This continent is the only one that contains life... beyond its multiple islands, the continent of Greenleaf harbors the conditions for a race as weak as humans to thrive. It was difficult in the beginning. Humans knew magic through other creatures, most of which saw them more as a nuisance than as someone to educate. They depended on poor mechanical inventions that paled before the many magical devices, surviving or being enslaved by those who held power—until the mages were born. No one knows where they came from. Even to this day, people do not know whether their ancestors were mates or sexual slaves of some of the more privileged races. The point is that over the centuries, magic permeated human society.
Normally, this would not matter. Yet most magical races discovered that their abilities waned little by little. Spells that would normally tear mountains apart became simple substitutes for dynamite. Chaos threatened to loom if the fragile balance between races was broken.
It is still unknown whether humans were special or if it was simply chance, but cities that had a human mage did not lose the use of their machinery. The machinery existing in their time was powered by magical runes, which stored and used the power of sorcerers from all races. As the rumor spread, human population centers were flooded by all civilizations. They were no longer a lesser race—they were the salvation of civilization in Greenleaf.
What soon became known as the magical field was nothing more than the reach of influence produced by the human sorcerer's magic. Its radius depended on the user's power. The most powerful established enormous cities around themselves with radii of over two hundred kilometers. Apprentices and the untalented had towns of one kilometer along the roads connecting cities.
The ancient archmages of all other races rebelled. They accused human sorcerers of being responsible for the loss of their power. The battle was bloody—a carnage, to use a better word. Elven, dwarven, and even elemental mages, with their diminished abilities, were formidable enemies against beings barely aware of the power they harbored. To protect themselves, they built towers at the center of each city. But they did not deceive themselves—they knew their days were numbered. They would never learn enough to face races with millennia of experience. That was when civilization united.
Ordinary humans saw their new way of life threatened. The other races, accustomed to their standard of living with all apparatus powered by the magical forces of those being attacked, chose to turn against their own before returning to dependence on the crude tools of their industrial evolution.
Seeing that their people did not support them, the high command of magic suspended the attack. With fury, they announced to the world that they were not worthy of them. In an act of wounded pride and rage, they hurled all their magical items—all their writings containing powerful spells now useless to them—into the center of the continent, thus spending most of the little power they still retained, thereby putting an end to the war.
None of the inhabitants dared to enter the continent's interior, even when the mages were powerful. The site they chose was a basin larger than all the coastal cities combined. The first five hundred kilometers were forest, but then came barren plains, followed by treacherous mountain ranges. That was only the terrain's dangers, which made it difficult. Adding the great number of wild beasts and magical creatures made entering or leaving suicidal.
On the other hand, human mages never left their towers again. Some feared possible revenge from once-powerful races, but most feared being captured and enslaved by their own race in a hunger for power.
The population grew prosperous. Each city faced the sea. There were battles between them, but without magic for conflicts outside the cities, the amount of damage they could inflict on each other was minimal. Since the population could only use magic contained in artifacts that survived the war and the few harmless inventions of human mages, they turned their eyes again to the industry invented by the despised beings.
Perfected by dwarves, the bland steam machinery of humans developed astonishingly. Navigation, flight, even transportation became faster, and the civilization that had been on the brink of extinction grew once more.