In the wake of the Precursors’ fall, numerous smaller empires arose from the ashes. Some were led by rare survivors of the cataclysm – the few remaining Precursors who still possessed a degree of sanity. Others were led by the Precursors’ experiments, including awakened servitors, enhanced creatures, and even essence-driven automatons. Each empire soon crumbled, however, over a handful of centuries, unable to properly maintain and wield the advanced technomagic of their predecessors, let alone hold onto any semblance of civilization in the disrupted and strange landscape of the New World.

Of these, the greatest and most successful was the Longtooth Legacy – a collective of essence-infused lesser and greater apes. Together, in close kinship with Gaia, they managed to build a thriving empire in the Skylair Mountains – a chain of floating peaks and verdant valleys. Even as their forms shifted and grew under the influence of time and essence, the apes of Longtooth endured, using their great size and strength to protect their lands from all intruders. Unfortunately, mere centuries before the first explorers of the Old World made landfall, tragedy struck. King Thanaku, a wise and well-respected ruler, lost his wife and child in an avalanche. This loss threw Thanaku into a spiral of grief and madness. Desperate to resurrect his family, he turned to ever-darker measures, eventually abandoning Gaia altogether for the seductive promises of Slern. His efforts escalated, growing ever more vicious and unholy, and his sanity continued to deteriorate to the point where his eventual overthrow and exile meant nothing to him.

Finally, after decades of sickening experimentation and increasingly gruesome rituals, Thanaku ignited a spark of necromagic beneath the Skylair Mountains with the hopes of fueling the return of not only his kin, but of all those who had been lost over the years. The resulting detonation was so catastrophic, it collapsed the entire mountain range, fused countless apes into undead monstrosities, and raised even more as mindless minions, all under the sway of Thanaku. Now, the Cursed King rules a rotting empire of fallen mountains, shadowy jungle, and zombified apes. To his twisted view, however, all has been set right, for in the calamity he unleashed, his beloved wife and child were indeed returned to him – though Thanaku is too far gone to realize they are but drooling husks of what they once were…