“Midgard was never one kingdom, nor even one people, but an inheritance of ages—a land where the bones of old worlds lay beneath the roads of the new. Men once divided it in thought, for Western Midgard and Elder Midgard were not the same, though they bore the same name.

Elder Midgard, the East, was where the world still remembered what once was. It was here that the last echoes of Asgard lingered, not yet a lost realm, but a land fading into something greater than history. It was called Middullund, in the tongues of men and dwarves—a place of old halls, of carved stones that marked the deeds of warriors who, in time, became legend.

Though Odin had not yet ascended to godhood, his name was spoken with reverence. His triumph over Ymir, the great rime-beast, was carved into memory, but the rest of his saga was still unwritten.

To the West, Midgard stretched outward, swallowing the remnants of Asgard. The land itself seemed to shift—forests thickened, the hills rose taller, and in the farthest reaches lay Vanaheim, where elves still haunted the deep woods and watched the march of men with wary eyes.

If Elder Midgard had been the past in slow retreat, Western Midgard was the future in slow conquest—growing, changing, consuming. But not all lands endured.

To the South, men once spoke of The Deluge, the drowning of Cimmeria, when the storms rose and the rivers swelled, and what had been land became sea. Some claimed it was a punishment, others a fate long foretold, but whatever the truth, Cimmeria was no more. Its sons and daughters wandered as lost heirs of a kingdom swallowed by the deep, speaking of their home as the Atlanteans once did of their own ruin—with pride, with sorrow, with clenched fists. Midgard, then, was not merely a place, but a world caught between what was and what would come.

To the dwarves, it had been a road. To the elves, a warning. To men, it was the only home they had ever known. And still, the road had gone ever on.”