5th Age
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The Return
For thousands of years, the Wardens were little more than legend.
Civilizations rose without them. Worlds once isolated by the Great Vanishing were reunited through the ingenuity of mortal hands. Empires spanned the stars once more, not by the will of immortal rulers, but through the union of magic and technology. Though the old banners endured, their ancient rivalries had become little more than politics in a far greater age.
Then the Wardens returned.
Not one.
Not a handful.
All of them.
By the Fifth Age, the AVIS (Advanced Vacuum Infantry Suit)** represented the pinnacle of conventional infantry armor. Though other military and security armor systems remained in service, the AVIS was widely regarded as the finest protection and combat platform available to ordinary soldiers. Its compact Rift-Cell power systems supplied the enormous energy demands of its powered exoskeleton, life support, maneuvering systems, sensors, and defensive equipment, giving its wearer capabilities far beyond those of conventional infantry.
When the Wardens returned, security forces equipped with AVIS armor were among the first to confront them. For the first time, advanced mortal technology allowed soldiers to approach something resembling parity with the ancient beings. The AVIS gave them the strength, mobility, protection, and firepower to survive encounters that would have been impossible for earlier forces.
But it was not enough.
Even the most advanced armor of the Fifth Age could not truly bridge the gulf between mortal engineering and Warden power. AVIS-equipped forces could resist, coordinate, and even wound their opponents, but the Wardens still tore through security lines with terrifying ease. The armor had brought humanity closer to the Wardens than it had ever been—but not close enough.
Across countless worlds, pale giants descended from the skies, their arrival heralded by impossible displays of magic unseen since the Age of Wardens. Cities fell in hours. Fleets vanished. Ancient capitals that had stood for millennia were reduced to ruin. They did not come to rule. They came to erase.
The great powers of the galaxy proved almost helpless. Entire armies that once believed themselves invincible crumbled before beings whose strength had once shaped worlds themselves. Every victory came at terrible cost, and every fallen Warden seemed to be replaced by another.
Yet amid the devastation, impossible stories began to spread.
An heir who stood up to one and refused to yield.
A village that drove one back.
A company of soldiers who slew one together.
The tales were dismissed at first as desperate rumors. Then the reports multiplied.
The impossible was happening.
For the first time since the First Kingdom, the Wardens were bleeding.
No one understood why.
The Keepers claimed they did.
Their Oracles proclaimed that the King had returned, just as He had before the Vanishing. They spoke of the loyal Wardens walking once more among the stars, of ancient covenants awakening, and of dominion quietly returning to the heirs.
Most dismissed them as they always had.
The Keepers had been predicting the King's return for ages.
Why should anyone believe them now?
But as more Wardens fell to ordinary people, even the skeptics found themselves asking the question no one had dared ask for thousands of years.
What if the Keepers had been right all along?
