The Republic of Schwarzwald doesn't have the terrain, natural resources, or location working in its favour. It lies in the northern part of the continent of Rune-Midgard, to the north of the eponymously-named Kingdom, and the main reason the monarchs of ages past didn't try to conquer it until it was too late is that it's an arid, mountainous region with little to offer anyone wishing to settle there. So, while the Kingdom of Rune-Midgard nominally considered itself to span the entire continent, the people settling there never had reason to acknowledge their sovereignty.

Now, they have the power to back it up. They invented the steam engine and airships and have become a technological powerhouse with an army that the Kingdom would do well not to underestimate. And it's not just technology, either; the Republic's capital, Juno, is a marvel of magical design, a floating city held up high in the clouds by ingenious enchantments developed by the sages that reside there, making it nigh-unassailable. The specifics of these enchantments are a closely-guarded secret that no one outside the Council of Sages and the high leadership of the city has access to.

Prior to the Advent of Magic (which is the name the sages of Juno have been using to talk about the time nearly a hundred years ago when everything in the world changed), the truce between it and the Kingdom (and the Arunafeltz States to the west, though that's a story for later) could only charitably be described as uneasy, and more accurately as fragile. Historians from Schwarzwald will tell you that the main aggressor was the Kingdom, which was jealous of their technology and couldn't abide the existence of nations other than itself on the continent and would do anything in its power to control everything; historians from Rune-Midgard will tell you that Schwarzwald is an oppressive technocracy that serves only the mercantile interests of the corporation that controls their government from the shadows.

With the Advent, the balance shifted, and the promise of mutually-assured destruction made by the existence of extremely powerful people on both sides of the conflict has greatly stabilised the situation, or so it seems from the outside. No one wants to be the one to pull the trigger and start a war that could well leave large swathes of the continent devastated, especially when threats like the demon of Morroc are right there to serve as a reminder that things can get much, much worse than they are.

But this particular story isn't about that conflict and history. It's about a girl, who was born in the Republic to an unknown family in a poor city and who got to see much of the dark side of her country.