Millennium · The Human-Demon War¶

Historical Chronicle — The Two-Hundred-Year War and the Moon Oath Accord

More than eighteen hundred years ago, the continent was fragmented into many nations, allied or hostile with one another, with the borders of the human race endlessly redrawn through war and trade. In this age of constant conflict, a fear far deeper than mere territorial dispute was spreading among the common folk — more and more people were undergoing mutation. Some woke from their dreams to find that claws had grown from their fingertips; some were denounced by their neighbors in the streets, accused that their pupils were no longer the shape of a human's. People called such ones "Shape Shifters", but in the mouths of the vast majority, that word was no different from "monster".

The attitudes of the various nations toward Shape Shifters were not the same, yet they converged on the same end: rejection. Some nations executed Shape Shifters outright, raising wooden poles outside their city gates to hang them on display; some confined them to isolation zones, herding them like livestock; even the few nations that acknowledged their combat value did so only to send them to the front lines as expendable assets. No matter how the laws were worded, the stones and spittle in the alleys were the life Shape Shifters truly faced. Burned homes, exiled families, children silently disposed of — these things happened every day, yet were never written into any history book.

The Birth of the Moon-Born¶

Driven into a corner, the Shape Shifters scattered like seeds blown apart by the monsoon. Some wandered alone until death; some banded into small groups in the wilds to barely survive. Gradually, in word-of-mouth, a single direction emerged: the north. The northern frontier of the continent was a vast wasteland, an expanse of frozen soil and broken stone where even wild beasts would not linger long — and naturally no nation was willing to plant so much as a single outpost there. To those at the end of their rope, "no one watches" was the greatest mercy.

The first Shape Shifters to arrive were only a few dozen. They dug burrows in the tundra and lived by hunting. Then dozens became hundreds, and hundreds became thousands. They built shelters and distributed food for kin who had fully turned beast yet still retained their minds; and they had to execute, with their own hands, those who had lost themselves and begun to attack their own kind — each execution was like burying a possible future of their own. Some humans who sympathized with their plight also crossed the border, bringing tools, medicine, and the knowledge of farming. On this wasteland that the world had forgotten, a community belonging to no nation quietly took shape. They called themselves "Moon-Born", because the curse could never be separated from the moon — and they chose to face it head-on, not flee.

By the time the third Chieftain ruled the Moon-Born, more than a dozen towns had risen on the wasteland, with thousands of members fit for battle. Seen from the borders of the nations, that place was no longer barren, but a faction with city walls, hearth smoke, and an order and law of its own.

The Spark of War¶

The rise of the Moon-Born struck the continent like a thunderclap. In every court the matter was debated — some advocating clemency, some calling for extermination — and the arguments would not subside. But behind these debates, an unseen hand had long been moving pieces on the board: the Marauders, the most skilled at disguise among the marauding factions, had already pushed their tentacles into the cores of state power. Some played the role of noble advisors; some impersonated frontier couriers; beside thrones they wove carefully crafted lies. Reports indistinguishable from truth flooded the courts like snowfall: the Moon-Born tribes were secretly forging siege engines, Shape Shifters had assassinated a border patrol, an unprecedented bestial army was massing deep in the wasteland… Most of this information was fabricated by the Marauders, but fear made it readily believed. In the end, the most powerful kingdom on the continent was the first to break the stalemate, issuing a punitive decree under the name of "prevention", and the other nations — out of solidarity or out of dread of defying it — sent troops in response. A vast coalition cobbled together from many nations was assembled, banners filling the sky, marching toward the northern wastes.

This was the beginning of what later ages would call the "Human-Demon War". And on the morning the coalition set out, it is said that the Moon-Born sentries smelled iron and blood on the north wind — and they knew the age of pleading was over.

Two Hundred Years of Stalemate¶

When the coalition first reached the wasteland, the fighting was an utterly one-sided crush. A well-trained army facing the hastily organized defenses of the Shape Shifters — the outcome was beyond doubt. The outer small towns fell one after another within ten days, and the Moon-Born were forced to retreat into the depths. The coalition's commanders raised toasts at victory banquets, believing the campaign would be over within a year.

But they were wrong.

When the coalition's supply lines stretched three hundred li into the wastes; when soldiers began to lose their way on the unfamiliar tundra; when what came at them from all sides under the cover of night was not the enemy army but a blizzard — the Shape Shifters began to strike back. They did not engage the coalition head-on; instead they turned into foxes, into wolves, into eagles, using post-shift senses and stamina to launch harassing raids at the coalition's weakest moments. Provisions were burned along the transport route; scouts vanished into the blizzard and never returned; entire patrols were silently dispatched before dawn. The towns the coalition had occupied became isolated islands, unable to support one another.

