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The year would be 787 since the founding of Valdemar, if one were reckoning by that calendar.
On the continent that the locals call Beset, Valdemar lies on the other side of an ocean. Ships crossed it, once, but it's been nearly two thousand years since the annual merchant trade ships quietly trailed off. The Haighlei Empire is known as a legend of distant lands. No one has ever heard of Valdemar at all.
(Half a world away, a thirteen-year-old boy named Vanyel Ashkevron hides from his brothers and plays the lute, oblivious to the threads of Foresight already wrapped around his future. Hundreds of miles to the north, an immortal mage prepares for an invasion, already anticipating interference but with no idea what shape it will take this time. In the ordinary course of affairs - and in the unaltered threads of prophecy as seen by the gods of the Pelagirs and Iftel - the other continent is an isolated world of its own, and no matter what happens, it shouldn't matter to the path laid out over the next twenty-odd years.
Valdemar's god in the shadows sees further, sometimes, but everything still appears to be on course, though it's still too early to know which course.)
The port cities of Beset are bustling and prosperous, but the interior is mostly arid and lightly populated. The town of Katireen is built on an oasis tucked away in a valley, a two-day ride from the nearest river and its accompanying packed-dirt path that doesn't quite deserve to be called a "road". It holds nearly a thousand people, a livestock market, a smithy, and the only school for Healers and Mindspeakers within a hundred miles. It has a mage, technically, who even has two apprentices, but none of them have greater than Journeyman potential, and the teacher's training extends to little more than basic shields and wards for guarding homes and livestock pens. The locals know rather little about the wider world, but they've never really felt that they needed to.
