Maztica

Maztica is an elusive, mystical oriental continent located in the Far East of Middle-Earth, exclusive to the Aeon of the Champion story series. Due to isolationism and a lack of outsider exploration, it has developed its own history parallel to that of the rest of the world, and until recently was untouched by the stain of war - though it had already been afflicted by [[demonic taint|something much worse).

Early development and War of the Dragons
During the Ordering of Middle-Earth which took place after the Sin Wars, the supercontinent of Old Vigrith began to flourish like never before. With the Princes of Hell sequestered, their influence no longer choked the land, and thus, the Wild Gods developed; most of them in the west of the planet near the Midnight Glade, where they were revered by the night elves, one of the first sentient races on the world.

Further southeast, a similar phenomenon was occuring. However, the Wild Gods of the Orient were not as calm as those on the Occident. Indeed, they were catastrophically more violent, clashing with each other in several disastrous wars that caused tectonic shifts within the fabric of the land itself, each time permanently altering its structure. They were a group of powerful beings known as the Dragon Kings, each ruling over a river system in the continent, and each King was attempting to become the Dragon Emperor by destroying the others and taking on their powers. Each King embodied a different theme: the azure dragon, Ao Guang, was the essence of spring. The red dragon, Ao Qin, was the essence of summer. Ao Run, the white dragon, was the essence of autumn. Lastly, Ao Shun, the black dragon, was the essence of winter. To stop their dangerous struggle, around 800 years before the rise of the trolls, the Earth Watchers contacted their Earthen servants, ordering them to fight their way to Maztica and sequester the Dragon Kings before the angels were forced to intervene on the planet again.

Thus, Naz'gomal and some of the other Earthen warriors rallied the angels who had remained on the planet after the Sin Wars and took the fight to the Dragon Kings. Thriving on chaos, their weakness was the order-bringing magic of the Light, and one by one, they were brought down. Ao Qin was the hardest of the four dragon kings to defeat, as his raging temper and powerful fire magic resisted all attempts to calm him down. He saw Light magic as energy, and hungrily fed on it thinking it would increase his power. Thus, playing to his weakness, Naz'gomal fed the dragon more and more Light magic until he became oversaturated, causing his body to uncontrollably expand and burst in the infernal spectacle of the century. His remains were collected and stored away by the Earthen in processing facilities near the site of Ragnar the Mighty's Monument. Ao Qin was dead in body, but everyone knew he would, over thousands of years, reform in spirit. Thus, the Earthen wanted to remain on the planet to find a solution to this potential crisis.

Demonic taint and rise of the Qilan
Beelzebub was recovering from his imprisonment in the meanwhile, and disliked the re-ordering intensely. He thus decided to use the opportunity to spread more taint. His hellish whispers emanated from the depths of the planet's crust itself, staining the minds of the Earthen who worked on the continent, greatly reducing their powers. Naz'gomal noticed this worrying trend and began to panic, through fear that the demons may be on the rise again if he wasn't able to keep the ordering at the current rate. The Earthen began to feel lethargic and useless, as if they had been stripped of all their energy. As a cure to this condition, the Earthen leaders made a dangerous suggestion: suffusing the souls of the Earthen with some of the essence of the dragon kings.

This was a leap of faith, and it could have disastrous consequences - but the deed was done. Khar'zoth had Earthen researchers weave a small portion of essence from the spirit of Ao Guang to a group of volunteers, and the results were recorded. Fascinatingly, an exponential rise in power was reported, with the engineered Earthen losing all feelings of lethargy and listlessness. They completed their tasks with renewed vigor, while also showing an increased resistance to demonic possession. This pleased Shemyaza, Lord of the Watchers, who allowed the process to be repeated on the spirits of Ao Run and Ao Shun, and in time, Beelzebub's plans had apparently been thwarted. The Earthen engineered evolved into a powerful race known as the Qilan, chimeroids with fiery scales and antler-like horns growing out of their heads. The project had been a success, it seemed.

