Nabil

The one who survives is the stronger being. That alone is the only truth of this land.

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A Multi-Tribal Confederation

The children of this vast continent are each born with a different face, different claws, a different cry. Some resemble the form of humans; others bear the horns and fangs, feathers and tails of beasts. But in Nabil, appearance is not what matters.

Here, only one thing decides a life: how long you have survived amid the endless onslaught of threats, and how strongly you have adapted.

Ever since the Red Queen projected "evolution," Nabil has been no ordinary continent.

This immense land, where countless tribes, races, and cultures live intermingled, became a vast proving ground, a battlefield, and a confederation built upon memories of blood and survival. There is no king, and no single absolute power. What moves this place is only the old traditions and pride of each tribe, and the cold reality that they must join hands to escape annihilation.

A Continent Where Evolution Descended

Nabil was originally a land where humans and various tribes lived, each in their own way.

Even amid the climate that had changed and the civilization that had collapsed after the New Age, the tribes fought, traded, and coexisted, forging a new order. But everything changed when the dragon that would later be called the "Red Queen" — the first child created by "Gergia," mother of ten thousand dragons — made her nest in this land.

Using the Codex "The Origin of Species," seized from Kallipolis, and her own power, she projected the "concept of evolution" across all of Nabil. As a result, beings that blended the traits of human and beast — beastfolk and demi-humans — began to be born in this land. It was no mere mutation. It was a cataclysm in which flesh, senses, and the very way of survival were redesigned.

At first, people feared this change. Humans found the beastfolk repugnant, and the beastfolk remembered the fear and hostility of humans. Tribes split apart naturally, and these different beings had to divide their territories and fight for survival.

But the Red Queen did not stop there. She created countless drakefolk — those resembling dragons yet who could never become dragons. These perfected predators she set loose to hunt the inhabitants of Nabil. And within that bloody repetition, she waited for the living things of this land to grow stronger and more cunning.

"One day, the children of Nabil will trample my severed head and wings and hold a festival. Come… I long for that day to arrive."

— The Red Queen

An Advanced Civilization Built Within Nature

To outside eyes, Nabil is often seen as a "land of the wild."

But that is merely the judgment of those who understand this land by half. Nabil values nature and instinct, yet it is by no means uncivilized or primitive. Its people know the technology and civilization that have spread across the world, and they know how to pick and choose it as needed. Only, to them the worth of civilization is measured not by convenience or luxury, but by whether it aids survival and the endurance of the tribe.

And so the cities of Nabil blend into nature while remaining unmistakably civilized.

Grasslands and rivers, deserts and high mountains, frozen earth and seas each take on the colors of their tribes, and every tribe has developed its own architecture, weapons, rituals, and ways of life. One tribe raised a great city upon a sprawling plain; another built a city of hardened warriors along a river; another erected a pyramid city that reads the stars beneath the open sky.

Nabil is one nation, and at the same time a continent where countless nations overlap.

A Confederation Without a King

As the invasions of the drakefolk grew ever fiercer, the tribes of Nabil finally realized the truth: that their separate traditions and pride alone could never hold back the calamity the Red Queen had made. When half the continent had been trampled and the tribes, confined to shrinking territory, began to turn on one another, the leaders of the Volmont tribe were the first to summon the continent's chieftains to one place.

And so was born the multi-tribal confederation by the name of Nabil. Nabil has no official king. Each tribe is an autonomous domain that guards its own territory and culture, and only matters concerning the fate of the whole continent are decided by the council of chieftains. Because of this, conflict, delay, and battles of pride never cease, yet at the same time it is precisely because no single tribe can wholly dominate another that this confederation is so unique.

If Aerorn is a civilization that ultimately found order under one central tribe, Nabil is its opposite. This is a confederation that, never having become truly one, stands together so as not to perish. Their bond therefore springs not from ideals or faith. It arises from a very harsh and pragmatic solidarity — the awareness that they face the same calamity.

Three Hearts

Nabil is made up of more than a dozen tribes, but at its center stand three great powers.

The first is the Volmont tribe, the "Children of the Earth."

The largest and most influential tribe in Nabil, and the true central axis of the confederation. Upon broad plains and abundant farmland they accumulated resources, and they systematically raise not only mighty warriors but strategists and shamans as well. They are not simply a strong tribe, but those who can see the whole of the wide land and think for the long term.

It is also almost solely Volmont that leads trade with outside powers, and where other tribes react with emotion, they always calculate the gains and losses of the entire continent.

The second is the Nashugaranka tribe, the "Children of the River."

A tribe of warriors as hard and direct as a raging river. They regard magic and machinery as cheating, and seek to prove their lives through body, force, and leadership alone. They endure the harshest training, are deployed to the battlefield fastest, and are the first to send troops when weaker tribes fall into crisis.

The Nashugaranka are warlike, but not cruel. To them the tribe is family, and surviving together is a duty that comes before honor.

The third is the Hegutarian tribe, the "Children of the Stars."

Famed for their golden pyramid cities and astral faith, they are the most religious and at the same time the most intellectual power in Nabil. They read the courses of the stars, thrown into disarray since the New Age, to foresee the future, and upon that they judge the timing of magic, farming, and war. To the outside eye they may seem mystics, but their astronomical knowledge never remains at the level of superstition.

They believe in the stars, yet they build that belief upon calculation and interpretation more precise than anyone's.

These three tribes are different from one another.

One reads the earth, one tempers the body, and one deciphers the sky. But it is thanks to that very difference that Nabil has not fallen by any single method, and has endured until now.

The Red Queen

The tragedy of Nabil lies in this: the source of all this calamity is all too clear.

From the frozen land at the southernmost tip of the continent, the Red Queen watches over all these changes even now. The drakefolk she created are not mere monsters, but a test cast down to temper all of Nabil — cruel problems that demand its people survive faster, smarter, and more creatively.

Some foolish ones revere her like a god, but the Red Queen despises such parasitic attitudes. What she desires is not kneeling worshippers, but beings who resist, adapt, and at last surpass themselves. What she has in mind, and why she does these things, no one yet knows.

Nature, Sorcery, and an Uneasy Civilization

The people of Nabil live amid nature and spirits, omens and the memory of blood.

But that does not mean they reject technology entirely. Especially with the Volmont tribe at the center of trade with the outside world, Nabil has, if only in limited ways, taken in the tools of outside civilization. The rare raw material of Baluram, "Lavista," has flowed in, and Kallipolis has even supplied Automata mercenaries under the pretext of gathering data on the drakefolk.

Yet many of the inhabitants feel an instinctive revulsion toward machines and humanoids.

For in the worldview of those who evolve through living flesh and blood, sweat and wounds, a metal body and an artificial mind are alien things not easily trusted.

Nabil is not ignorant of civilization, but neither is it a place where civilization itself becomes an object of respect. What is honored in this land is always, in the end, only the experience of having survived on one's own.

A Gathering Tension

In the year 510 of the New Age, Nabil is once again caught in a strange tension.

The Red Queen's creations still watch for their chance in the south, and recently it has even come to light that a new producer of drakefolk had slipped into the central mountain range and tried to make its nest there. Fortunately, Scaglione, a scout of the Nashugaranka tribe, discovered this and barely managed to stop it — but it was an event like a signal that the Red Queen's hand was once again spreading to every corner.

And while "Damon Nayu," a priest of the Hegutarian tribe, set out for the Aran Plateau to uncover the identity of a new star that had appeared in the sky, those who serve the Red Queen, hidden in the shadows, began to stir once more.

Before long, all will come to know who will remain as the strongest being.