The war thus sank into a long stalemate. The Moon-Born had not the strength to drive the coalition out of the wasteland; the coalition could not gain firm footing in that land. Both sides were like two exhausted beasts — neither able to bite the other to death, neither willing to let go.

This biting lasted two hundred years.

Over two hundred years, the soldiers fighting changed generation by generation. Those who first took up arms had long since turned to yellow earth, yet their grandchildren still killed on the same battlefield. Whenever the Moon-Born lost a town, they would build another deeper in the tundra; whenever the coalition broke through a defense line, they would find three more behind it. Countless villages were trampled again and again in the back-and-forth, until in the end no one could even tell to which side a particular ruin had once belonged. Hatred soaked into the bones of both peoples like mildew — human children were taught from a young age that "Shape Shifters are monsters", and Moon-Born children were taught from a young age that "humans are butchers". No one remembered anymore that this war had begun because of a few forged reports.

And the Marauders, and the marauding factions behind them, made fortune after fortune from these two centuries of blood and chaos.

The Discovery of the Suppressant¶

In the 173rd year of the war, the turning point appeared in a place no one had expected: a laboratory. A human alchemist named Erin Frostleaf — a scholar with no connection to the war whatsoever — accidentally discovered, while researching the extract of a rare mineral, that the liquid could significantly suppress the activity of the curse within Shape Shifters. After years of refinement, she finally formulated a stable potion: in small doses it could halt the further deterioration of mutation, and in long-term large doses it could even completely reverse the curse, restoring Shape Shifters to ordinary humans. She named the potion the Suppressant.

The news at first circulated only within scholarly circles, but no fire stays wrapped in paper for long. When the first batch of Shape Shifters truly recovered human form after taking the Suppressant, the whole continent was shaken. Even the most stubborn hawks on both sides had to face a fact: if the curse could be cured, then the Shape Shifters were not some irreversible "alien" — they were simply people who had fallen ill with a disease. Before this realization, all the reasons that had sustained two centuries of war began to crumble.

The Battle of Pure Dawn¶

The Marauders, of course, would not sit idly by while peace descended. Their methods grew more frenzied: peace envoys were intercepted on the road, couriers carrying the Suppressant formula vanished mysteriously, and Marauders even disguised themselves as Shape Shifters to attack human civilian villages, manufacturing bloody atrocities to rekindle hatred. But this time, their schemes failed — because both sides had already begun to verify intelligence with each other. The seventh Chieftain of the Moon-Born, "Silver Moon", and the young queen Isabella within the coalition camp, exchanged the evidence of Marauder infiltration each side had gathered, through a secret channel. When the two lists were laid side by side, the answer was already plain.

For two hundred years, the true enemy had never been on the opposite side of the battlefield. He had always been sitting next to the king, smiling as he handed over the next forged war report.

Silver Moon and Isabella concluded a secret pact, outwardly feigning that the war continued, but inwardly launching a top-secret joint operation. The Shape Shifters, with senses far beyond ordinary humans after the shift — smell, hearing, even direct intuition for a being's aura — identified the Marauder agents lurking within human society one by one; the humans provided armies and logistics, carrying out massive sieges against the exposed strongholds of the marauding faction. This purge, which later ages would call the "Battle of Pure Dawn", lasted twenty-seven years. From courts to frontiers, from harbors to mines, the Marauders and the marauding beasts they drove were uprooted, exiled, or annihilated one after another. By the end, even in the most remote village, not a single trace of a Marauder could be found.

The Moon Oath Accord¶

In the two-hundredth year of the war, on a night when the two moons crossed paths, Silver Moon and Isabella met in the ruins of an old battlefield. Behind them stood their respective weary armies; before them lay the scorched earth plowed countless times by two centuries of war. There was no grand ceremony, no long speeches — Silver Moon extended a hand, and Isabella took it. Two people destined to be enemies before they were even born chose, atop a blood-debt of two hundred years, to walk a harder road.

The document they signed was later called the Moon Oath Accord. The Accord had only three core articles:

The curse is not a sin, and transformation is not evil. Shape Shifters and humans are alike citizens of the continent.
All nations shall provide the Suppressant to every Shape Shifter in need, and shall not profit from it or use it to coerce.
The Moon-Born shall open their borders, no longer sealing themselves off, but engaging in exchange with all nations.

From that day, the Human-Demon War, lasting two hundred years, was declared at an end.