to his youth. In his hubris, he turned to more extreme methods, using great rituals to strip away the life from plants and animals and use it to bolster his own. Finally, he found a methods that could give him back his youth, but the price was inconceivable. A herd of cattle, drained to death, would erase a year of his age. And afterwards, he found that he aged faster than before, as fast as a dwarf, and not an elf. And none of the methods he used before to slow the process down would work. In his desperation, the mage left his home, and went deep into unclaimed, unsettled land. Into the Great Forest to the west. More and more life was drained by his rituals, but still he aged faster and faster, now aging almost as fast as a human.

Mad as he was, obsessed with living as he was, always before there were always limits that the mage would not cross. None of his experiments or rituals were ever aimed at any of the sentient races. But now, having turned the Great Forest into a blasted wasteland, all to no avail, madness gripped him, and for the first time he tried to drain the life from a fellow elf, one of the two servants who went with him into the Forest. A torrent of life force, greater than any he has ever felt, surged into him, instantly returning him from being a nearly dead elder to being a youth at the height of his strength. Moreover, the drained servant wasn't dead. There was nothing left of him but his bones, but those bones still moved, and obeyed the mages commands. For a while, the servant's mind still dwelt within his bones, and could converse with the mage. He could even still use what little magic power he had before. But by the end of three days, there was nothing left of the servant, and only mindless obedience was left.

The mage still aged as fast as a human, but he now had a way to quickly restore himself to his youth. He quickly found that he could store the life force from his other servant inside specially prepared jewelry, and wasted no time before draining her, and turning her into another walking skeleton. With the mere sixty years of a human lifespan ahead of him, and sixty more years stored in his new gauntlet, the mage returned from his self-imposed exile, and set out to drain enough life so he could live forever.

Even before his madness, he was the most powerful mage alive, and there was none who could stand in his way. Whole villages were left barren behind him, the skeletons of the dead villagers following the mage's footsteps and serving as his army. There were, however, survivors. Woodsman who happened to be in the forest when the mage attacked. Shepherds who tended their herds away from the village. One of them, a fairly strong human mage, managed to see the ritual used by the great mage, and glean enough of it to be able to reconstruct it. He, too, started to drain life from the dwellers of isolated hamlets, in order to extend his own life. But this human mage, while powerful, was nowhere near as mighty as the great elven mage, and he has made the mistake of attacking a remote dwarven mining camp. The dwarves were caught unaware by his attack, and were all drained before they could mount a defense. However, one of the dwarves in the camp was an old, retired Valkyrie, who we now remember as Förstadrake. She was caught in the draining ritual, and reduced to being a walking skeleton, but her mind and magic were still intact.

You might not know this, coming from another world, but the Valkyrie are the elite of the elite amongst dwarvenkind. These dedicated dwarves spend decades training with the elite dwarven infantry, the Järnriddare, and after reaching the rank of captain of the Järnriddare, they spend decades more learning the craft of the Healers. Even the mightiest of human warriors and mages would fall before a dwrven Valkyrie. And while Förstadrake was now old and weak, being transformed into a skeleton removed from her a lot of the infirmities of her age. Förstadrake battled the human mage, and defeated him with ease. Then, having felt the effects of the ritual used to drain her life, she used her knowledge of healing magic to revese the spell and return to life. Morover, she was restored to the prime of her life, and was stronger, in both body and magic, than she ever was before. She was unable to restore the other dwarves in her camp, however. The spell she used could only be cast on ones own self.

Förstadrake went to the capital of the dwarven lands, to inform the leaders of the battle, and before long she, and an army of elite dwarven warriors, set out to battle to increasing amounts of mages who learned the draining rituals. It was not long before it was discovered that Förstadrake's reversal of the draining spell rendered her immune to it, and that the spell could be reversed using her counterspell, but only if the casting mage was dead, and only by extremely strong mages.

The elven mage, meanwhile, continued to experiment on captives he took, and discovered that he could take the life force a person, and trap it in a shadow. The shadow could then possess others, controlling them and slowly draining them of their life and sending it to the shadow's master. When the victim died, he would become a shadow himself.

Thus, the second curse, the Curse of Shadows, was born, and the mage gained access to more and more power.

Knowing that eventually he would have to face Förstadrake and her dwarven armies, who were now joined by brave warriors and mages from other races, the elven mage sent out his own army of shadows to harass them. Many of the brave warriors fell prey to the insidious shadows, until eventually one of the shadows managed to possess Förstadrake herself. Förstadrake, however, was not one to just lie down and die. Though her body was controlled by the shadow, she managed to wrest back control of her voice, and began to chant a spell that she has prepared to combat to shadows. Without the ability to move, casting the spell took twice as long as it normally would, with the shadow constantly trying to regain control of her voice, but after several hours of chanting, the shadow was destroyed.

Even more power surged into Förstadrake when she was freed from the shadow, and she used her new magic to banish the shadows from her army. In the aftermath of that fight, Förstadrake found that her skin was nearly impenetrable by anything not enhanced by magic, and her bones unbreakable.

A few other mages have managed to free themselves from shadows, but once again this was a feat that only a master mage could accomplish. Those mages gained some of the same abilities that Förstadrake gained, though other than her, none had managed to survive both the draining spell and shadow possession, and none had gained as much as she.

Their victory was far from complete, however. Many of their army were dead, either directly killed by shadows or slain by their possessed brothers and sisters in arms. Even worse was the fact that one of their strongest mages, a dryad who had managed to survive a draining spell, fell to the shadows. And the shadow that was born from her was different than all other shadows. Stronger and more intelligent, it managed to escape Förstadrake's cleansing spells, and returned to the elven mage's side.

While Förstadrake's army was battling the shadows, the elven mage was busy creating even more abominations. Monstrous skeletons, composed of the bones of multiple victims. Shadows infused with elemental magic who could cast spells of their own, and a brand new abomination. By draining a victim's life force almost to the point of death, and than fusing a shadow into the remains, a new creature was created. Starved of life force, these walking corpses the elven mage called "vampires" could feed on the lifeblood of living beings, and had the ability to vanish into the shadows that were a part of them. Even worse, their blood was contagious, and anyone contaminated by it would transform into another vampire.

Once again, the elven mage sent his new creations to harass Förstadrake, and once again her army was decimated. Förstadrake herself was infected by the vampires' blood in one of the battles, but her masterful command of healing magic came again to her rescue, and she managed to prevent herself from becoming one of the abominations. And once again, the experience left her stronger. She could move with speed and grace that were thought to be the province of elves and fay alone, and what wounds she could suffer through her armored skin would heal in minutes instead of days.

By that time, the elven mage had an army of skeletons, shadows and vampires, and has even joined forces with some of the mages who managed to copy his draining magic. Against them, Förstadrake had an army comrpised of every intelligent race in the world, from the smallest gnomes to the biggest giant-kin, and reinforced with mages who managed to survive the Curses of Bones, Shadow or Blood.

The stage to the biggest war the world has even seen was set."

Parched from the story, Melissa stopped talking, and gazed at Hilde, who hadn't stopped her dancing and her chanting for even a minute. Hilde's face shone with her sweat, and her voice was ragged, but she didn't falter. I blinked, and my vision changed again, and I could see the incredibly complex, incredibly strong spell she was casting, and I sensed that it neared completion. But I could also see that the blackness inside her was still spreading, and had nearly consumed her.

None of us spoke after Melissa's story. The combination of the tale she told, and of its newest chapter that was unfolding in front of us, left us entranced.