Prologue

Dragion. The name of the greatest country on the planet. The largest, most peaceable country throughout the whole land. Twenty thousand square miles total to the land, filled with every terrain imaginable. To the east are mountains, that stretch down and wrap around to cover the southeast, and some of the southern border. Half of the country is forest, smack dab in the center of the land, running from the very northern most point, to the most southern point, and about five thousand miles in each of the other two directions. Between the forest at the eastern mountains was a plain, sometimes flat, sometimes with nice, rolling hills. Between the western ocean and the forest was a desert, dry and barren. One more country was connected to the vast piece of land, up in the north, where the trees continued to grow and spanned out further.

Humans inhabited most of the land. Their homes were scattered everywhere. There were some in the valleys of the mountains, others in the plains where water was plentiful. Others had towns in the dark forest, where they were sheltered from the worst elements, though where dangerous creatures lurked. The desert, however, belonged to the creatures. No humans wanted to live in the dry, desolate wasteland, where they would perish within a month because of lack of proper food and water.

In the center of the country, right in the middle of the dark forest, a large town thrives. It is the capitol, made in an extremely large clearing that was twenty miles from one end to the other, in any direction. Some of the clearing where Granak rested was man-made, the wood having been used to make some of the lesser houses, and used for firewood. The town had definite class limits to it, too.

In the middle of the town was a looming castle, where the king took up residence. He had no queen, though he did have a son who stayed at the castle too. Right around the castle wall were homes were the richest and most important people lived. Further down were the middle-class people, whose lives were average. Not too bad, but not perfectly good either. At the edges of town, where the wooden houses sat, was the poor part. Most of the roads were dirt, while the others were paved, and it was also fairly over run by children. There weren't any good accomidations down there. There was one school for all those kids, and the adults had to work as housemaids or servants to get any money at all. A lot of the kids had to be stable boys, or the girls had to help their mothers with housework.

Most of the people were fine with this arrangement, even those at the lower level who had learned to live with it. Most people were fine with the entire arrangement of Dragion. Though, naturally, there were a few who weren't. These were the Testers.

Testers were brand new, and most people considered them alchemists. They made potions that were said to increase a person's senses, and give them new senses entirely. However, all experiments on adults failed. So then they moved on to the children, whose brains weren't fully developed and whose bodies would take the potions much more easily...