Things started going wrong when the Qilan began expanding. They soon colonised the majority of Maztica for themselves, building powerful kingdoms based on the slavery of the less-powerful of their race, and in pursuit of power began violent crackdowns on any outsiders. Ten Tsux, the most powerful Qilan Emperor to date, entered the Spirit Isles where Ragnar's tomb lay and did battle with keeper Naz'gomal for control of the centre, believing it to be a source of ancient power for which would increase the might of their civilisation. Successive generations of dragon essence-breeding had groomed him into a fierce opponent, and Tsux destroyed Naz'gomal and his allies in a single thundersweep, dooming all the other races of Maztica to millenia of slavery and darkness. He is said to have cackled like thunder itself as the moon set on the continent.

The Qilan ruled Maztica for what seemed like eternities afterwards, with successive Emperors taking over and making the empire stronger and stronger, while their greed grew greater and greater. All of this being the influence of Beelzebub, who had turned the once-noble race into materialistic savages who wasted their power and resources on trying to acquire more.

The Return of Ao Qin
9,000 years before the opening of the Genesis Portal, Ao Qin - the malevolent, deposed red Dragon King - returned to the living world as a vengeful spirit looking for a host body. Forshad, the reigning Qilan Emperor, was supremely confident in racial power and was determined to build the Qilan an empire that transcended the frontiers of reality. By this time the effects of Beelzebub's corruption were becoming pronounced, and though they grew in power, the Qilan lost their sense of direction. They began to fight among themselves, squabble among themselves, and this nearly led to a civil war between Forshad and the other Qi sorcerers. This meant that they lost control over their slaves, and the other Maztican races - namely the ticapan - were able to slip out of the iron grip of serfdom that had held them for so long. The ticapan revolutionaries were led by the spiritual, nature-minded Seer Kwang, who had spent his free years learning the ways of the monk. By the time of the real revolution, he was a powerful practicioner of martial arts, and taught the other pan his ways. They were the only family he ever knew, the students, and became powerful enough to stand up to the cruel Qilan.

After Forshad sorted out his popularity problems at home, he was disgusted to see that the slaves had revolted. He sent qilan soldiers in force to re-subjugate them, but the chaos instigated by Beelzebub's taint caused disorder within their regiments which Forshad had been far too ignorant to see. Indeed, though outnumbered, the slaves slowly pushed back the Qilan, whose losses in the war resulted in regression to prior ways. Furious with his accumulation of defeats and the loss of face they caused, he accused the Qilan of softening over the years, claiming that prosperity had made them weaker. He became single-mindedly committed to purging Maztica of the genetically inferior, and thus retreated to Spirit Isles once again to reclaim his former glory. The rebels gained ground as a result, all the way to the Isles themselves.

Reaching the Shadow Summit, Forshad followed the trail treaded by his ancestors, in search of the legendary power source that lay at its crux. Unbeknownst to him, it was the spirit of Ao Qin looking for his old body. Both of them appeared in the same place at the same time, and when they met, the result was not pleasant. As soon as the evil spirit came across a free body, it attempted to attached itself onto Forshad's soul, but Forshad's own inner spirit resisted him, pushing him out. A furious battle of the spirits emerged, with fireworks and thunderclaps galore atop the Shadow Summit. The two spirits clashed bitterly such that the Summit around them began to collapse, first regularly, but then pyroclastically. Seeing the danger, Kwang instructed his now-victorious rebels not to chase Forshad into oblivion. Instead, they began to hastily combine their monk powers to build a shield around the Spirit Isles, locking them off from any outside intervention and containing the effects of the Summit standoff. Kwang knew that Forshad had doomed his people, and did not want to see his pan make his mistake. Thus, the pan returned home to establish their own kingdom.

War of the Ancients and Sundering
The War of the Ancients largely eluded Maztica, as the fighting was concentrated on demons entering a portal created by the smurfs to summon Sargamon onto Middle-Earth. However, this did not mean demons from within weren't able to succeed where demons from without could not. Beelzebub was not quite finished with the continent, and his whispers once again infiltrated into ticapan society. However, the pan refused to be manipulated as the qilan had been. Du'Yin, the Monk Lord, gathered his fellow monks together and they collectively expunged all demonic taint from within their bodies, before trapping and sealing it into containers made from a special, supposedly demon-proof material. These containers were then floated off of the continent, hopefully to never make contact with a tica again. This would later prove to be a costly mistake for isolationism.