The earliest recorded history in Verkolst consists of fragments of writing leftover from the Roverkols who originally settled the continent. Little is known of them except for inferences based upon the few legible recovered artifacts, and even those few bits of knowledge are subject to intense scholarly debate. The successors of the Roverkol called themselves the Sinjenn. It's unclear what exactly precipitated the rise of the Sinjenn over their forerunners, but one quality that they inherited, and, indeed, perfected was proper record keeping. In fact, it is the scholarly opinion that the longevity of the Sinjenn can be attributed primarily to their aptitude for and emphasis upon effective administration.
Eventually, however, the greatest strength of the Sinjenn, the strong Prime Keeper and her loyal administrators, became their greatest weakness. For in the 327th year of Sinjennian dominance over Verkolst, Jan Shnee began his campaign to reshape the continent. Schnee hailed from a village nestled on the slopes of the Pinefell mountains on the eastern edge of the Sinjennian empire. The official histories contain accounts of village locals who describe him as a pillar of the community and a model for others to aspire to. The circumstances of his departure from his hometown are murky, but what is well recorded is that Schnee arrived in the capital in disguise. This subterfuge gain him access to the Imperial Academy where the Prime Keeper was making an inspection. During a demonstration of the Academy's newest inventions and discoveries, Schnee directed the might of the Imposer to bend the will of the Keeper to his own.
With the Prime Keeper under his control, Schnee was able to steadily cement his position in the empire, until only five years after that fateful visit to the Academy, he was anointed as Emperor of the Sinjennian Empire. For the following thirty-two years, the combination of the Sinjennian organizational prowess and Schnee's audacious design led to a golden age never seen nor matched. Marvels of magic and industry, now dismissed as fantasy by all but the most fervent of believers, were commonplace, and both noble and common flourished is peace.
Inevitably, however, the Sinjennian empire, as all that came before and all that have come after fell. The individual details of the descent into chaos vary, but the cause is invariably the same. Corruption, and its faithful accomplice, greed. In the case of the Sinjenn, it was unequivocally the greed of Jan Schnee, and his boundless quest for eternal hegemony of Verkolst. The fate of Schnee himself is unclear, however, official documents from the Remnant tersely describe his fate as both "self-imposed", and "well-deserved".
After Schnee's death, it became clear how far he had gone in Imposing his will over the empire. For the effect of the Imposer lasts only until its master's death. And with the fall of Schnee, all the hundreds of civil servants who had been thralls under his control suddenly were restored to autonomy. What had once been a single river channeled and dammed via the Imposer, had become a deluge of discordant streams, each flowing with its own will. The empire fell. And all measures of civilization and progress that had come with it were lost in the vacuum it left behind.
After the Fall, the continent languished in chaos for hundreds of years. Until eventually, a collection of city-states emerged to bring a semblance of order to the lost continent. Chief among them is Zantiko, a trading city built upon the very same riverbanks as the desolated ruins of Sinjennto, the once imperial capital. It is in this city that the story of Samuel begins.