Ten thousand years after the great Calamity struck the world, the mortal survivors moved to islands of rock that drift on the winds above an endless sea of clouds known as the Stormshroud. Villages and whole kingdoms are constrained to the fragments of a past the people have long forgotten. The world is now named after its largest and most populous of these islands, Howling Isles, an inverted mountain filled with the moaning roar of the winds of the Stormshroud. The islands give life, shielding the people from the long-forgotten monsters that dwell below the clouds. Mortal kind has come a long way since all was nearly destroyed in the Calamity. Memory of those days has passed beyond myth, and monsters are relegated to
the stories told by parents to children. But the monsters have not forgotten the people of Howling Isles. Deep in the world below the Stormshroud, those of the void stir once more. Mortals have had ten millennia of peace in the wake of the great disaster. Soon they will have no more.